Tag: Michelle Nussey

5 Good Reasons to See Eileen Williams in Irrelevant

1) Hello, Mrs Eileen Williams here to tell you why you should come to see Irrelevant at the Butterfly Club at the end of March. It will be quite the social occasion. I will be there in support, but of course more importantly my husband, Mr Howard Williams, will be there and will have wonderful, relevant opinions on things.

2) Howard is a very good husband and takes very good care of me. In fact, he takes excellent care of all his things. His golf clubs are very shiny.

3) Although it might seem that the word “Irrelevant” is very long and not suitable for women, it turns out it’s just a three syllable word with a little hat on. So, all invited.

4) Did you know that back in the 1950s the word ‘applesauce’ was – ahem, excuse me – an expletive? It was a very dangerous decade for cooking pork dishes let me tell you.

5) I’m so sorry, my husband Howard has just reminded me that it is not the wife’s duty to enter into correspondence with tabloids unless typing for her husband. This is ever so embarrassing. Please disregard this email.

Michelle Nussey as Eileen Williams in Irrelevant is on at the Butterfly Club 22 -27 March

*Note it starts on Tue the 22nd

For more information go to the MICF site

http://www.comedyfestival.com.au/2016/season/shows/irrelevant-eileen-williams-in

Written it Down: Live!

By Elyce Phillips

Written it Down is an improvised sitcom created by Matt Saraceni and Dave Zwolenski that has seen a lot of success. Starting out as an independent webseries, it has since been picked up by the ABC and Funny or Die. The premise is fairly simple – each episode involves a scene with two comedians. One has an important piece of news that they must tell the other, but they don’t know what that is until they read the piece of paper it’s written on.

The live version of the show was broader in its format – a mixture of Written it Down style sketches and short-form improv games. All of the performers had made appearances in the series and are regulars in the Melbourne improv scene – Jimmy James-Eaton, Liam Ryan, Sophie Kneebone, Michelle Nussey, Gillian Cosgriff, Stuart Packham and Cameron Neill. It was a fantastic group, each proving themselves to be quick-witted and hilarious. Packham’s baffling portrayal of a South African rollerblader was a stand-out.

Most of the show’s games would have been familiar to anyone who attends improv nights like The Big Hoo-Haa – Lines from a Text, Perfect Match, Scenes from a Bucket. A highlight of the show was a game where an audience member was pulled into a scene and could only use lines taken form interviews with footballers. The one Written it Down piece performed saw the group pair off and break up with each other for reasons submitted by the audience earlier – soy sauce addiction, smelling like their mother and being in love with Justin Bieber. The scenes were all very funny, however, the way they were staged, rotating through the three pairs several times, was a little disjointed.

Written it Down: Live! was closer to Theatresports than a live version of the webseries, but with a group of performers this strong, I can’t imagine anyone would have been bothered by that. The spirit of the series was there in all of the games they played. It’s a joy to see these guys perform, no matter what they do.

Written it Down: Live was a one-night-only event, but you can watch their webseries at http://writtenitdown.com/
For a similar live experience, check out The Big Hoo-Haa! – Thursdays, 8pm at the Portland Hotel –http://www.hoohaamelbourne.com.au/

The Big HOO-HAA! – 24 Hour HOO-HAA!

By Elyce Phillips 

It’s 6am at Czech House.  Six bleary-eyed improvisers are up on stage, looking for suggestions from an equally bleary-eyed audience. Many have fallen, some have only just begun and there are still 14 hours to go.

For this year’s Fringe, The Big HOO-HAA! threw all their comedic eggs into one proverbial basket and put on a 24 hour show. It’s something we’ve seen at festivals in the past. The 24 hour show has become something like an extreme sport in the comedy world – and the HOO-HAA team’s performance was up there with the greatest of endurance athletes.

Team members of the Hearts and the Bones rotated through the night in hourly blocks, with ten minute breaks in between. For every hour you stayed, you got a dollar back from the $24 ticket price – a moment heralded on the hour with the jingling of a bowl of gold coins and a burst of an on-theme tune like ‘Gold Digger’.

The event began with HOO-HAA’s usual two hour program, with Liam Ryan on hosting duties. Ryan was an absolute stand-out through the 24 hours, somehow remaining incredibly witty right to the end. The man is an absolute natural as a host.

From there, the show took a step into different territory, changing up the theme with each hour-long block. At 10pm, there were games based on stories told by Nova’s Deano. At 12pm, an improvised musical.

At 3am, we hit Danger Hour and things started to get a bit weird. HOO-HAA’s usual games were beefed up with a series of increasingly painful punishments. We saw a strip edition of Doo Doo Ron Ron. The poor players who found themselves Desperate and Dateless (Ryan and Michelle Nussey) had pegs clipped to their bodies every time they made an incorrect guess. There was even a moment of genuine danger as Scott McAteer slightly choked on an unreasonable amount of bread in a game called Carbo Loading.

In the next couple of hours, the weirdness continued. We had Free Love at 4pm, in which team members paired up and did whatever they wanted for 15 minutes, resulting in an extremely complicated piece by Matt Saraceni and Wyatt Nixon-Lloyd about the invention of closed captioning. Then it was a mega round of My Game, My Game, where we saw such gems as ‘Multi-Cluedo’, ‘DolphinHospital’ and ‘It’s Banjo Patterson’s Birthday!’.

By 6pm, brains were beginning to break. I think everyone’s mindset was best summed up by Saraceni during a game of 181, in which the players had to come up with one-liner beginning “181 somethings walk into a bar.” On the theme of spiders, Saraceni stepped forward and said, “Let me give you a little insight into how things are inside my head. 181 spiders walk into a bar. Something about a web?” With many in the audience just as sleep-deprived as the players, that simple statement was perhaps the funniest moment of the hour. We were all suffering together.

How they managed to get through the whole 24 hours, I have no idea. The sleep deprivation was enough of a challenge for those of us in the audience. In the end, only four audience members stuck it out for the full 24 hours, but many more popped in and out over the duration.

It’s an absolute testament to the skills of the HOO-HAA! team that they created an experience that was genuinely hilarious for the full 24 hours. There’s no sense in pointing out the stars in the group – they were all fabulous. Go and see them in action for yourself, perhaps at their saner two-hour show.

The Big HOO-HAA! Perform every Thursday at 8pm at The Portland Hotel.

http://www.hoohaamelbourne.com.au/