Review: Livin' The Dream

MELBOURNE FRINGE 2010

Livin' The Dream

5 October 2010

Meeting Room,  Fringe hub

to 9 October

www.melbournefringe.com.au

I had no idea that I had lived someone's dream. Back in 1988, little Kate McLennan would so have hated me because I went to Expo 88.

In Livin the Dream, Kate McLennan and Fiona Harris open their hearts and embarrassing pasts to explore what it means to live your dreams. With vision boards (you've watched Oprah and know what they are), family pics,  a blackboard and videos of their comedian friends, Kate and Fiona sit down to a cup of tea and talk about the dreams they achieved and their total fails.

Fiona directed Kate in the award-winning and bloody marvellous  The Debutante Diaries in 2006 and in last year's  Dead River. It's so wonderful to see this duo being themselves and I can't say enough good about them. Except that it's great to see them joined by director Roz Hammond. Roz is already one of the best comedy actors around and twists stand up and theatre into a structure that makes the show feel like a chat in the living room with your best friends, while being as therapeutic as a year in expensive therapy.

The stories we love the most aren't devised by overly-clever writers (who all secretly admire the Da Vinci Code for its plotting), but are the day-to-day things that really happened. Real stories are the ones that our hearts love, even if our brain tells us to love the clever plotting.

By listening to Fiona and Kate read their childhood literature (I would buy the picture book about the baby chook being flushed down the toilet), show pictures of their not-as-hot-as-they-are-now teen years and reveal some big relationship scars, everyone in the audience can re-live their own remarkably similar experiences.

I know I wasn't the only person inanely grinning with recognition. Being neither blonde nor hot, I too aspired to be the achievable Jan in Grease (and it solved my lack of dancing/singing skill), discovered at 15 that getting off your face was totally the best way to talk to boys, used the phrase "get on" (what one did when "talking" to boys), liked The Pirate Movie and have spent time following and staying with men who had made it clear that I wasn't the one.

But at least I didn't talk to trees and can remember the name of my first with-tongues kiss.

Dreams are what get us out of bed to face each day, so don't consider missing Livin' the Dream

And Kate, Expo was great, even if I didn't see any of the Young Talent Team and was busy trying to impress a boy who didn't fancy me. 

This review appears on AussieThearte.com (without my Expo 88 pass).

  

Review: Miles O'Neil's World Around Us

MELBOURNE FRINGE 2010

Miles O'Neil's World Around Us

5 October 2010

The Loft,  Fringe hub

to 9 October

www.melbournefringe.com.au

Miles O'Neil is best known as one of the marvelous Suitcase Royale trio. His first solo show, World Around Us, is a gentle and atmospheric hour about found stories that opens with the most beautiful self-confession about pornography.  But don't worry, it's not a dirty story.

Miles found a box of super 8 film in an op shop. Watching old home movies is almost as voyeuristic as peeping at your neighbours or reading a lost diary. Projected onto the traditional bed sheet screen, we search for recognition in the places and the people. We place them by clothes (70s bathers), places (the 80s Jaws shark at the Universal Lot in LA) and images remembered from childhood (TAA and Ansett planes).

We know they were made when film was precious. Every person filmed is someone loved and we have to wonder how these films were thrown away. Were they lovingly transferred to VHS and are now on the iPods of the children in them, or accidentally thrown out and someone has searched and cried because they lost these images of their loved ones (and many performing sea mammals).

Miles watched these films a lot and as we watch, like a silent movie accompanist, he sings and plays instruments that he found in strange places, as the nearly-lost hypnotic sound of a film projector opens and closes each number. The songs aren't about the films and their stories. Seeped in nostalgia, they reflect the lost mood of the films from the hope and love that made them to the melancholy of the times and people now lost or forgotten.

Between the songs Miles tells us stories: stories that he also found. He found them in taxis, outside the Black Box theatre and on a bench by St Pauls. They are stories about older men who shared their own tales and gave this young man some advice. Miles never judges the advice or the tellers; he just reads us their stories about life and hope and loss. (He doesn't need me to tell him to stop reading and start telling. I hope the papers will be gone by the end of the week, because every second that his connection with his audience is lost is too much like disappointment.)

World Around Us is still rough and needs some more runs, but I loved it even more for it's unreadiness because we got to see the real Miles on the stage as he tried out some moments (keep Neil Diamond), jokes and overcame his nerves. This is such a rough diamond of a show that it would be sad to see it slick and shiny.

Like a Drambie, a cuddle and comfy couch, it's a perfect end to a night at the Fringe.

This review appeared on AussieTheatre.com.

Review: Accidents are Prohibited on This Road

MELBOURNE FRINGE 2010

Accidents are Prohibited on This Road

Russell McGilton

5 October 2010

Cabaret Voltaire,  Fringe Hub

to 10 October

www.melbournefringe.com.au

There is little as boring an someone else's travel stories. The main reason backpackers have so much sex is that fellow-travellers shag them to stop them sharing their tedious stories. So when I realised that Russell McGlinton was sharing his 20-year-old backpacking stories, I thought of sneaking out.

Glad I didn't, because Russell is the exception to the rule. He also appreciates that most of us would rather have travellers diarrhoea than listen to backpacking tales, so he ensures that he tells good story. But I'm not forgiving an opening joke about the Grand Final and the federal election being a draw. You're a much smarter, more original and funnier man than that Russell – and so is your audience.

 Accidents are Prohibited on This Road is one of the many English-gone-wrong signs he saw in India and the show is a selection of his first backpacking trip tales from when he was 20 – 20 years ago, when he had hair. It's the follow up to the popular Bombay to Beijing by Bicycle.

Russell's easy manner of talking with his audience, which included a front row of 20-something backpackers, quickly put his audience at ease and eager to join in,  and he has a quick enough wit to get himself in and out of trouble. (FYI,  Russell found out that Germans still aren't ready for jokes about them bombing London).

This is the kind of story telling that has probably got him many free pints,  and if you're expecting boring dinner guests, Russell would be the ideal bloke to invite so that the conversation never slowed and everyone is too busy laughing to notice that you've served them frozen Lean Cuisines and cask wine.

Accidents is loosely structured around the need to escape a psycho girlfriend. Young Rusty headed to London (where folk are rude), Scotland (where folk talk funny) and Kenya (where folk are sexy or violent and talk funny). Here he doesn't do too well with the women, which may have something to do with him only meeting strange women. In fact, none of the women in this show were shown in any positive light.

For all its great telling and funny stories, there's a lot unsaid in this show. I kept asking myself why a 40-something was telling 20-year-old stories and why his "self-reflection" slides were as personal and meaningful as a fortune cookie. Accidents are Prohibited on This Road is as fun as drinking pints with mates at your favourite pub, but would become a much gutsier show if Russell dropped the fun-dude mask to reveal something of himself, show why he's still telling old stories, and let us know how 20-odd years have changed him or if he's met a woman who isn't a complete freak.

This review appears on AussieTheatre.com.

Review: For Whom The Bell Tolls

MELBOURNE FRINGE 2010

For Whom The Bell Tolls

Poet Laureate Telia Nevile

5 October 2010

Son of Loft,  Fringe hub

to 9 October

www.melbournefringe.com.au

Following the critical raves, award nominations and sold out houses of While I'm Away, Poet Laureate Telia Nevile takes us back to the genesis of her genius and the common hell of all artists. In For Whom The Bell Tolls, she goes back to high school.

In her rust red check uniform, teen Telia captures the soul of every angsty teen artist in poetic wonders like "You Can Ring My Bell Jar" and "Losing My Virgility"and her awkward confidence is an inspiration to anyone who remembers the Pure Evil and Puerile Embarrassment of a PE class where popularity is publicly ranked.

With the likes of Vegemite sandwiches and oral presentation notes, Telia continues to capture the often ignored details of daily life and disarmingly transforms them into something so charming and gorgeous that we'll see their gorgeousness for ever. Our poet can't gas herself in her electric oven, so she has to fight on and envision a beatnik future with crowds of loving fans.

With the guiding eye of director Lou Sanz, the disarming and dry humour of For Whom The Bell Tolls is a more structured and complex show that Away, and we're seeing a lot more of the longing-heart of our poet, even if she still tries to hide behind the seriousness of her delightfully not-quite-right words.

As I love nothing better than a "well structured, drawn out word fuck", the Poet Laureate is my favourite poet and my inner-depressed-arty-out-of-place teen has replaced her Emily Dickinson quotes with those from Telia Neville – and will keep the thank you letter she slipped me (and everyone else – just to be polite) in my diary for ever.

For Whom The Bell Tolls finishes on Saturday. It's a brilliant start to a night at the Fringe hub.

This review appeared on AussieTheatre.com

Review: The Event

MELBOURNE FRINGE 2010

The Event

by John Clancy 

Daniel Clark

3 October 2010

The Loft Fringe hub

to 9 October

www.melbournefringe.com.au

A writer sits at a desk and writes about a man who stood in a pool of light in a darkened room and talked about a man standing in a pool of light in a darkened room who talked about writers, and actors and the "professional observers" who watch them and the strangers who sit in darkened rooms wanting to be entertained.

Written to be loved (or possibly resented) by anyone who has sat in a small theatre and watched a show, The Event is uber-meta. It's so meta that the performer in this performance about a performance, written in the third person, explains that it's meta.

Does it already sound a bit wanky? A tad self-indulgent and arty-farty perhaps? Of course it is, but this could be the secret to its appeal. 

Writer John Clancy is a New York-based producer and director who has spent ten years presenting shows all over the globe. He knows theatre and pours every bit of his love, understanding and cynicism of our strange sitting-in-the-dark world into The Event. Us who watch in the dark know actors whose friendships are maintained by drinking and lying, about having naps during shows (he even helps with a lullaby) and the strange combination of advertising and chance that gets us into the darkened rooms.

Just when we're comfortably giggling at the time updates, the in-jokes and recognition, The Event reveals its real depth and places the man beyond the fourth wall into a more uncomfortably recognisable world of angst and confusion. This is far more than a funny story about theatre.

Adelaide-based director Daniel Clarke leads actor Nick Pelomis in the Australian premiere (I think... let me know if I'm wrong). This team also know the ironies, frustrations and payoffs of theatre. Pelomis performs like he's not performing, like The Event was penned for him and he talks to his audience like they are friends whose presence is more important than his is in this darkened world.

The Event is so independent theatre that it will spawn a a wave of imitators in future Fringes, but  – like the music theatre gem [title of show] – they will never be as original. 

Even if, per chance, you don't love The Event, you'll regret it if you miss it.

The writer checks for obvious typos and signs of her own meta wankiness, clicks Publish, before she checks Facebook, links the review to Twitter and hopes that the show she is seeing tonight didn't start at 6.30.

Review: McGuffin

MELBOURNE FRINGE 2010

McGuffin

Shaolin Punk 

1 October 2010

The Loft Fringe hub

season finished

www.melbournefringe.com.au

A scruffy man hands me a business card. It says: One briefcase. No memory. Three rules. Haven't you always wanted to write a TV show?

Yes I have.

McGuffin was a seven-episode Aussie TV drama series, but it was like watching TV in a time before re-runs and VCRS – miss it and it's gone. This was TV on stage and it was improvised. 

Ben McKenzie and his company Shaolin Punk call it hybrid improvised theatre. The structure of each episode was created in advance, but the dialogue, character development and plot were created on the night by the performers, the directors (McKenzie and Sean Fabri) and the audience – who were asked to suggest the pivotal turning points and reveals for each episode.

I only saw the last episode, but – like any good telly story telling – I was hooked into the mystery of the Sanchez Cross and those who sought it. It was a bit like the Da Vinci Code meets Dr Who and Offspring.

Fabri was joined on stage by Gina Morley, Chris Broadstock and Kate O'Neill, who know the rules and style of TV storytelling so well that they must spend many wonderful house on the couch watching the box.

McGuffin was far from slick high art, but it was never meant to be. It was a lot of fun (for the creators and the audience) and the next time they do a series, I'd try to be there from episode 1.

The TV show is over, but Shaolin Punk are presenting three performances of Dungeon Crawl at the Fringe. Impro Dungeons and Dragons.  Yes, it will be geeky.

Review: Sammy J - Skinny Man, Modern World

MELBOURNE FRINGE 2010
Skinny Man, Modern World
Sammy J 
1 October 2010
The Ballroom, Fringe hub
to 9 October
www.melbournefringe.com.au

Our Sammy's all grown up. With no puppets, fancy sets (or Heath) and a slimming pin-stripe suit, Sammy J shares a reflective hour of sophisticated wit and word play... if you think reflection is fantasising about Alf from Home and Away, sophistication is getting rat-arsed drunk and the words you like playing with include "fingering" and "fucking ugly mermaid".

Sammy J has never been shy of revealing his embarrassing past, and Skinny Man, Modern World is a step towards a style of personal story telling that is going to open him up even more, let us see the man behind the character and make him even more of legend.

Smart as without ever being a smart arse,  Sammy J is simply one the best around. I love him in the same way I love Tim Minchin and Daniel Kitson.

I hope he never stops creating shows with Randy and puppeteer Heath McIvor, but I can't wait to see more of this intimate style of show that is just about Sammy and his stories. Some of which are songs, some of which may not be true and one of which is the BEST STORY told this Fringe. I can say no more because I'm blushing from the memory of it. The best comedians are the brave ones, the ones brave enough to pull out those stories that the rest of us would never, ever speak about.

And he's funny. Very, very, very, very funny. Jaw aching from laughing funny. Brain aching from thinking funny. Heart aching from feeling funny.

 Skinny Man, Modern World is on until 9 October.


PS: Have I mentioned that the first time I reviewed Sammy J, I was only mildly impressed.  I know how wrong I was. Always give performers another go.

This review appears on AussieThearte.com

Review: Words They Make With Their Mouths-

MELBOURNE FRINGE 2010

Words They Make With Their Mouths

Bambina Borracha Productions

1 October 2010
Son of Loft, Fringe Hub
to 9 October

www.melbournefringe.com.au

Tim Spencer has the most beautiful smile, but there's a lot more to his solo show, Words They Make With Their Mouths.

After a terrific reception at the Adelaide Fringe, Spencer (writer and performer) brings Melbourne his delicate and beautifully observed account of a group of 20-somethings out on a Saturday night in inner-south Sydney.

This isn't a plot based story with compelling twists and turns, but a study of the characters and place. Each ones begins by simply turning the corner and walking down the street. Linked by their universal search for love, he lets us watch these people without passing any judgement. With such an authentic voice, it's as fascinating watching strangers but we get to hear what they are saying and thinking.

Playing every part, Spencer, gently directed by Jessica Tuckwell, tells us about their average Saturday night. There's people like Elise who tasted like lipsmaker and Midori, a young man (Lewis?) who loves having a 30-something couple snort coke off his chest because it makes him feel like he's in the movies, Charlotte who hates that her boyfriend didn't hold her hair back when she puked, and Nick who treats Stacey's pussy like the door to Narnia.

At first it's difficult to understand that Spencer is the teller and no specific character himself, but you know that now, so will be able to enjoy it without your brain asking annoying questions.

Words They Make With Their Mouths runs for another week and these gen-Ys deserve love from audiences.

This review appears on AussieTheatre.com.

Review: A Study in Scarlet (A Study of)

MELBOURNE FRINGE 2010

A Study in Scarlet (A Study of)

Vicious Fish Theatre

1 October 2010
Son of Loft, Fringe Hub
season finished

www.melbournefringe.com.au

Before driving, comedy, sex and even before Dr Who,  Robert Lloyd discovered Sherlock Holmes. A Study in Scarlet (A Study of) is the story of his obsession. As someone prone to nerdy obsession, I had to love it.

Twelve-year-old Robert fell in love with Sherlock Holmes in Dubbo. He was the first person in ten years to borrow Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's book from the local library and still hasn't recovered from his school production of a Holmes parody (with young Mr L in the lead) losing to an excerpt from The Crucible.

He intersperses his nerdy confessions, with an abridged telling of A Study in Scarlet, Doyle's first Holmes story. I admit that I haven't read any of the books – at 12, I was obsessed with Louisa May Alcott (Little Women) and KM Peyton (Flambards) and I'd discovered Dr Who on the telly – but wasn't surprised to see how much I already knew about the famous detective. Amazing fictional characters are so loved that they creep into our popular culture. And now I'm inspired to read about him. But I might go straight to book two, as I feel like I know Scarlet now.

Being alone on the stage, Lloyd is every character.  His Holmes is hot. He's suave and irresistible (and looks a bit like David Tennant). This is where this study gets really interesting, we get our deductive hats on and co-creator and director Scott Gooding steps in.

Gooding (who hadn't read Holmes but is familiar with nerdy obsession) not only saved the show from being called The Me in Holmes, but ensures that it's really a study of Lloyd.

Lloyd tells us how much he, as a lanky big-nosed kid, wanted to be like his tall, lean, sharp-nosed hero – but we are allowed to read deeper. We see how much his Holmes is the man he still wants to be, even when he admits that he's not smart enough to be Holmes and is only good at creating facades. Gooding makes sure that the man on stage is still revealing more than he intended.

More of this personal study and confession will add extra guts to the next season. There's still a hint of Robert playing a character when he's being himself. Watching a performer open themselves up personally on a stage – and become a person – is what makes good storytelling astonishing. It's what catches our hearts instead of our heads.

Study in Scarlet (A Study of) is an intriguing, honest and funny exploration of why we obsess with fictional creations. As a boy, Robert aspired to be Holmes. As a man we wonder if he still thinks Holmes (for all his depression and faults) is a better man than he is. Holmes was created by a man who probably felt the same. It's the recognition of the self doubt that audiences – including people who don't give a toss about Holmes – will love because we all want to hide behind a mask that makes us look better than we think we are.


This review appears on AussieThearte.com.