The 5:30 Show

By Luke Simmons

If you’re keen to see some young comics perform before-they-were-famous, check out this show.  Each of the guys are under 19 years old and they nabbed the 22 slots at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival on the back of winning some tough Open Mic nights and scoring some nice writing gigs.

Simon Bower started off proceedings with some musing regarding his unchartered sex life.  Bower’s got an unassuming style about him and clearly has a great sense of what’s funny. Rather than tackle hard issues, there was a common theme which any Gen Y’s and Gen X’s could relate to like relationships & Facebook (hacking). He provided the most laughs when he proved that it’s possible to make date rape funny – by taking the complete piss out of the sleazy perpetrators.

Harris Stuckey then came on to the stage and is definitely onto something with his dead pan style of joke telling. He’s not afraid to push the boundaries of taste and pulled it off when he used the boorish disability joke as a sucker punch for the viewing platform gag. Gold! In terms of general styles, there is a real similarity with Stuckey and Daniel Connell who is another Canberra boy.

Shahed Sharify then completely changed the pace of the night by bounding on the stage and getting straight into his high energy set. He uses his Iranian roots to full comedic effect by playing on 9/11, racism in Australia and his family. However, he proved he’s not a one trick pony when he brought the house down with the creepiest of creepy mating call. He may need to arm himself with reliable backups when the crowd participation doesn’t come off but he’s clearly got the energy and X factor to make it as a comic.

Tim Noonan then came on and started strongly with his onesie gag where one has to imagine themselves seemingly crapping themselves. Eww.  To steal a line from Stuckey, it was simply unpalatable – in a good way!  He obviously likes to take the audience on storytelling journeys to dark places which means he’ll have to gauge audience reactions to ensure he gets a regular flow of laughs at his gigs. For those that dig this sort of stuff, his material is original and hard hitting.  He did make the audience both laugh and groan at the same time when he closed with his First Time story.  Stuckey then joined him on the stage with his guitar and they closed the night with an amusing Tenacious D-style ode to destroying your friend.

Although they do not have the punch-in-the-face sort of delivery (as yet) to suit the types of jokes they tell, they unleashed moments of comedic brilliance during the hour.  Hopefully they absorb as many shows as possible during the festival and return to Canberra ready to OWN their audiences.

 

The 5:30 Show is on at the Portland Hotel

http://www.comedyfestival.com.au/2013/season/shows/the-5-30-show

$5 Comedy Variety Hour

By Luke Simmons

This night featured two performers on the bill and there was a packed crowd who assembled for some Sunday night laughs in St Kilda.

Angus Brown immediately charmed over the audience with his bellowing voice (the mic was out), style of storytelling and expansive visual gags. Many men in the audience could relate to walking out of a clothes shop with a confusing amount of items – thanks to the charm of the sales attendant/s. If you were a friend of his and happened to be in the audience that night, you’d never look at his cats the same way again too. He put on this impressive set to provide a taster for his “Angus Brown Mania” which he’ll be performing throughout the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. This guy is very funny and oozes energy so check him out!

The night was brought to a close by Sheila Graham who is an up and coming comedian who originally hails from Ireland. She started with a little crowd banter which cleverly put the crowd on her side. We’ve all had or heard of shared-house nightmare stories and she managed to reel off a number of entertaining tales from her experiences in Melbourne. Graham also gave some interesting insights into the world of fetish porn proving she’s no slouch in the research department. To close, she brought the house down with her Muppets expose.

The Comedy Variety Hour is always going to be a bit of a grab bag with a mixture of new and experienced comics on the bill. The material of the night’s MC James Rose was definitely too dark/rank for the assembled audience but Brown and Graham did well to carry the load.

$5 Comedy Variety Hour at the Felix Bar
http://www.comedyfestival.com.au/2013/season/shows/5-comedy-variety-hour

ADAM ROZENBACHS – EURODAD

By James Shackell


There’s a universal humour in Dads that has something to do with daggy jokes, weird pockets of specialised interest, and a stubborn unwillingness to evolve with the world. Simmer that down with a healthy splash of mild exasperation and thinly-worn patience and you have the makings of a successful hour of comedy. That’s the recipe Adam Rozenbachs has followed with Eurodad and, mostly, he succeeds in serving up a delicious comedy meal.

But like most meals, you do have to warm it up first. See the problem is, at the start of the show, we as the audience don’t know Rozenbach’s dad from any other dad, so the comedic punch of his stories is weakened by the gulf between his familiarity and our ignorance. Rozenbach’s solution, however, is genius: he lets his Dad do half the talking via a pre-recorded audio interview that plays at intervals during the show. This device is actually responsible for some of the gig’s biggest laughs, leaving Rozenbachs in the strange position of almost being upstaged by his own father (a circumstance I’m sure he’d find as funny as anyone).

For instance it’s one thing to hear Rozenbachs describe his dad’s whinging in Paris, quite another to hear dad himself (in an indignant and slightly oblivious way) saying, “The Eiffel Tower? It wasn’t as big as it looked on TV. I reckon it should have been double the size.” Ahh, classic Dad.

It has to be said that Rozenbachs plays off his physically absent father beautifully, shaking his head in mock disbelief at every culturally insensitive comment, rolling his eyes at Dad’s weird obsession with European window hinges (and don’t even get him started on cobblestones).

This is a show for anyone with a father, anyone who has been to Europe, or anyone who wants to know what it would be like to go to Europe with their father without actually having to suffer through it.

Adam Rozenbachs is performing Eurodad at the Melbourne Town Hall Regent Room
http://www.comedyfestival.com.au/2013/season/shows/eurodad-adam-rozenbachs

MICHAEL WORKMAN INTERVIEW

By James Shackell

Since emerging from Perth in 2009 to win RAW Comedy, Michael Workman has taken out nearly every award for being funny the country has to offer, along the way gaining a reputation for whimsical narratives, haunting poetry, and eyebrows that move as if independent from his body (although that may be just this critic’s opinion). This year he returns to the festival with Ave Loretta, a dark comedy about depression, loss and expectation. I met up with Michael at a cafe on Swanston Street to discuss the new show.

So tell me about Ave Loretta. What’s the story?

It’s hard to talk about it without making it sound like something it’s not. It’s about a successful musician who travels back to his shitty home town to visit the grave of his muse who committed suicide. When people ask me what it’s about, that’s kind of what I’m obligated to say because technically that is what it is about, but it’s hard to picture that being funny.

Well you are known for going into dark and different places with your comedy. Is that your intention?

Well I bring it on myself. I did a show about political unrest in Cuba and freedom of speech, which again is not typical subject matter for comedy, and really to expect people to go, ‘Hey! Go see this hilarious thing!’ is possibly a bit much. But that being said, it is funny, and it is a comedy show. But that’s probably not the focus. I like to use comedy as a vehicle to convey loftier concepts.

And what are the concepts this year?

Well this year the show is kind of a departure from my other stuff because it’s quite morally ambiguous. There’s no distinct moral conclusion to this show, it’s pretty open ended. So I’m really just trying to get people thinking about depression and suicide and banality and how that affects the human experience. This was something that was important in my life, certainly before I started comedy. Those were the sort of battles I was going through. But I wanted to fictionalise that story a little bit and give an impression of it, rather than an autobiography.

What were you doing before comedy?

I was making music. I was writing scores for theatre, and drinking heavily. Those were my two main interests at the time. Comedy seemed to be the panacea for that. I pretty much stopped immediately after I started stand-up.

Do you feel pressure to back up with this third show?

Yeah definitely. This was certainly the most difficult show to write. Because I felt like I was maybe falling into a formula with doing these fables, these very symbolic shows, and then I decided to get out of that by doing a really gritty, down-to-earth story with very little whimsy. This is dark as hell. People should be expected to be very surprised that they are laughing at some of the things they’re laughing at. And they should expect that I won’t pull any punches. This is an intense subject and I’m not going to make light of an intense subject, but I am going to find the humour in it. This is definitely got the biggest chunks of real me in it.

Did it feel like therapy writing it?

Yeah to an extent, it did. Having to come up with ways to express what I meant in ways that maybe people who hadn’t experienced it could understand; I think that’s actually been really helpful to unravel some of the problems. But I should say that this is not about my therapy, which had a positive outcome. This is about other people.

Your shows always have a narrative. What do you think story can bring to comedy?

I feel this compulsion to get maybe a single idea across in each hour. So I think of a show as a potato – coz like a potato is like a big sack of starch, and that’s the part that we eat, and that’s the part that we like, but the whole point of that big sack of starch is so that a tiny sapling at the top can poke through and survive. So the audience prefers the starch – you can fry it, mash it, have it with some duck, but the sprout is the point I’m getting across. The sack of starch is just what makes it edible.

So what do you find funny?

Honesty and self awareness. People who can stand back and see exactly who they are objectively are very amusing to me. People who deconstruct what’s going on in their social interactions and that kind of thing without being awkward.

And who are you objectively?

Oh God. Look I think it changes from situation to situation. I think there’s a whole bunch of inaccurate views of me, that I’m aware of. People often say that I’m a mysterious person, but I don’t think that’s true at all, I think I’m just really very awkward, socially, but also very comfortable with the fact that I’m awkward socially, which culminates in this air of mystique which is possibly misguided.

Is the life of a full-time comedian at all like a rock star?

While I don’t have a lot of experience with what a rock star might do, I’ve heard the stories. There’s probably some of that, a little bit of that. You’ll find that comedians are generally pretty obsessive about their work, especially while a show’s on, they’re extremely committed, and they have to be, because if you’re not you’re just going to bomb. So there’s not a lot of wild parties and lines of coke and prostitutes and yachts. Not a lot of yachts.

Do you think that could be what’s missing from comedy? Yachts?

Yeah, I think so. Yachts, mizzen masts, jibs, spinnakers. The whole thing.

Now your accent, what’s going on there? (Workman has a kind of minestrone accent: there’s a bit of Australian, a bit of British, a bit of American, and a bit of something else).

No one quite knows. I was born in Perth, and my parents are Australian. The prevailing theory at the moment is that I was possibly too influenced by television as a small child. But as long as I can remember I’ve spoken like this.

And your look keeps changing year by year.

I keep changing my look to suit the show. So this show is more of a dark, but also casual, show so I’ve gone unshaven and back to the natural black hair. Because I think that represents this person I’m playing.

And what’s the next step after Ave Loretta?

Well I start writing the next show pretty much now. But I’m going to do more music and painting, but in terms of comedy I’ll start writing now. I have a few ideas in the works that I’m not at liberty to talk too much about, but there’s movement there.

Michael Workman is performing Ave Loretta at Melb Town Hall – Regent Room
http://www.comedyfestival.com.au/2013/season/shows/ave-loretta-michael-workman

MICHAEL WORKMAN – AVE LORETTA

By James Shackell

Hands up who wants to see an intelligent comedian at the top of his game. Okay, a good number of you. Now keep those hands raised if you also want to see a show about suicide, depression, the inherent loneliness of creativity and the soul-crushing weariness of constantly not measuring up to your own high expectations. Hmm, okay. But what if I told you they’re one and the same thing?

Yep, Michael Workman has done it again. Last year it was a moving fable involving cabbages and political dissent in 1960’s Cuba, and this year he goes even darker, with a haunting semi-fictional eulogy about love, inspiration, and the curse of losing both. Workman plays a musician revisiting “the town we grew up in”, a nostalgia-soaked concrete purgatory, to buy some Red Rooster and say a few words at the graveside of Loretta, a girl he knew.

If this all sounds like too much to digest in an hour of what is supposed to be, essentially, funny stuff, do not be put-off. There are laughs here a-plenty. In fact Loretta involves more traditional stand-up than Workman’s previous two shows Humans Are Beautiful and Mercy, and his trademark combination of wit, imagination and poetry will surprise you with its inventiveness. My particular favourite was when he somehow linked Ikea furniture to the death of childhood innocence. But just like music is often called the space between the notes, here the real genius is the silence between the laughter.

This is a dark show, and behind every joke is a truth ready to smack you in the eyes and leave you reeling. It’s a weird rhythm you don’t usually see in comedy: the room goes from uncontrolled laughter to stunned, thoughtful silence and back again, over and over.

At the end of the show the lights go down and we all sit there in darkness for ten seconds, the general consensus being, ‘What the hell was that?’ Then Workman reappears to thunderous applause. As I look around there are a few people holding tissues (although this may be as a result of colds; I have no way of knowing for sure).

That’s what you can guarantee about a Workman set, if nothing else it’ll make you do two things: laugh and think. I’ll put my hand up for that every time.

Michael Workman is performing Ave Loretta at Melb Town Hall – Regent Room
http://www.comedyfestival.com.au/2013/season/shows/ave-loretta-michael-workman

SUPER SPEEDY SOUND SHED: A LIVE RADIO PLAY

By Lisa Clark

This was a children’s comedy festival show commissioned by The Arts Centre and they couldn’t have picked a better bunch of people to put this together. Conceived and Directed by Laura Milke Garner the radio play veteran (Whodunnit live Radio plays, 3RRR & much more) and written by Kate McClennan (who’s also in Standard Double) with her esteemed ability to create comedy characters. It is performed by three of the most expressive comedy character actors in Australia; Justin Kennedy, last seen in the gorgeous romantic comedy Donna & Damo (2010), Lana Schwarz (actress /puppeteer, co-creator of Puppet Slam) and Xavier Micheledis (who’s solo show at MICF this year is Good Morning! but was also invited to perform with Rich Fulcher in Tiny Acts of Rebellion).  All brimming with charisma and joy they play multiple roles and are supported by the hardest working sound tech at the Festival, Brett Maverix, making all the amazing sound effects in the story, because this show is done in the style of an old fashioned radio play. Brett and his props take up half the stage!

All the kids (and I) are given a paper bag and a rubber glove to add their own special effects when asked. These and other sounds contributed by the audience, such as buzzing bees and gasps and dinosaurs, were signaled by large cards with pictures on them. This is all practiced at the outset giving us a taste of what is to come and making you wonder how a dinosaur is going to fit into the story. The story itself was about a brother and sister, Sam (Xavier) and  Maddy (Lana), forgetting their Dad’s birthday and then deciding to do up his shed into a music studio (which they name The Super Speedy Sound Shed)  before he gets home from work. For this they need to go down to the futuristic shopping centre guarded by a store security dog/donkey named Connie.

Justin Kennedy and his adorably rubbery face plays the story’s Narrator and acts as a sort of adult authority to the children who often gleefully ignore his advice to their peril. Justin also plays many of the shop keepers they meet such as Mr Sprodly Sprocket the spring salesman, funk singing Dizzy the musical instrument salesman and Mike of Mike’s Mics. Xavier’s other characters include the kids’ Dad Cyril, the farting flying baboon mirror salesman and Connie the dog/donkey. Lana is absolutely perfect as Maddie and also plays the shopping center announcer and Shirley the train driver. Meanwhile the sound effects guy is running all over the place creating farts with with a tube trumpet, vomit with a fishtank and jelly lumps, and a sound system with a theremin, he also had lots of bells, whistles, shoes to stomp, chains to rattle and glasses to tinkle. Then of course the kids got to join in at regular intervals when the big cardboard signs were held up.

There were a couple of tiny glitches with the first performance of such a complex piece that will be ironed out by these performers quick smart, no doubt. It will also improve as the performers become more familiar with the rather word heavy script and perform to each other and the audience more.  The important thing about it is that the kids were for the most part transfixed, becoming completely involved with what was going on throughout and enjoying the participation when it happened. This is an ambitious kids show put on by a swag of talented people who know how to make sure the adults will get a big kick out of it at the same time.

Super Speedy Sound Shed is only on for 5 shows – at the The Famous Spiegeltent at Arts Centre until Sunday April 7
http://www.comedyfestival.com.au/2013/season/shows/a-live-radio-play-super-speedy-sound-shed