Exit and Swallow
Ghost Boy with Golden Virtues
29 September 2009
Fringe Hub, Lithuanium Club
It’s too late and I’m too tired to write the arty farty review just now, but there are only two more chances to see Ghost Boy with Golden Virtues (and I’ll do the serious writerly bit as soon as I can).
I saw Exit tonight. Swallow is on tomorrow and Exit is on again on Thursday. 10 pm at the Lithuanian Club.
I saw it based on a review that is hopefully in today’s Inpress and I second everything it says. I doubted that I would ‘fall in dirty love’ with everyone one the stage – but I did – and I got a lap dance from an enigmatic boy in a black tulle skirt!
It hurts to sit and watch a stage full of people working their hearts and souls out for a handful of people. A few hundred metres away the Fringe Club was packed with hundreds of Last Tuesday Society fans. Every person there would fall in obsessive lust GBGV, but they don’t know about them.
Melbourne likes seeing what it knows. Lord knows I’m one of those people. So a show that this city would love so much that we would try to extradite them from their Brisbane home, are performing to empty seats. Instead of embracing them in our loving arms, taking them to a hidden bar and feeding them in a restaurant recommended by Matt Preston (and wanting to shag them senseless), we’re standing them up like a bad internet date.
Admittedly their publicity hasn’t been good, but don’t we all want to believe that good shows will find the audience they deserve. They’re not running long enough for word of mouth to get around, so juggle your shows for Wednesday and Thursday and put this one on your list.
Any comparison is lame and doesn’t do Ghost Boy himself justice, but think along the lines of a high-art Hedwig with a lot more punk and a lot sexier. (And understand that I have a deep love and unnatural passion for Hedwig and The Angry Inch).
Ghost Boy with Golden Virtues reminds us what art can be and what it’s all about. We love having our minds woken up, but we’d give it all up for sex . And not tedious, it’s-1am-and-we’re-not-asleep-and-the-DVD-has-finished sex, but the uninhibited kind that makes you understand that love and wildness and passion can exist together – and leaves you smiling for weeks.
If you take a date to this show, I can promise you that you will be naked together by the end of the evening.
