Entertaining UK audiences with jokes about the US is as easy as - well, attracting Edinburgh crowds to a show with a celebrity in it. So Simpsons and Spinal Tap star Harry Shearer should do fine with this cannily entitled offering.
But it's a strange show. On one side of the stage, the genial Shearer dispenses droll views on the state of the American nation. But the lightly comic atmosphere is frequently deflated by Shearer's wife, the singer Judith Owen, hammering at a piano stage left and singing overblown power ballads about plastic surgery and the US addiction to oil.
I was happiest when in Shearer's company. New insights into America may be thin on the ground. Laughs too - his material is more interesting than funny. Witness his argument that we cannot expect a culture that believes people can erase their personal history and be "born again" to pay any respect to world history at large. And when she's not singing, Owen can be tartly amusing, as when she describes nip'n'tucked Hollywood actresses as looking like "Bambi in a wind tunnel who's been kicked in the face by Thumper".
But there's an insincere and self-conscious edge to her performance, which escalates when she breaks into song. The tossed hair and keening gestures are a bit much for this wee cabaret show, not to mention the humourless lyrics: "Funny how those who're chasing fame / Are those who're in the greatest pain."
Nadir is reached, then overtaken, by a song in which Owen shares her thoughts on Michael Jackson's personal life and the murder of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in Soham in 2002. This combination of gentle satire and drastic music is a little misjudged. The show may not be about The Simpsons, but a larger dose of that series' self-irony wouldn't have gone amiss.
· Until August 28. Box office: 0131-226 2428.
