The Groggy Squirrel

In a self confessed Dave Gorman inspired moment, Paul Kerensa set himself a rather pointless, yet entertaining challenge. Over the course of a year, he apperently subjected himself to a different genre of music each month. The result was his Fringe show iPaul: The Great Playlist Challenge.

Through the use of many costume changes, video footage, musical performance and lots of PowerPoint wackiness, Paul ran us through his year in music. We witnessed his Pop month visiting Peter Andre at his book signing, went to the Ballet with him during Classical November, watched his music video masterpiece for Richard Marx’s Hazard, skimmed over his month listening to Coldplay and took part in a MacGuyver challenge when celebrating TV Themes. The segments were of varying lengths, depending on how much material he could extract from them. In amongst the music ran a thread relating to his personal life over that year. His concluding segments revealled a sightly sinister (depending on your musical tastes) bias towards one particular artist that was amusing.

Paul was a very upbeat fellow who filled the damp and cavernous venue with energy and warmth. His spots of banter with the audience were painless as was his call and reponse segment, with everyone willing to join in. With a topic such as music, people will always want to make their opinion known. He changed costume for every music genre, some of which were more elaborate than others and required layered clothing to ensure a smooth and speedy change. His PowerPoint slides were amusing and succeeded in not always echoing what was said. The music video was a hilarious parody of the Power Ballad style but his decision to use the entire duration of the song made it a little over long, although he obviously needed the time to prepare for the next segment.

Paul played on the stereotypes of each genre in both costuming and material. Some punchlines could be seen coming a mile off and some of his wacky facts were well worn, but others were given a special little twist of his own to suprise us. He made liberal use of musical excerpts in his presentation, especially in his very clever introduction. The precorded and live musical pieces were rarely too long and usually gave him the chance to dance about comically.

His challenge concept of living with the genres seemed slightly irrelevant as his presentation of each was merely a chance to tell jokes about that style with little, if any, connection to his life. This perceived lack of commitment to the challenge cheapened the show slightly, however it was easily forgiven considering the strong material he presented and the eventual admission of the extent of his guilty pleasure that did bleed into real life.

_Ipaul was fun show that had the punters laughing throughout regardless of there musical tastes. Through his hilarious presentation we could acknowledge our musical guilty pleasures as Paul celebrated his own.

Visit the Fringe Website for booking details.