Colchester Fringe Festival 2025
Bruce Ryan Costella: Spooky and Gay.
Bruce Ryan Costella
Venue: Three Wise Monkeys, Colchester.
Festival: Colchester Fringe Festival
Low Down
Inventive use of minimal lighting creates a perfect atmosphere for these spooky tales.
Review
Perfect for Halloween, Spooky and Gay is a collection of original Queer ghost stories, together with stand up and music, imaginatively staged using table lamps, hand held lights and torches, creating a perfect spooky atmosphere in the upstairs bar of the Three Wise Monkeys in Colchester. Unthreatening audience participation adds to the atmosphere of gather around a fire to hear tales that will send a shiver up our spines.
Costella is an enigmatic story teller, immediately taking us into his world, with a nice self- deprecating style that we Brits appreciate. The strength of the piece is in the Queer spooky stories. The first is a story of a young lesbian and a fortune telling jack-o-lantern, and they each build to an extended, medieval style metaphorical story of the Reagan era AIDS crisis, in which The Pink Death spreads throughout the land as the King in his ivory tower ignores it. Most effective of all is the story about gay ghosts in gay bars and clubs, safe spaces where the spirit lives on long after the buildings have been gentrified or pulled down. Or at least we remember as safe spaces, he references beautifully the Pulse nightclub shootings in Orlando, his home town. A mournful performance of Cher’s classic Believe asks us if we believe in life after love. It’s a beautiful elegy to lost souls, and really takes the show to a high level.
In contrast, some of his humorous asides offer a mixed bag of trick or treats. Whilst it is a joy to sing along with his “Scary Ghost Song”, the observations of awful Halloween costumes fell a little flat. with the flip chart presentation being too small for audience members a couple of rows from the front to see clearly, and having to describe so much in detail extended this section, and the impatience for him to get back to the story telling grew. But his beautiful singing voice meant he was forgiven a lot for these less impactful diversions, and, overall, this is a show of strong storytelling, delivering exactly the show’s description.
