New York outfit Recent Cutbacks return to the Edinburgh Fringe with KEVIN!!!!!, a breathless, hour-long sprint through Chris Columbus’s 1990 holiday classic, Home Alone. Having scored a massive hit last summer with their Lord of the Rings spoof, the company now applies its familiar mixture of lo-fi puppetry, camera wizardry, and vocal trickery to the McCallister residence.
It is heartfelt and enormous fun. While it does not quite reach the wondrous heights of Fly, You Fools!, it still brings the company’s trademark ingenuity straight to the fore. Director Kristin McCarthy Parker marshals a manic stage, steering four performers and a dedicated Foley artist through a thicket of miniature sets, action figures, and recycled household junk.
Nick Abeel handles the main Kevin puppet, capturing Macaulay Culkin’s iconic mannerisms with hilarious results. He moves from tiny rod figures in the scaled-down rooms to a larger hand puppet for the heavy emotional lifting. When he lets rip, Abeel’s yell is a thing of joy, ringing loud and clear across the auditorium.
The rest of the cast leap between panicked relatives, airport clerks, and bumbling burglars. Natalie Rich, in particular, nails the frantic stress of Kevin’s desperate mother. Miniatures are manipulated live before a camera that feeds real-time video to an overhead screen, warping cinematic perspective on the fly. For all the moving parts bringing the show to life, the execution is never anything but crisp.
Hitting the right notes: Live Foley and sound design
Sound design is just as central to this parody as the visual mechanics. You cannot tackle Home Alone without parsing John Williams’s sweeping score. Richard Sears is particularly excellent in this department, driving the live Foley duties while anchoring the audio track. The cast are musically game, but without his work and soaring vocals, the music so central to the Home Alone mythos would feel underbaked.
“Nick Abeel handles the main Kevin puppet, capturing Macaulay Culkin’s iconic mannerisms with hilarious results.“
Where the staging falls slightly short, at least for me, is in the physical violence. The multiple, improbably non-lethal punishments doled out to the two robbers are fun, but they could do with more concussive heft. A few more crunching Foley thuds would give the booby traps that comic report that had me in stitches when I was a kid sitting in front of The Three Stooges.
The breakneck speed required to condense a ninety-minute feature film into an hour also creates brief narrative blurs. Audience members who do not know the original script inside out may occasionally find themselves squinting to catch up amidst the rapid visual shifts between screen and stage.
However, these are minor reservations. There is no question that the micro-munchkin-packed audience were delighted from start to finish. Recent Cutbacks have crafted another smart, silly, and affectionate tribute that proves their staging ideas still hold plenty of spark. It’s not just any company who could conjure Christmas in a sweaty Fringe venue, but by jingo do they do just that.
Their secret? Their love for the IP they are parodying—they might be reimagining it with sock puppets and a Man-E-Faces (He-Man reference for us 80s kids) version of John Candy, but the heart of the story remains intact. When Kevin and his mum are reunited, you bet the audience goes, “AWWWWWW!”
Show details
Venue: Venue 33: Pleasance Courtyard, 60 Pleasance, EH8 9TJ (Google Maps)
Date(s): Wed 05 Aug to Mon 31 Aug (25 shows)
Time(s): 12:20pm (60 mins)
Age recommendation: 5+
Price: From £10 (concessions available)
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