Almost Like A Virgin

Pleasance Dome    5 - 31 August @ 19.50    Brink Entertainment/Festival Highlights

Evelyne Brink is a Madonna impersonator. At an earlier stage she wanted to be Ute Lemper but an Ute Lemper impersonator probably wouldn’t get to stay in the General Tito Suite at Honduras’ swankiest hotel, which is where Brink finds herself at the start of this show. ‘It’s a tough job but somebody’s got to do it’, she says.

After a medley of Madonna’s greatest hits, belted out with tremendous conviction, she tells us about the highs and lows of her own life, from waitressing in Brighton to lending Britney Spears her rescue remedy; from trying her hand at stand-up comedy (in a vegetarian restaurant, and disastrously) to winning Gagging For It on ITV2.

She peppers her account with such remarks as, ‘I’m not really Madonna – I just WANT to be’ and ‘I’d rather forget I’m not Madonna’, yet seems at the same time eager to escape from being her. Alongside the chart-toppers, Brink sings some, more personal, songs she has written herself. In one of them, with the chorus ‘As above so below, life is strange, there you go’, she says she just wants is to be loved for who she is. Fat chance, when you’re as good a tribute as Brink is!