If you thought beat boxing was just for the young and frivolous, think again. Beardyman is here to bring Fringe goers an intelligent, funny, show unlike anything else at this year’s festival.
While you find your seat, Mr. Hopkinson, Beardyman’s assistant, sits at his laptop which is hooked up to a giant projector. With this, he uses the social networking phenomenon Twitter to encourage audience participation by tweeting suggestions for tonight’s improvisations. When the house lights go down, Beardyman enters and warms up the audience with his UK champion beat boxing capabilities, where he uses not only his voice, but also his hands, his facial contortions, and aspects of mime to create sounds with multiple dimensions.
After a brilliantly executed comparison between the acoustic similarities of the tube and a Drum n’ Bass club, Beardyman moves to a table centre stage, every inch of surface covered with the most up-to-date machines in music technology such as the Korg Kaoss Pads, which he has mastered to allow himself to loop sounds he creates in real time and then multi-track them to produce songs from scratch on demand.
On this occasion, the BBC hailed “King of Sound and Ruler of Beats”, creates mixes from audience suggestions, including combinations such as: Leprechauns and Elton John to a Dubstep beat; James brown does Sugarhill Gang with an interlude of a complete rendition of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, and Gardening Metal, amongst others.
A highly intelligent, supremely talented musician, Bearydman’s performance doesn’t miss a beat.
5/5 
Grainne OHogan
(42 votes, average: 4.83 out of 5)
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