Edinburgh Fringe 2024
Silence! The Musical- The Unauthorised Parody of the Silence of The Lambs.
Paul Taylor Mills and Victoria Lang.
Genre: Musical Theatre
Venue: Underbelly Bristo Square.
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
The Oscar winning psychological horror thriller gets the musical theatre treatment as rookie FBI agent Clarice Starling has to work with convicted serial killer Hannibal Lecter, (Hannibal the Cannibal) to capture another killer, Buffalo Bill.
Review
I’ve waited a long time for Silence to arrive in the Fringe, having seen it during it’s successful off-Broadway run. It’s a perfect piece for the Edinburgh Festival, highly irreverent, with terrific nods to the film, an excellent parody of the main tropes of the movie. Maybe my expectations were too high, as it fell a tad flat here, and I suspect that the material has had it’s moment. After all, the film is almost 25 years old, and even I struggled to recall some of main points of the movie, and the character of Buffalo Bill, who captures fat girls to imprison them until they slim down enough so he can skin them to make a female skin suit, certainly needs some revisiting! However, the material by Jo Kaplin and Al Kaplin still has enough spice to create some genuinely funny moments and any show that features tap dancing sheep has to be high on the originality list!
My reservations are to take nothing away from a fine ensemble, and two excellent leads. Phoebe Panaretos captures perfectly Jodie Foster’s performance as Clarice, complete with vocal phrasings, and her comic timing is superb. She is matched by the excellent Mark Oxtoby as Hannibal Lecter, capturing the quirks of Anthony Hopkin’s iconic performance, sniffing and drooling his way through the part. His love song to Clarice is unprintable here, let’s just say he doesn’t just drop the C word but plants a minefield and then steps on every one! Perversely, this leads to a beautiful ballet sequence in a nod to West Side story, and a homage to Bob Fosse also works it’s way into the show. Catherine Millsom is perfect as Catherine Martin, exaggerating her despair, and all of the memorable characters from the film are given excellent tributes, including self serving FBI head Fred Chilton, here very well realised by Matt Bond. The two way mirror through which Clarice and Lecter first meet is used to hilarious effect in a tango sequence, and there are many glorious nods, including the paintings that Lecter has on his prison wall. (Though I couldn’t get the superb French and Saunders spoof out of my head).
And yet, despite the slickness of the company, it doesn’t quite gel. It’s quite an achievement to reduce a two hour film to half it’s time and still retain the main plot and highlights, yet the show begins to drag half way through. and, like the film, some focus is lost when Lecter escapes his imprisonment. Another problem is the sound mix, very unbalanced on the night I night I attended, the lyrics were not always clear, and the chorus were too loud for comfort. Whilst it’s always good to see a company enjoying themselves, there was some unnecessary corpsing, which I think happens every performance. Some audience members walked out after the swearing, but there is no doubt that fans of the irreverent will love this show.
