Playbill Pick Review: Janie Dee’s Beautiful World Cabaret at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Playbill Pick Review: Janie Dee’s Beautiful World Cabaret at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe

This two-time Olivier winner has brought a stunning cabaret act to the Fringe—and it’s got a message, too.

The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is the biggest arts festival in the world, with over 3,700 shows. This year, Playbill is in town for the festival and we’re taking you with us. Follow along as we cover every single aspect of the Fringe, aka our real-life Brigadoon! 

As part of our Edinburgh Fringe coverage, Playbill is seeing a whole lotta shows—and we’re letting you know what we think of them. Consider these reviews a friendly, opinionated guide as you try to choose a show at the festival.

Edinburgh Festival Fringe is a fantastic place to discover some exciting new talent. But sometimes, it’s a rare opportunity to see a major, award-winning star doing what they do best—and in a venue in which every £18 seat is like £200 premium-level seating, so close to the brilliance that it’s as if the performance is for you alone. That’s what Janie Dee’s Beautiful World Cabaret brings to the table.

A shameful gay confession: I wasn’t familiar with Janie Dee until seeing her in the National’s ravishing 2017 revival of Follies in the West End. Dee starred as the icy Phyllis, the character that sings “Could I Leave You?” and “The Story of Lucy and Jessie.” As soon as she was on stage, she became a performer I would happily watch sing the phonebook, to borrow a somewhat overused phrase. I still viscerally remember her “Lucy and Jessie,” sitting in that theatre just wanting the number to continue on for eternity. Divine.

Dee has a fantastic voice, but most compelling is her ability to make her singing seem almost like talking. I don’t mean she speak-sings; I mean her conviction and acting is so deft, the communication so direct that you nearly forget she’s singing as wonderfully as she does. And she could just as easily be a dancer first. The combo made her Follies performance pretty remarkable. I’m still a little bitter she didn’t win a third Olivier for it.

So naturally, I had to catch her Fringe performance. She lived up to every expectation she set up with Follies and then some. I would have been happy with a straightforward cabaret bill, but Dee has Fringed it up to give her performance a thoughtful theme: climate change.

Don’t roll your eyes. The way Dee has managed to cover a topic that’s clearly quite near and dear to her heart while doing what she does best—and truly giving the audience what it wants!­—is nothing short of masterful. As the performance begins, you might think the setlist has been built around a more gentle celebration of the world around us. Two of her backing band—Sarah Harrison on violin and Igor Outkine on accordion, together Mazaika. Fabulous—kick things off with Vivaldi’s “Spring” from The Four Seasons, a work they later return to in further interludes. And then Dee appears to sing “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.” The world is beautiful! We love it!

And then Dee follows that up with Tom Lehrer’s psychotically delightful “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park,” a cheeky ode to gleeful avian murder. The tune is a comedy cabaret favorite, but in Dee’s hands its selection is a little more subversive. She’s easing audiences in to a discussion about how we’re treating our planet, from melting ice caps to islands of plastic suffocating our seas. Don’t worry about that message being heavy handed. In Dee’s masterful hands, a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.

Next up is a pointed take on “Fever,” a celebration (of sorts) of rising temperatures. The number also allows Dee to introduce us to the two dancers who are joining for the performance, Josephina Ortiz Lewis (who also gets several opportunities to sing in her lovely soprano, notably a wonderful take on Adam Guettel’s “Migratory V”) and Sophia Priolo (also the performance’s choreographer). Yes, Dee has brought all her powers to this performance, dancing even while wearing an elegant red, sparkly gown.

Between songs, Dee talks frankly about her climate anxieties and what we need to be doing. Namely, this is cutting down on our consumption of plastics, watching our carbon footprints, being more careful with the world around us—all things worthy of giving more thought and action to. There is bad news, though, for Broadway fans. Dee reveals during the show she will not be bringing Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends to the Main Stem after starring in its West End run, because she’s not willing to get on a plane. Ah well. We’ll always have her on the London cast album.

It doesn’t hurt that her arrangements are wonderful, too. Along with Harrison and Outkine, Dee is backed by music director Ed Zanders on piano. The trio is fantastic together and makes a unique sound. At one point, Harrison, with brushes in hand, transforms her upside-down violin into a drum. Elsewhere she strums it like a violin. The variety of sounds helped enrich the performance even more.

Beautiful World is first and foremost a thrilling hour of cabaret, with Dee’s skill at delivering a song there in spades. What I ultimately found most admirable, though, was how Dee found a way to use what she does best to speak to what’s clearly weighing heavily on her heart and mind. Hearing Dee sing Company’s “Another Hundred People” and Sunday in the Park With George’s “Beautiful” is a delight in any context. Putting her climate change narrative on top of those songs made the performance all the more rich and layered, both in terms of the emotion Dee was infusing into her performance, and what it made me think about as I watched her. If you ask me, that’s art—and activism—at its finest.

Janie Dee’s Beautiful World Cabaret is running at Pleasance’s Queen Dome through August 26. Playbill reviewed the performance that was onboard the Playbill Fringeship. Tickets are available here. See photos from the show below.