I came to this show having seen a couple of sketch videos that had been performed at cabaret shows by Enrico and thinking he was hilarious. His Fringe venue is a wee yurt on Potters Row.

There was a decent enough crowd for a Sunday in a very cramped space.

The show begins with Enrico acting as his own mc. Standard practice in the business, but he is also acting as his own lighting technician and sound operator.

I applaud anyone who takes on the task of operating all parts of the show themselves. It’s tricky in this business to find or even afford a team to attend for an entire festival and not every venue has tech staff on hand to help out. However, I did find myself wondering as Enrico was making silly comments and playing with the lights whether this was part of the act or if he was genuinely struggling to operate the lighting system. I feel it was the latter, and it, unfortunately, created pacing issues in the show.

The show runs around the theme of fulfilling your dreams, audience members invited to to reveal their dreams, only to have Enrico decide for them and invite them up to play in a clowning/cabaret bit. One I found particularly funny was a bit where he and some audience members become brass players for Robbie Williams but their instruments stopped working. The improv between Enrico and the audience member was rapid fire and hilarious!

The show has a really nice idea, but it hasn’t fully been fleshed out yet. There are bits and sketches, some of which worked, but it just seemed like the idea of dreams was a ploy to bring an audience member on stage to play in the part, rather than actually being a part of the bigger picture tying the whole show together.

I would love for this show to be worked on a little more and to find a way to work the script into more of a show with a storyline that can weave in audience interaction as the repetitive nature of asking an audience member their dreams and taking the mic away to tell them their answer starts to lose its effectiveness.

I also feel like the venue was largely unsuitable for the show. This is not the performer’s fault at all; it is so hard to get the venue you need due to so much competition. But I felt that the space hinders the show. Sight gags fell short because of the angle everything was positioned in, and I felt like the performer couldn’t move freely for fear of tripping over wires or bumping into the audience.

My advice is this: the bits are really good, and the idea of those bits feeding into people’s dreams is good. If the script could be reworked and if the space was just the tiniest bit bigger, or at least didn’t have wires all over the floor, it could end up being really strong.

⭐️⭐️