For a mainstream art form, the musical comes in many odd shapes. Kudos to the producers who thought the crowds would roll in to see TS Eliot, the Paris June rebellion and Jesus Christ set to music. But roll in they do and, looking around the Edinburgh fringe, it can seem as if the less expected the subject-matter, the more likely it will be given the song-and-dance treatment. If you’re so minded, you can catch musicals about the lead singer of AC/DC, the apocalypse and dogs.

Could it be that recognising the inherent ridiculousness of the undertaking is part of what makes a musical good? That’s certainly the case with My Left/Right Foot: the Musical, a title that invokes the bad-taste possibility of a Broadway chorus line giving it the full Daniel Day-Lewis. It’s as cringeworthy a prospect as doing Springtime for Hitler in The Producers.

The satiric purpose of Robert Softly Gale’s entertaining show is to send up the patronising assumptions behind the casting of able-bodied actors in disabled roles. Day-Lewis is a repeated point of reference, thanks to his Oscar-winning turn as Christy Brown in the 1989 movie My Left Foot. Eddie Redmayne gets off relatively lightly for his portrayal of Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything, but the point is well made: “Who hasn’t won an Oscar when they play the disabled?”

Staged by Birds of Paradise with the National Theatre of Scotland, My Left/Right Foot is about an am-dram group who get wise to the inclusivity friendly guidelines for the Scottish Amateur Drama Association’s one-act play competition. If they could just find a show that broadened their membership, they could be on to a winner. Having dismissed the idea of bringing in “some gays or Jews”, they alight on adapting My Left Foot, the heartwarming tale of a boy with cerebral palsy who teaches himself to write and paint. It even has the perfect role for their leading man, a West End has-been with an inflated ego (John McLarnon, suitably pompous).

An anti-musical … My Left Right Foot. Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian

Cue a characteristically non-PC song by Richard Thomas, composer of Jerry Springer: The Opera, fast-forwarding us through a whole show about a “dazzling cripple rising to the top”. In this sense, My Left/Right Foot is an anti-musical, a show about how terrible a musical could be. It then puts theory into practice when Matthew Duckett, an actor with cerebral palsy, claims the lead role. For anyone following the row about cultural appropriation leading to the cancellation of Robert Lepage’s Slav and Kanata, here’s a show that deals with the question of representation head on.



Not that the discussion ends there. “We need you to be you, but without the politics,” says Gail Watson’s Sheena to Duckett’s Chris, as he wrestles with the ethics of adapting the “inspiration porn-y” movie rather than Christy Brown’s original book. The show has traditional musical highlights, such as Dawn Sievewright’s majestic rendition of On the Outside by chief composers Claire McKenzie and Scott Gilmour, but every time it threatens to satisfy our happy-ever-after urge for resolution, it raises another awkward question. Call it cheeky, call it subversive, call it funny; just don’t call it inspirational.



‘Drive less, smile more’ … Hamilton (Lewis). Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian

Also fully aware that it shouldn’t really be a musical is Hamilton (Lewis), a lively sendup based on the wafer-thin premise that somebody thought Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway smash had something to do with the Formula One driver. David Eaton and Fiona English’s show is powered by two jokes. First, there’s the curious mismatch of American revolution and high-speed motor racing, made weirder still by the addition of rap. Then there’s the limited dramatic potential of the life of Lewis Hamilton, presented here as a man whose greatest off-track achievement is learning to namecheck his sponsors. Politician Aaron Burr’s “talk less, smile more” in Hamilton now becomes the media-savvy racer’s pledge to “drive less, smile more”.

All this would count for little were it not for the top-notch performance of Letitia Hector as Lewis Hamilton, winningly backed by Liberty Buckland, Louis Mackrodt and Jamie Barwood in Benji Sperring’s happy, harmonious production.

If you’re going to turn the musical on its head, however, you need to have the courage of your convictions. When the first line to be sung in Splashback is, “Oh my God, did he just look at my penis?” performed by two men apparently peeing on the keyboard player, the prospects for a lunchtime of scatological filth are promising. When the same company launches into a lavatorial history lesson (sample line: “Two dinosaurs having a shit”), hopes remain high. But there’s something about musical convention that makes it hard to resist the pull of sentimentality, and the further the likable young performers of Car Crash Productions go into their self-devised show, the more they drift towards songs about looking for love and feeling sorry for the toilet attendant. Sweetly sung though they are, they turn what could be a student-friendly musical of toilet-humour ribaldry into something less distinct. Now wash your hands.