Latitude Festival comedy review: Sexy American Girl Cousins
Natasia Demetriou and Ellie White are so fizzily funny as sort of bleak, post-Soviet cabaret act Sexy American Girl Cousins, ribbon dancing, grimacing through songs and grinding to music so gloriously tacky you wish you were wearing a Miss World 1992 sash and purple lip liner.
Sexy American Girls made their Latitude festival debut in the Cabaret tent, fittingly. It’s an alternately painfully awkward, and bizarre, gauche cocktail of cod-Eastern European accents and stars and stripes: ‘…New York, Australia – we’re sexy in all fifty states, baby!’
Ellie White’s excruciating, paralytically afraid is mutely hilarious, wearing a constant look of utter terror even while ribbon-whipping at Demetriou during a routine set to a club remix of Let It Go.
Both Demetriou and White are character comedians; as a pair, their same-world, different-time creations are impossible not to be in awe of.
On stage there is something so huge, so space-filling (in this case, not actually that difficult): the uncomfortable feeling of the two on stage that builds between bursts of Miley Cyrus and Demetriou’s jittery hip-grinding and genital-framing.
The contrast between White’s quiet, broken, weepy voice and Demetriou’s nervously elongated shouting of ‘baby!’ is fabulous, each time the former speaks again her whispered ‘sexy’ notes seem all the more painful.
Not only is their ending ribbon dance spectacularly awkward, it’s actually really good: balancing on feet and swinging around waists, garnering applause from a simultaneously bewildered and loving audience. On the whole it seemed like people had no idea what they were watching, but they found is hilarious regardless.
White and Demetriou also feature in People Time, one of BBC iPlayer’s new Comedy Feeds along with Sheeps trio Liam Williams, Daran Johnson and Alastair Roberts, Australian comic Claudia O’Doherty and character comedian Jamie Demetriou.
The two take their debut show, A Mother and A Baby, to the Edinburgh Fringe next month. It would be blatently remiss not see it.
Date of live review: Saturday 18 July 2015 @ Henham Park, Suffolk.
