This year’s Fringe Pageant may perhaps have additional than its fair share of queens, but everybody should to increase for Orlando theater’s real British royalty, award-winning artist and educator Sarah-lee Dobbs.
Dobbs (who is actually British) returns below the direction of Laurel Clark (who is not), accompanied on the keyboards by longtime collaborator Christoper Leavy (who is not British possibly, but does a respectable English accent) for an hour of tales and tunes about her journey from a lower-class Leicester upbringing to becoming a struggling actress in London — where Catherine Zeta Jones narrowly beat her out as the main woman in Bugsy Malone — and finally to our American shores.
Dobbs soars on sixties classics like “To Sir, With Love” and an compulsory Beatles medley and even though she by no means fulfilled her dream of getting to be a Bond woman, her tale of turning down a date with the least-liked 007 just after George Lazenby (aka Pierce “Mama Mia” Brosnan) kicks off a clever compilation of rewritten spy film themes. An unwanted participation video game translating British isles slang in trade for British biscuits briefly broke the if not ebullient momentum, but Dobbs swiftly recovered with an amusingly incomprehensible Cockney dialect lesson.
The night finishes with an energetic set of tracks by an obscure all-feminine pop group Dobbs declined to sign up for. That could possibly be her greatest job regret, but Orlando’s theater followers should depend our blessings that a celebrity like Sarah-lee stiffed the Spice Girls, and ended up on our stages alternatively.
Tickets and show info: Everything I Wannabe!