Edinburgh Fringe 2024
Low Down
From Recent Cutbacks comes the UK premiere of Hold On To Your Butts, the hit parody of Jurassic Park. Performed live by two actors and a Foley artist. Steven Spielberg not included.
Review
Confession: I should have read the show description more carefully.
When I signed up to review Hold On To Your Butts, I thought I read that it’d be a witty deconstruction of the beloved Steven Spielberg film Jurassic Park. Thus when I entered the audience-packed Pleasance Courtyard Forth I was looking forward to biting commentary about the 20-year age gap between romantic leads Sam Neill and Laura Dern, or sassy gossip about the four-year relationship Dern entered into with Jeff Goldblum once the two met on set, or perhaps even critical reflections as to why certain parts of Michael Crichton’s bestselling book were changed by Hollywood for a mass audience, including the death of billionaire John Hammond, played so charmingly in the film by Richard Attenborough that he survived to fly off in the helicopter as John Williams’s score soared with it and the credits rolled.
That is not what Hold On To Your Butts is. (But a bit of it should be. More on that later.)
Instead, it’s a low-tech, candy-coated comedic valentine to the movie and its many ardent fans. If you haven’t seen the movie, you are screwed. But if you have seen it, and given its popularity you’ve possibly seen it many times, you’ll have a grand time.
I did once I realized the error of my ways and let the show work its charms. After all, I am a fan, one who devoured the book when it was published in 1990 and raced to see the movie in a cinema when it premiered in 1993.
What’s most winning about Hold On To Your Butts is watching this extraordinarily expensive, CGI-filled film be recreated almost entirely with the most basic of materials: a few shirts and sunglasses, various items you could find in almost any utility closet (a stepladder, bicycle helmets, cardboard), and, most importantly, a large heaping of imagination. Director Kristin McCarthy Parker has whipped this parodic concoction into tight shape, and the hilarious cast (performers Natalie Rich and Matt Zambrano, abetted by Foley artist Kelly Robinson) has the audience in its clutches from moment one, recognizably playing most of the main cast and many of the dinosaurs, including, of course, the star of the park, the T-Rex.
From the audience’s response it is clear that the show could benefit by adding edgier critical and cultural commentary here and there; easy cuts could come from some of the earlier scenes that simply recreate the film’s beginning beats rather than mock them. Jurassic Park can withstand the jabs. After all, velociraptors aren’t overly nice. They bite.
