We fans of musical comedy have a special place in our hearts for Otis Lee Crenshaw, Rich Hall's country music-singing jailbird alter ego. Crenshaw's comic songs about the trailer park and the penitentiary can be as poignant as they are funny, and as musically satisfying as they are lyrically adroit.
At its best, tonight's show — the character's first at Edinburgh in three years — hits those heights, even if the set loses momentum in the second half, with a few songs that tantalise more than satisfy, and an improvised ditty that does not quite fly.
That only seems a letdown because the show starts so brightly, with a sublime track about Roberta, a KKK member. "You think you're the master race/ But you can't even show your face/ Now give me back my pillow case." I could listen to lyrics like that all day. But it is not just the lyrics: there is gorgeous slide-guitar and banjo-backing from Crenshaw's henchmen, Myron Buttram and Dave Lindsay, whose plangent sound evokes the white-trash world in which, Otis reminisces, "our idea of a good time was for dad to take us down to KFC and let us lick other people's fingers".
On this occasion, the chat with the front row and the ad-libbed song that follows lead to a musical cul de sac. Elsewhere, some numbers closely resemble past hits (a punning song about Scottish place names, for example) and others are too brief to deliver on their initial, giddy promise. But I am being greedy. There is plenty to enjoy here, including a closer about America's corruption of the single malt whisky ("They called it Jack Daniels and that was the night domestic violence was born") and of Scottish culture in general. "Now Argyll's a sock, Paisley's a tie/ Not a place near Glasgow where you'll probably die." Harsh on Paisley, perhaps — but a treat for the rest of us.
