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Description: A month-long season of dark cabaret and variety, a mixture of comedy, music, dance and performance.
Trains: Tube: Chalk Farm 
, Tube / Bus: 24, 27, 29, 31, 134, 135, 168, 214, 253, 274, C2 
Phone: 0844482 8008
Website: www.roundhouse.org.uk
Email: info@roundhouse.org.uk
Extra info: Food, Pub
No pain, no gain: Miss Behave is not one for the kids
Edinburgh works like a variety brain drain during the Festival month. Stand-ups, singers and acrobats who don't go north usually go on holiday, meaning there's little for stay-in-town Londoners during the dog days of August.
Three cautious cheers then for the Roundhouse for staging a month-long variety show, which I should tell you right away is very much at the fetish end of the scale (don't take children or sensitive souls). Also, the venue is not ideal, but you can't grumble at six shows a week, added to which Friday night's eight acts racked up a respectable (for the time of year) hit-miss ratio of 50-50.
Among the hits were Frank Sanazi and Spymonkey, who cabaret regulars will know well. If you don't, they are worth catching. Spymonkey, a mixture of Monty Python and porn-movie spoofs, did two short turns, including their extreme pole-dancing send-up that mocks poor Britney Spears. Dressing as crusaders and using Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet, it epitomises the cultural racketeering that is their style.
Sanazi sang excerpts from his Hitler-meets-Sinatra show, Songs for Swingin' Dictators, including Third Reich and Strangers on My Flight. The improbability of crooners and dictators is comedy gold, and all Sanazi's references to Sadami Davies Jnr and Osama Bin Crosby raised hearty laughs. How you wish you could have been at the recent sale of Hitler watercolours that Sanazi disrupted with royal party crasher Aaron Barschak, yelling: "These aren't Hitlers, they're Mussolinis!"
Other hits include the fetish fireeater Lucifire, ace hula-hooper Kalki Hula Girl and aerialist Marjo Nantel. The evening was compered by Miss Behave, a Betty Boop-alike Mistress of Ceremonies who's billed as the last female sword swallower. Her blade and chair leg guzzling will make you squirm, although many will find her S&M act a bit try-hard. Others will doubt her choice of filler acts - singer Caroline Nin was a woeful Marlene wannabe, Lyndall Nantel a rubbish trapeze artist, while the bottle juggler is best forgotten. Roll on September.
Until 24 August (0844 482 8008; www.roundhouse.org.uk)
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
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What a magnificent show. Entertainment of the highest order - compered with style, humour and authority. Great performances leaving one with a feel good factor.
- Mary Rudolf, Leeds UK
Miss Behave's Variety Nighty is the best show I have seen in months! She was funny, sexy and quick witted as an MC. She lubricated the evening with an ease and humour that won the audience. The varied acts made for a thoroughly enjoyable evening.
- Jack Chalkley, London
