“‘Dandy Darkly’ is a colorful, outrageous performance artist with a talent for telling dark tales using wordplay, alliteration, and a sophisticated soundtrack. Prepare yourself for a journey during which you will encounter well-meaning alien cats, patriotic dogs, flying space pyramids, a virtual reality character, a professor of anthropology, a Geisha android, Persephone, and Cha Cha, the first ‘artist’ on the planet. This show features compelling narratives brought to you by a master of myth.”
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"His performance style is rhythmic, hypnotic and entrancing. The original underscore only adds to the experience and the audience quickly tunes into his sinister tales. But it’s not all dark; there’s a lot of levity in Darkly’s parables and many laughs are elicited from an enthused audience…Each story segues easily into the next without needing to be hammered home, and the hour feels like it is over all too soon."
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"He weaves compelling narratives that are set in grotesque realms of eerie, alarming detail, expressed through mesmerizing, finely wrought doggerel, and accompanied by a sophisticated running soundtrack of bespoke music and sound effects...It’s also his strongest work yet. There’s a powerful cohesion to the stories’ engagement with very different kinds of mythologizing."
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"His talent for storytelling is second to none. Everything about the meter, rhythm, and rhyming is completely transfixing…Dandy’s stories are absolutely captivating…This tying together of everything that goes on in the hour is completely rapturous and eye-wideningly electric…Dandy can work and captivate a crowd like no other…It’s an utterly intoxicating performance where you end up hanging on his every word, and not to mention tickled pink and cheering at the unexpected jokes."
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"It's not especially good or clever, but it is different and Edinburgh relishes difference: so the audience responds well to a reworked classical tale of a junkie Persephone who gets ‘slut-shamed by the Real Housewives of Olympus’ and the lazily scripted notion that Zeus wore a soiled jock strap and a gimp mask…His shows are technically tight and, timed to a sound effects iPhone track, impressively done."
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"Consistently brilliant, playful, outrageous and with an incredible talent for wordplay and hidden meaning, Darkly gives us a new set of characters…Darkly’s tales are nuanced, sharp, caustic but humane…It’s incredibly relevant to what we’re going through and more than that, it’s incredibly funny and touching. His tales embrace and celebrate the dark and twisted parts of ourselves, they are anti-shame, pro-queer parables of remarkable intricacy."
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“Against Dandy’s evening- and era-straddling storytelling, his new, retro sci-fi costume is all the more striking, and his musical partners’ palette extends through throbbing basslines and spacey sounds. In the end, the most explicit reference to 2016 is a closing nod to David Bowie, and it’s pleasing to see a fabulous spaceman communing with new members of his tribe at the end of another thoughtful and fun outing.”
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