Underbelly, Cowgate, Edinburgh
Ashley Blair and Drew Reilly send up gen Z anomie with hardcore ditties about awkward dinners, megachurches and centaur boyfriends
‘How to feel whole in an empty world?” There are many possible answers to that question, and Megasquirt’s late-night comedy rave workshops a good few of them. But there’s probably no better way than putting on a banging show and performing it to an adoring audience of your peers – and that’s what Brooklyn imports Ashley Blair and Drew Reilly do in Fully Loaded, turning the Underbelly at some ungodly hour into a pulsating queer(ish) celebration-cum-sendup of gen Z anomie. “Everything is empty / Life is a hole / You gotta fill it up,” they sing, looking like refugees from Warhol’s Factory but delivering comedy that couldn’t be more now.
The show starts as if we’re being seconded to a generational revolution, but it’s soon clear that this pair, both Second City alumni, are threats to nothing but your funny bone. Their premise is that life is void of meaning. We flash back to meet them as alienated schoolkids and one terrific sketch, a silly symphony of clinking cutlery and ASMR tuts and sighs, imagines two parents at dinner, struggling to repress their mutual loathing. If this is our hosts’ generational inheritance, why not look for a better way of being? Like a romance with an inverted Centaur Boyfriend, the title of one daft ditty, or like forming a megachurch to start replenishing the spiritual chasm.
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