Colchester Fringe Festival 2025
Sadomusical
A Similar River
Genre: Comedy, Improvised Theatre, LGBTQIA+, Queer Comedy
Venue: Dragonfly Lounge
Festival: Colchester Fringe Festival
Low Down
Sadomusical takes painful, jaw-dropping displays of Sado-masochism and adds in a few S&M of its own (singing and musical numbers). This is an improvised work chock full of schadenfreude that will leave you begging your dominatrix to take you back to it again and again.
Review
Art.
What makes… good art?
Is good art… painful?
Well, with all certainty, Sadomusical proves that good art can be painful (and fun).
As performers Lee Apsey and Jayda Fogel showed me after the show, Sadomusical leaves literal war scars. Those welts from the kendo stick will heal up in a few days. However, there is a reason the performers told me they only do this show in short runs. It is a painful show to perform (and a hilarious one to watch). I was invited backstage by mere coincidence. Fogel accidentally stained her leather from the wax strips they use to tear off Apsey’s chest hair and ran to the bar for help, asking the bartenders if they knew anyone who knew how to care for leather. Being known as the “pup leather guy” of Fringe, I was summoned immediately (which turned out to be a simple polish job). While backstage, I got more insight into this delightfully unique improv show.
Sadomusical is Apsey and Fogel’s response to the ‘suffering artist.’ All good art should be painful. An artist, as Jerzy Grotowski of Poor Theatre fame would say, must give themselves up to the audience, serving their knowledge and creativity as a gift to be devoured by the masses. In my opinion, it is a load of pretentious rubbish. Sadomusical is the antithesis of the call for suffering as artists. Apsey and Fogel certainly experience pain on stage, but they do not suffer; they have joyful fun. They allow the absurdity of their own situation and performance to thrive. The ending number shows as much. No matter what the audience hurls at them, and the audience hits them directly in the face during my performance, Apsey and Fogel keep doing their art with the same cheeky grin.
Sadomusical’s premise is simple. Two self-absorbed artists take the stage and try to prove, through increasingly elaborate S&M displays, that good art is painful. Their improvised comedy will be the greatest ART if they do this. They will out ART everyone. And the strange irony of the piece is that they do (but not for the reasons their on-stage personas think). As an improv show, it is well-structured with brisk pacing. The S&M will be a lot for your grandmother, but a seasoned leather daddy will find the show fairly vanilla. That said, both your grandmother and the leather daddy (turns out they’re best friends) can agree that the show is indeed painful and brilliantly entertaining.
Sadomusical is entirely improvised, moving between different short segments and games. The difficulty in reviewing improvised shows is that every performance is different. Some things that flop one night might do better another. In the night I watched, there was a mix. Without spoiling too much, the highlights were generally when there was audience participation or a guest performer. At these points, the chaos of audience members created hilarious and unexpected scenarios for the performers. The weaker sections were where Apsey and Fogel were in the groove of their improvised art without as much care for the audience. Weaker, not because Apsey and Fogel are anything less than seasoned improvisers, but because the engagement dwindles in these moments.
Does the S&M make their improvised art better? Yes and no. It makes it more entertaining, yes. What makes Sadomusical better than the regular improvised flair is the willingness of Apsey and Fogel to take risks. They communicate with one another. Apsey and Fogel are synced in with themselves, their colleague, and the audience. Like real BDSM sex, there is a deep understanding of the other’s limits, their strengths, and where to push further. They challenge one another and simply have fun on the stage. That is ultimately why Sadomusical works. Apsey and Fogel turn painful displays into some of the funniest improvised comedy you can find. You will be begging for more, and more, and more (and maybe a little harder too, daddy).
