John Scott’s DAY 3 coverage of the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe with The IMITATOR

For a Capital City, Edinburgh often feels like a village; it’s an almost unusual occurrence to walk the length of Princes Street, the city’s main thoroughfare, and to not bump into someone you know. It happens quite often to me, and I hardly know anyone.  What’s more unusual is to bump into someone you’ve never met before but who has emailed you about reviewing their Fringe show.

I’m on a bus, on my way to a show when a guy gets on carrying a sign with his name on it.  The name seems vaguely familiar so I check my emails and, yep, there it is; a review and interview request.  So I get up from my seat and sit beside him, and silently offer him my phone so he can read the screen. Quite rightly, he looks at me like I’m the person on public transport with poor mental health (we’re not allowed to say loony on the bus anymore, are we?), but he realises that he’s looking at his own email and we have a really good chat.  When he asked for an interview I bet he didn’t think he’d be having it on the number 7 bus.  Anyway, look out for the review coming soon.

The show I was on my way to see was The Imitator a one-man biographical theatre piece by Julián Fontalvo.  The USP of the show is that Julián is a singer who mimics around seventy famous singers over the course of an hour.

Julián’s story starts as a boy in Columbia, listening to Sting on his radio,  singing Every Breath You Take.  His attempt at Sting is pretty much bang on but oddly, it was even better when I heard him sound-checking from outside the the room as I was waiting to get in.  It crosses my mind that perhaps this might be a show that is better experienced with my eyes shut but then again, that would make it a lot more difficult to photograph.

Julián wants to be like the singers he hears on his radio and the radio also offers an escape from his day-to-day life.  Fontalvo cleverly works snatches of song into his narrative to drive the story along.  Finding space in his story for seventy singers is a tall order though so he helps himself out with a couple of setpieces such as We Are The World, which allows him to hit twenty-one targets in one go.  Julian’s impressions are generally excellent: Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen, Willie Nelson, and Bob Dylan stand out here but I’d be impressed if anyone could identify all the singers so the likes of Al Jarreau and Dionne Warwick may go unappreciated.

Julian moves from Columbia to New York and then to Europe, soundtracking his life’s ups and downs as he goes. It’s often the unlikeliest of voices such as The Proclaimers, Amy Winehouse and Tina Turner that prove most successful but, however good the imitations, the show would be likely to fall flat without Julián’s ability to tell an engaging story with humour and charm.  I thought his lyrical reworking of Bohemian Rhapsody into an argument with his mother was a bit of a misstep but otherwise, Fontalvo gives a clever, entertaining, and impressive performance and if the buzz at the end of the show was anything to go by,  the first night audience seemed to thoroughly enjoy it.

Recommended.

John Scott

UPSTAGE PHOTOGRAPHY