Edinburgh Fringe 2025
The Family Copoli: A Post-Apocalyptic Burlesque Musical
Liv & Ken Productions LLC
Genre: Burlesque, Cabaret, Dark Comedy, Musical Theatre
Venue: TheSpace UK
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
A darkly inventive show-within-a-show that offers entertaining musical numbers within a more sinister outer layer, The Family Copoli will leave you contemplating what makes life worth perpetuating, and whether we’re drifting too far from those ideals.
Review
The Family Copoli, directed by Liv Licursi, offers a tender ode to the value of the arts and humanities, wrapped in an uneasy disquisition into the essence of human nature. In a show within a show, this rag-tag extended family travels the post-apocalyptic landscape of 2097, staging a pro-natalist musical variety show that mixes burlesque meant to stimulate the carnal desires of their audience alongside Broadway-esque paeans to parenthood.
It’s a little bit Shakespeare (especially with the excellent Oscar Llodra as emcee, a cross between Puck and Joel Grey); a little bit steampunk; partially Mad Max; and a blend of Cabaret and other Broadway hits, with a twist of Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road. Basically: there’s a lot going on here.
There’s a visual tumult, too. The costuming is excellent (kudos to costume designers Ana Mocklar and Julia Schanen) – think plastic-bag-and-bottle fur stoles, and detritus as ornamentation. A rotatable set provides a clever solution to the need to follow events both on-stage and backstage, and maintains the aesthetic marvelously. More problematically, there are often up to eight performers on the tiny stage at one time, so that when the focus is just on the interactions of a duo, the others lounge around rather awkwardly.
Musically, there’s also a lot – a little too much, in fact – happening. Even for a variety show, the scope of the musical numbers is awfully wide. Slick Broadway power ballads that seem foreign to the otherwise enjoyably consistent homespun look and feel of the show sit uncomfortably next to songs such as “Bobbsey Twins” that are a little too close to Kander and Ebb, which are, in turn, next to excellent and less derivative numbers such as “The Great Flood.” The original music and lyrics (by Michael Wookey and Andy Colpitts) are competently-written, if unremarkable – you probably won’t leave the theatre humming the tunes – but the larger issue is that the songs just don’t seem to all belong to the same show.
Despite everything that’s going on, there’s much less happening in the story. There just isn’t enough room for it: the storyline has to be squeezed into the spaces between the presented variety show acts. This means that for too much of the running time, the only dramatic tension is whether the family is going to make it to their stated destination of the sea, which is rather underpowered as a driver. A lot happens just before the end, and all of it is wonderfully thrilling, but setting down a trail of breadcrumbs for the audience, in the way of foreshadowing, or at least greater complexity and menace in the responsible character, would go a long way to establishing a more satisfying throughline.
The Family Copoli is deft at world-building, and much in their ambitious undertaking is enjoyable and engaging, especially in its inner story of the variety show. The overarching story doesn’t arch quite enough, but it still manages to deliver a thought-provoking message that is both timely and important.
