Margarita Pracatan – Stranger in the Night (Pride Fringe – Manchester)

Venue: Radisson Blue Edwardian
Where: Manchester

Best known to UK audiences for her closing spot on Clive James’s Saturday Night Clive, Cuban songstress Margarita Pracatan has been on the showbusiness circuit for many years, performing her cabaret around the world while also starring in her own public access television show.

Now she’s bringing her brand of peculiar worldly wisdom to the UK in her latest show, Strangers In The Night, all told through the medium of her mangled music and a Powerpoint presentation rustled up on a computer in her local library.

It’s an in-your-face evening with Pracatan arriving on stage in enough feathers and (fake) diamonds to appear like a cross between Big Bird  and a bling H Samuel before powering through covers of Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Gloria Gaynor and ABBA.With a devil-may-care disregard for lyrics and melody it’s knowing camp rubbish, but what Pracatan’s throaty tequila and treacle vocals lack in skill they make up for in their sultry gusto.

Between songs however is where Pracatan really sparkles with her crude Technicolor slideshow, Stranger in the Night: Elegant Lesons with Margarita Pracatan!!! (sic). Offering advice on everything from make-up and God to why you should go to the toilet in posh hotels and never McDonalds, Pracatan is a winning presence, steering an amusing course between starry-eyed optimism and gold-digging naked ambition.
 
Extremely  unsubtle your enjoyment can be directly correlated to your tolerance of tinny Casio keyboard bossa nova and cheeky innuendo, but one thing is clear, under her faux naïve persona Pracatan is one consummate performer.

– James Stanley