Sammy J - 1999

Melbourne International Comedy Festival 2009
Sammy J - 1999
4 April 2009
Melbourne Town Hall

If I were 14, I’d be writing “SJ 4 AMP” on my pencil case, putting a great big love heart around it and considering some under the jumper action.

Sammy J had a cringe worthy start on Red Faces in the 90s, but he has found his genre and made it his own. His cabaret is terrific but following on from the amazing Sammy J and Forest of Dreams, the Sammy J -1999 style of musical comedy is going to make him famous. (And it lets him prance around the austere Melbourne Council Chambers in a pair of budgie smugglers, waving rainbow ribbons.)

It’s 42 days ‘til Toy Story Two, Malcolm Turnball is a republican hero, Y2K is threatening to fuck up our VCRs and 15-year-old Sammy Gay is rightly terrified of getting a boner at the pool.

The dial up internet and the Tamagotchi set the era, but the angst-ridden quest for coolness is as universal as it gets and Stiffy J’s natural story telling evokes our painful teenage memories with an unseen cast of archetypal classmates and a tale of painful decisions and nerdy revenge. Teenagers do horrible things to each other and make stupid choices in their quest for acceptance and love. As grown ups we learn that nothing really changes and accept that there’s a bit of Stiffy Gay in us all. (Yes Wade - that’s a double entendre.)

Sammy’s hero journey is textbook, but it’s also tear-wiping, jaw-aching, snort-out-loud funny. Bring your teenagers, but you will love it even more than they do.

PS: To all the geeky teens out there – the cool kids will always want to be fingered by the Wades of the world, but we eventually come to our senses. You just have to wait til we’re 30 ... or 40.

This review originally appeared on AussieTheatre.com.

Randy’s Postcards from Purgatory

Melbourne International Comedy Festival 2009
Randy’s Postcards from Purgatory
5 April 2009
Portland Hotel

As his recent pairings with Sammy J have proven, if Heath McIvor has his hand it, it’s worth checking out. Sammy and Heath’s close friend Randy may be the greatest heterosexual male couple on stage, but have parted ways to give us Comedy Festival solo shows. Sammy has regressed to1999 and Randy is sending us Postcards from Purgatory.

Randy is more foul-mouthed, drunken, and animated than most stand ups. His tale of dismal love is augmented with treats like the divinely absurd Flashback Yeti, a really creepy kids TV show (done with shadow puppets), and Randy’s own hand puppetry – but it’s still just an A to B to “now I SEE that I just need to take charge of my own life” tale – and – we’ve heard it all before.

The monologues that captivate us are filled with dilemmas and choices and the teller creates enough detail to bring every element of their semi-fictional world to life. It’s hard not to have a bit of a crush on someone as purple and irresistible as Randy, but it’s hard to care about Randy and Polly, when we don’t know much about her. Compared to the complexity of Randy, his vital offstage characters felt too much like...puppets.

Of course it’s easy to get a giggle by calling Keanu Reeves a cunt, but so is just saying “cunt”. To make it more than a lazy joke, we need to know about Keanu‘s cuntish behaviour. Plot jumps like “Before I knew it I was a Private Detective” gave us rip snorting prop gags, but instantly sacrificed the authenticity of the story. We believe in Randy – so we need to believe in his world as well.

Great story isn’t just good plot. The same night I saw Denise Scott make community circus sound fascinating, and Sam Simmons bring Adelaide’s most bogan-filled Westfield to vivid, almost fit-inducing life. Randy’s story is more interesting, but Denise and Sam made their worlds and their unseen characters live. Postcards from Purgatory is perfectly told by Randy, and worth going just for the telling, but the story needs more detail to make it soar.

This review originally appeared on AussieTheatre.com.

Goodbye Ruby Tuesday

Melbourne International Comedy Festival 2009

Goodbye Ruby Tuesday
Justin Hamilton
7 April 2009
Melbourne Town Hall

Totally blowing me away this festival are artists who are grabbing their genre and recreating its form. There will always be an audience for disposable stand-up rants, but Justin Hamilton is one stand-up who knows we deserve more and trusted himself to create it.

A love story that soars and hurts as much as love, and a love story about Melbourne (where so many wanderers have found home), Goodbye Ruby Tuesday is intelligent and surprising story telling, that combines theatre with stand up as originally and perfectly as the first person who added chilli to chocolate.

As Jason Harrington, Hamilton explores and satirises stand-up, himself and punters who don’t get that it’s all an act. But it’s really Ruby’s story. Hamilton wrote Goodbye Ruby Tuesday for Adelaide actor Hannah Norris. Obsessively organised, stuck in work hell and desperately lonely, Ruby finds herself at her first ever stand-up gig and meets Jason, who sends her back to “boredom, obsessive roundabouts and Fyshwick” (aka Canberra) for her school reunion.

In a festival overflowing with amazing writing, Goodbye Ruby Tuesday rises to top. I’d love to see it develop in a theatre season, but it’s designed to travel, with content that can adapt and change (Facebook may be the new comedy black this year, but will be beige before we know it), a rock-solid story base and awe-inspiring performances from Hamilton and Norris that ensure that Jason and Ruby will continue to touch the hearts of anyone who meets them.

I remember Hamilton when he was doing any gig he could get in Adelaide. He was sweet, funny and a bit scared to let go of the microphone and move. Ten years later ... WOW. It takes grunt, determination and hundreds of gigs to be this good. It’s a great reminder to let emerging performers make mistakes and remember that experience can turn comedians into artists.

This review originally appeared on AussieTheatre.com.

The List Operators

Melbourne International Comedy Festival 2009
The List Operators
The Last Tuesday Society
3 April 2009
Melbourne Town Hall

Simmering underneath the populist level of “fuck, cunt, wank”, “bogan slut in ugg boots” and “our train system sux” bonza Aussie comedians is a seam of independent work too good to ever be seen on a footy show. Topping the list is ... forgive me ... The List Operators.

The List Operators (Matthew Kelly and Richard Higgins) first appeared at early Last Tuesday Society performances and their Melbourne Fringe season sold out. They continue to leave me bleeding internally and have destroyed my ability to watch a certain ABC show without running to the screen and touching you-know-who in the you-know-what area.

With lists as diverse as “10 alternative ways to open a show” ,“Things that are hard to spell” and “Countries it’s OK to be racist about”, the Operators had me squirming at the most-wrong-ever Santa joke, joyously giggling at a wind up puppy and pretentiously sniggering about semiotics.

Their recipe-list for bad stand up comedy may be too close for many comedians about town, but it proves how well they know their genre. The uptight, angry, straight (as in conservative/boring/rod up his arse) bloke and adorable idiot is an over-used formula, but Higgins and Kelly add enough illegally imported and drunkenly-bought-on-e-bay-at-3am ingredients to create characters we recognise, but haven’t met before. Their lists are a hoot, their sketches rib cracking, but the unrelated material wouldn’t gel without these cementing characters.

There’s nothing wrong with seeing your favourite telly or radio star rant on a stage, but you know exactly what you’re going to see. Grab a ticket to something smaller and be thrilled by the experience of something original. And when these artists start appearing on the telly in a couple of years – you can boast that you saw them before they became famous.

For a choice grab of the best, The Last Tuesday Society (including the Operators) is meeting at on the first Tuesday of every week during the festival.

This review originally appeared on AussieTheatre.com.

The Boy With Tape On His Face

Melbourne International Comedy Festival 2009
The Boy With Tape On His Face
Mr and Mrs Wills
3 April 2009
Trades Hall

Despite its raving reviews, I never thought I’d be into a wordless work. Well, never shall I doubt a review again, as The Boy With Tape On His Face is the most exquisite piece of comedy theatre that I have seen.

The boy (Sam Wills) doesn’t speak. He can’t speak because he has tape on his face, and from this sightly disturbing, and never explained, premise springs delight and joy that defy description.

It’s like unwrapping a plainly wrapped pile of birthday presents to finding kittens, ducklings, the beloved teddy bear you lost at the park when you were six, an outfit that makes you look stunning, the simple answer to world poverty and a cure for cancer. And then your best friends, the family members you love and your resurrected childhood pets all run into the room to hug you and reveal a table laden with every type of cake imaginable.

The Boy With Tape On His Face is comedy that warms your soul and lets your heart beat in time with the rest of the audience. The audience integral to the performance, but please don’t let the fear of participation scare you away, as even the most hesitant participants were happy to be on stage.

We love witty wit, punny puns and cunning language play – but the artists we come back to are those who find the “voice” that is theirs alone and let us see the secrets they keep in their hearts. The touch of sadness in Wills makes the boy one of us, but he takes us by the hand and flies us into the glorious giant snow dome of his beautiful world.

You have been warned - if The Boy With Tape On His Face sells out, as it did at the Adelaide Fringe, you will miss something extraordinary and I defy anyone not to love it.

This review originally appeared on AussieTheatre.com.

Rod Quantock Eats Himself

Melbourne International Comedy Festival 2009
Rod Quantock Eats Himself
April 2009
Swiss House

While Rod Quantock made plans to eat in, I spent a typical Melbourne Good Friday devouring sparkling wine, hot cross buns, chocolate bunny and China town dumplings - and saw Rod Quantock (the only person in town who knows the correct usage of a rubber chook for comic effect).

The Melbourne City Council have renamed laneways after Dame Edna and AC/DC. As Rod is as Melbourne as trams, unpredictable weather and Collingwood jokes, he must be next on the list. Or if there isn’t a spare laneway, I’m sure we’d all support the renaming of Swanston Street as Quantock Boulevard.

Shame on any Melbourneite who hasn’t seen Quantock live (Captain Snooze adds don’t count). His stand-up is created from a passionate sense of right and an intelligence that could make him rich - if his sense of right wasn’t stronger. For all its spontaneity and improvisation, there is never a word out of place, a misguided thought or hint of self-indulgent gag in a night with Rod. And he remains the most consistently hilarious comedian on our stages.

Rod Quantock Eats Himself sees a return to the classic Rod blackboard and chalk. The recent laptop shows were great, but this is a carbon neutral show, so there’s no mic, minimal lights and a determination to leave his audience “rigid with fear” and filled with “a sense of existential dread”.

Sometimes the only way to make folk listen is to make them laugh. As a species, we humans are utterly stupid and selfish. Even after a 13-year drought, horrendous life destroying bushfires and the heart-breaking destruction of the Murray-Darling system, the Andrew Bolts of this world (and others with “the environmental credentials of a Cane Toad”) continue to deny climate change. If you too still doubt the proof – please see Mr Q to get some sense laughed into you.

Even with the glorious passing of Little Johnny’s political gang and the knowledge that many Comedy Festival tickets are being bought with Uncle Kevin’s stimulation money, Quantock knows that we cannot depend on politicians to create the change we really want. Even our once-lauded environment minister continues to approve bay dredging and de-salination plants – we shouldn’t be that surprised, because his band “was called Midnight Oil, not Midnight Sustainable Energy”.

So we’re going to have to create some change ourselves. Rod has some ideas and shares his secret to surviving in Rod Quantock Eats Himself. You’ll have to go along to find out what they are.

You can also listen to Rod chatting about this show with the Boxcutter's team.

This review originally appeared on AussieTheatre.com.

The Suitcase Royale Space Show

Melbourne International Comedy Festival 2009
Space Show
The Suitcase Royale
4 April 2009
Melbourne Town Hall

Semiotics, Campbell and universal archetypes aside, The Suitcase Royale Space Show has the best fart joke of the festival.

Now the fart may represent the hero’s vulnerability and public downfall, but this late night must-see isn’t about serious ponderings – it’s about trying not to poo from laughing.

The Suitcase Royale (Jof, Miles and Glen) have been rummaging though Melbourne and international junkyards for theatre since 2004. With a fan base developing in Europe and the UK, locals can still see their ideas developing at Last Tuesday Society gatherings.

Anarchistic, absurd and a little bit naughty, they fill their suitcase with painted foam and fake wood panelling and blast their way through the final frontiers of art, as the universally manly space travellers Kevin Bacon, Kerry O’Brien and Chuck Norris.

Motivational space-guru Pizza Box Space Man reminds a disillusioned space rock god that, “To be bad you have to be sensationally good”. Working with found objects (arty talk for junk), the set and costume design makes a 1970s episode of Dr Who look like the new Battlestar Gallactica, and their script feels like a collage of grade seven space essays. The Suitcase Royale Space Show is atrocious – which must mean that it’s better than sensational.

One reviewer said that The Suitcase Royale could be the Aussie Mighty Boosh. Bugger that – these guys are better. See them before they are whisked away by the lure of television fame.

This review originally appeared on AussieTheatre.com.

Re tale

Melbourne International Comedy Festival 2009
Re tale
22 April 2009
St Martins

They evoke a universal sense of fear and force us to stay at home, but we know we cannot avoid them or block out their squealing of, “Hi Babe, ya looking for something for a particular special occasion?”

Re Tale introduces gen Y retail assistants D’Bree, the penis flytrap, and Dash, who is happy to wait for mannequin-perfect love. They work in Faux Bo Ho, but their over-dressed, self-involved and falsely enthusiastic clonettes lurk in most retail stores. Yesterday, I was accosted by one in a health food store and, no, I didn’t need any help picking out my packet of tofu!

Katrina Mroz and Hayley Butcher’s creations are on their way to being household names. Already creating gales of genuine laughter, it’s hard not to compare them to fellow St Martins’ alumni Gina Riley and Jane Turner. Like Kath and Kim, D’Bree and Dash are everything loud, bright and crass that inhabits suburban shopping malls. We instantly recognize the perfectly captured language and attitude and love to laugh at them – because we are beyond such pettiness. What is missing is the touch that lets us recognise ourselves in them. We laugh at Kath and Kim, but we also laugh with them, because we reluctantly glimpse our own frizzy perm or jewelled g-string. D’Bree and Dash are superficial and stupid, but we need more hope of seeing their decent, caring and normal side. Of course, they must never fulfil our hope – but a touch of reality would bring us closer to loving them even more.

Re Tale has already been tightened and well-shaped by director Anniene Stockton, but will continue to improve with some work on the actual tale. At this stage the piece is mainly character and joke with a predictable story tacked around it. The complication and trouble comes in too late and is solved too easily and quickly. To get Re-Tale to the next stage (sold out shows, telly series and classrooms full of tween fans squealing, “I’m a cock magnet”) it needs a story that is as good as the characters. I would have loved to see the painful consequences from their previous nights antics, and know why the threat of losing their job is so significant - couldn’t they just move to Supre?.

There’s only a couple more performances of Re Tale left and it’s well worth getting away from the city venues and jumping on a tram to St Martins in South Yarra. I really hope this isn’t the last we see of the Ds, because they are well on the road to becoming unforgettable.

This review originally appeared on AussieTheatre.com.

Tim Minchin – Ready for This

Melbourne International Comedy Festival
Ready for This
Tim Minchin
15 April 2009
The Forum

Melbourne is more than ready to welcome Tim Minchin home. With more ushers at the Forum than audience at his early Butterfly Club gigs, Ready For This sees Minchin return a super star

I’ve had a bit of a crush on Tim since I first saw him at the Hi Fi Bar. Combining an intelligent wit, with a love of wordiness and virtuosic piano tinkling, this bare-footed, wild-haired, mascara wearing rock ‘n’ roll nerd parodied rock wankers, comedy tossers and all sorts of self-gratifiers, as he intimately shared his slightly-dorky life with his proudly-geekish audience.

After a handful of Green Room awards, a couple of MICF awards and some little thing called the Perrier Award at the Edinburgh Fringe, Minchin moved to the UK to collect even more adoring minions.

His popularity has forced him on to bigger stages, so the new show lacks intimacy, while Minchin’s material has become more observational and less personal. As the uber-cool, the theatre-snobs and the I-saw-him-on-Spicks-and-Specks crowd are now buying tickets, it’s natural that he develops a show with broad appeal. Don’t get me wrong – his material is as good as ever, but it’s still evolving to adapt to his growing super stardom. Ready For This would benefit from a tighter structure and more consistently themed content, but it’s not stopping anyone enjoying it.

Minchin is still frustrated about religion and new-agers (or is that anyone with faith?) and “Bears Don’t’ Dig On Dancing” is as fab as his earlier activist hit “Canvas Bags”, but his unsure and nerdy persona doesn’t seem quite right as hundreds of cheering fans welcome him to the stage, and it’s harder to satirise rock stars when you too are selling t-shirts and CDs in the foyer.

One person unlikely to wear a Minchin t-shirt is Guardian reviewer Phil Daoust. Daoust didn’t fancy Minchin’s 2005 Edinburgh Fringe show (the Perrier winning one) and went so far as to suggest that our Tim should be tarred and feathered. Tim’s musical response sent many fellow-reviewing pens scribbling in the dark, as it takes the anger performers feel about negative feedback to a level that is sure to have many artists inserting the name of their most hated reviewer – even if it ruins the rhyme. In fairness to Daoust, his is an honest review and he justifies his opinion, but Minchin’s reply is much wittier and more ironic – well I hope it’s ironic.

With sold out shows, audiences wanting more and gigs booked for the rest of the year, Tim doesn’t need to worry what any reviewer thinks. But I still think he’s great – and being a pale and freckly red head with great boobs - I reckon Tim thinks I’m OK as well.

This review originally appeared on AussieTheatre.com.