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.

A Company of Strangers

ADELAIDE FRINGE 2009
A Company of Strangers
Strut & Fret Productions
11 March 200
The Garden of Unearthly Delights, Spiegeltent

It didn’t take long among the company of strangers (and an old friend) to be reminded of the things that Adelaide does well.

Adelaide’s not just 1950s attitudes with great beer; this city knows how to create mouth-watering salt and pepper eggplant, affogatos and Fringe festivals. The Adelaide Fringe is the biggest on this side the world, because it’s the best. Audiences flock to shows; they see anything and everything – not because they’re among the arty farty “in” crowd, but because they know that taking a punt on a Fringe show is likely to be a lot of fun. And if the show sucks, they will enjoy it anyway, because they’ve paid and there’s still beer drinking and hanging around with the cool folk to be done.

Strut & Fret productions have captured the essence of the Adelaide Fringe in the Garden of Unearthly delights. Teenagers, dressed for nightclubs, line up alongside their grandparents, dressed for a possibly chilly evening, to get into the Garden. The food is delicious, the coffee is great, the bar has plenty of overpriced beer, the craft stalls are worth a look and there are more theatre spaces than you can count on both hands. I love the Spiegeltent when it sits by the Melbourne Arts Centre, but the tent feels at home in the Adelaide parklands.

Melbourne-based and world-travelling Martin Martini MC’s the Garden’s showpiece: A Company of Strangers. He declares Adelaide his favourite place to play – and it doesn’t take long to figure out why. This crowd doesn’t care about deconstructing the artistic merit of the piece– they want to enjoy the wackiness. So this show of strange people performing amongst the company of strangers is the perfect show for this perfect festival.

The company is a collection of wonderfully-odd musical cabaret performers. There’s no theme and no cohesion -it’s just meant to be fun.

The most-loved of the permanent strangers is the UK’s Le Gateau Chocolat. He knows that larger folk can appear svelte in flowing layers of black – so he has a collection of glossy, coloured lyrca body suits. With an opera-trained voice he belts out soprano-favourites as a bass and even has a play with Rhianna’s about an umbrella – whilst looking like a cockless telly tubby on acid. Drag is no longer a drag.

Lady Carol strums a ukulele and professes to be a “’lady” from Ireland. Her husky voice encourages the crowd to sing along, but she needs to decide if she is herself or her character on the stage.

Our own Paul Capsis should never be off a cabaret stage. Resplendent in red velvet he channels Janis Joplin and even sobers the mood with a composition co-written with Tim Freedman about his Nanna’s migration to Australia.

For all of the Strangers’ wonderfulness, none shone quite as blindingly as their special guest: Meow Meow. Lost in her own glamorous time-warp, Meow wraps herself around the audience and demands their support – literally. After forcing the audience to undress her she is carried to the stage with her thighs wrapped around the neck of the best looking man she could find. (I wonder if Mr Gateau is thinking of doing the same one night…)

With a temper rivalled only by her ego, Meow answer a less than modest “I know” to her rapturous applause. She thinks it’s for her, but we know it’s for someone else. Creator and character are so distanced that it’s hard to imagine them as one. Meow is too selfish to ever let us glimpse the woman behind her. She also knows that an illusion fails if we see the sleight of hand, and Meow’s magic would fade if we could see the work, the skill and the understanding of form that creates this exquisite parody.

A Company of Strangers is ideal Fringe fare. There are different special guests throughout the season, but be assured the Strangers will make you feel like you’re one of them in no time.

This review originally appeared on AussieTheatre.com.

Goodbye Vaudeville Charlie Mudd

Goodbye Vaudeville Charlie MuddMalthouse Theatre
Arena Theatre Company
17 March 2009
Beckett Theatre, CUB Malthouse

In recent years, playwright Lally Katz and director Chris Kohn have created some of the most fascinating and original independent theatre in town. Goodbye Vaudeville Charlie Mudd is the result of research grant, a commission from Malthouse and the resources of Arena Theatre - and I’m left wondering if this support has hindered their style.

Hours in the State Library reading room and searching through seemingly endless Tivoli memorabilia inspired the 1914 world of Melbourne vaudeville. Charlie Mudd’s theatre sits on the Swanston River, performing the same show every night to an empty audience. Act 1 may be as close to seeing pre-WW1 vaudeville as we are likely to get, with its exquisitely detailed design and recreations of bad vaudeville acts, all with a sprinkling of Katz darkness – of course.

It did feel like the story was just sprinkled around though. For all its authenticity, Act 1 played too much like a vaudeville sketch, with little character development and a surprising lack of mystery.
The terrific writing and originally dark stories emerged in Act 2, especially surrounding ventriloquist Maude and her search for love. The great stuff really stood out; the rest felt like padding. Hidden in the two and a half hour show is a remarkable 70-minute piece.

On stage, the relationships between characters felt dictated by plot, not character. The plot is brilliant, but the story doesn’t live until the characters make it real. I didn’t believe that Ethelyn (or Violet) loved Charlie or that Charlie loved Violet (or Ethelyn) and I didn’t believe that the magician believed that his magic was real. Whether it’s in the writing or not, the acting and direction have to make the characters choose their actions from their very real beliefs. The story feels forced if the love isn’t real.

The reality of the world was also questioned with an inconsistent performance style. What made a show like Katz/Kohn’s The Eisteddfod  soar was that the director and actors never let their audience doubt the reality of their naturally-absurd world. In Vaudeville, Christian O’Leary as Maude, and her wonderfully obscene dummy Doris, nailed the style, but others kept letting us into the “secret” that they were just playing pretend. During the after-show chat there was an active discussion among the actors about who they were performing to, and I realised why I was frustrated by otherwise great performances: the moment someone performed to the assembled Malthouse audience and not Mudd’s empty house, the onstage world died.

Goodbye Vaudeville Charlie Mudd isn’t a bad way to spend an evening, but it isn’t the show it wants to be. Hopefully some time with an audience has let it settle and it will hit its stride as it heads into its last week.

This review originally appeared on AussieTheatre.com.

Barb Dwyer

ADELAIDE FRINGE 2009
Barb Dwyer
Mickey D
Velocity Boy Productions
13 March 2009
Rhino Room

Adelaide creates many exceptionally funny, but ironically complex things: Don Dunstan’s pink shorts, the Mall’s Balls, Pie Floaters and Mickey D.

Mickey is welcomed in the UK, New Zealand, South Africa and anywhere he goes, but there’s nothing quite like watching a comedian in their home town – especially when their mum and dad have popped in to see why their pride and joy left home – and two very gorgeous year 10 girls are in the front row wearing the “Mickey D no #1 Fan” shirts” they made with a tube of glitter glue.

It was an honour to witness young Michael’s proudest moment ever. He saw the shirts, saw the girls, looked up and said, “Dad – I’ve made it!”

Barb Dwyer is Mickey‘s latest show. It‘s not about his mum - say it out loud if you didn‘t have a chuckle. Of course, it’s more than a nice bit of word play - but be warned that Mr Dwyer does play with some sharp and dangerous boundaries.

There are enough risk managed jokes out there; Mickey wants his audience to panic and continues to believe that you should be able to make fun of everything – even Victorian bushfires. Ok, still a bit too soon – so, it was onto the safer territory, like mindas, spastics, the time he broke his mum’s vagina...and Adelaide.

Over the next month, funny folk converge on Melbourne for the International Comedy Festival. Many are also at the Adelaide Fringe now and will open their Victorian shows convinced that Melbourne audiences love an Adelaide bagging. As many Comedy Fest punters have only been to Adelaide once – on a visit to an aunt, who lives in Paradise, when they were 12 – any joke that involves the words church, bogan or Rundle Mall tends to get a superior giggle. Mickey knows the secret though – you can only successfully make fun of Adelaide if you’ve lived there – and then you can gouge at the painfully truthful core. (And anyway, what would Victorians know – they killed Hooksie.)

Minda jokes may be central to Adelaide’s sense of humour. Just call someone a minda and you’ll know immediately if they are from the southern capital, due to their sniggering or embarrassed cringing.

Minda Incorporated provides care and support to intellectually disabled clients. Oh yes, callings someone a minda is making fun of the intellectually disabled. And if that’s where your jokes and insults end – well you’re just a bogan spaz. This is the core of Mickey D’s comedy – he viciously reveals the hypocrisy and bullshit surrounding this kind of insult. Sure, we can call someone a minda, but in doing so, we are really insulting the mindlessness of anyone who thinks that kind of insult is funny.

The minda jokes might not travel out of town, but Barb Dwyer is also about New Zealand, Thailand and Africa - and his Adelaide show really had to be about Adelaide.

Mickey knows he's home because he can’t have a meal in Rundle Street without seeing someone he went to school with, fought with or fucked. I knew I was back in Adelaide when I asked his mum if she was proud of her lad. She is – but worries that she “wasted all those (name of private boys school) school fees.” Trust me, Adelaide people are cacking themselves. (And don’t worry Mrs D – I’m sure my mum has said the same at some point.)

This review originally appeared on AussieTheatre.com.

The Dark Party

ADELAIDE FRINGE 2009
The Dark Party
The Dirty Brothers Sideshow
11 March 2009
The Garden of Unearthly Delights, Le Cascadeur

The Dark Party is what Waiting for Godot might have been if Beckett had been brought up in a travelling circus.

Sometimes sideshow tricks do belong on the side and on the street, but the Dirty Brothers have brought their sword swallowing and nipple stretching into the theatre. The tricks are just as cringe-worthy and “ewww”able as ever, but they leap high above the tattooed throng with their old-fashioned use of character and story.

In flasher trench coats and faded clown faces, their sense of almost surreal pathos sets the mood, and each trick is placed within a character sketch, bringing a level of tension and comedy often missed in trick-based shows. Staple-gunning of the chest is tired, but when it’s a sad, fat bloke being forced to dance a hoola and make his plastic flower lei with a staple gun, its bitterness is endearing.

If sideshow is your thing, don’t miss The Dark Party, but you’re not into watching the eating of maggots, you might still love this for its irony, comedy and darkness.


This review originally appeared on AussieTheatre.com.