Category: Melbourne Fringe 2014

Geraldine Hickey – Listen Out For The Castanets

by Elyce Phillips

From the moment this show starts, you know three things for certain – Geraldine Hickey is hilarious, has badass fashion sense and a natural gift for dance. The remaining 50 minutes merely serve to confirm that first fact over and over again.

In ‘Listen Out For The Castanets’, Hickey recounts a time where she found herself in a dangerous situation, and how she found the bravery to intervene. We’re taken back to Hickey’s childhood, we explore her love of theme parks and are left in no doubt as to her feelings on drinking. Although her stories are often tied down to specific places – Albury-Wodonga and Puffing Billy, for example – they are immensely relatable. We’ve all been in similar terrifying situations, even if we didn’t react to them in the same way.

Hickey has a gruff likeability that you instantly warm to. Her storytelling style is like the kids at the back of the school bus ranting about their school holiday exploits, using curse words as commas, constantly diverting on to the story of this other cool thing they did. Each distraction from Hickey’s main tale is cleverly crafted, beginning as an apparent non-sequitur but eventually returning to her story in surprising and amusing ways. The jokes may be presented as a down-to-earth ramble, but this is a very polished and accomplished piece of comedy. You are never left in any doubt that Hickey knows exactly what she’s doing. She’s one of those comedians that just appear to be effortlessly hilarious.

‘Listen Out For The Castanets’ is a wonderfully funny show and it deserves a great big audience. I highly recommend you get down to The Imperial and check it out.

Please note – it’s best if you have $2.50 on hand when you leave the house to see this, because if you’re as impressionable as me, you’re going to want to go buy a Bubble O’ Bill immediately after the show.

Geraldine Hickey – Listen Out For The Castanets is on at The Imperial Hotel until October 5.
http://www.melbournefringe.com.au/fringe-festival/show/geraldine-hickey-listen-out-for-the-castanets/

The Shuffle Show

By Colin Flaherty

“1000 songs in an hour” exclaims the blurb for The Shuffle Show. I wasn’t keeping count but Elena Gabrielle and Grant BusĂ© certainly packed a hell of a lot of popular songs into their medleys. Wrapped in a story about a visit to the Apple Store Genius Bar, with two incredibly perky sales assistants, this was Jukebox Theatre for the Attention Deficit age.

Similar to the “4 Chord Songs” gimmick, they instead cleverly tied the songs together by topic (or a passing mention of that topic) so the basic tune wasn’t necessarily the same. Our Apple Geniuses used the idea of shuffled playlists to introduce the long medleys, which for the most part were sung straight with a little bit of mugging and slapstick. They relied on the recognition factor of the numerous songs to do the the comedic heavy lifting so this was not a demonstration of musical comedy in the funny song sense.

The majority of the humour in this show came from the story surrounding the songs which included wonderfully lame puns and some gentle social satire. The characters themselves were brilliantly up-themselves to add a nice bite to the jokes but they also lapsed into some amusingly embarrassing scenarios which gave them a little more depth than just being infallible Apple Robots. There were a few moments of audience interaction but sadly these were variations of bumping and grinding against an embarrassed punter while everyone else giggled and thanked the heavens that it wasn’t them.

Gabrielle and Busé were both awesome musical performers who sold the living hell out of the songs. Busé sang and provided guitar backing using various parts of the instrument while Gabrielle belted out her vocals with gusto. They later kicked things up a notch by ditching the guitar and going to a backing track, freeing them up to get more physical. Their comic timing got the job done and both revealed that they were both unafraid to shed some clothing to look silly.

With so much music packed into this show to fulfil the 1000 songs challenge it was quite a draining experience. The pair managed to keep the energy at 11 for the whole performance which kept the audience going on the leftover adrenaline. This was a fun show for all music fans that will have you tapping your toes and chuckling in equal measure.

The Shuffle Show is on at The 86 at 7:30pm until October 4.

http://www.melbournefringe.com.au/fringe-festival/show/the-shuffle-show-a-playlist-of-playlists/

Creeps by Natalie Harris and Elizabeth Davie

By Hannah Frazer 

The creepiest thing about this show was how Natalie Harris shared my distaste for avocado, brunch loving hipsters and the fact that Elizabeth Davie and I seemed to belong the exact same family in the delightfully not so Creepy Creeps.

From the very beginning Harris and Davie made you feel like you were in good hands. With a great inflight/show safety demonstration (nothing makes you feel more comfortable and safe than authority in a fitted blazer and a neck scarf) to kick off the comedy version of a parallelogram. Beginning and ending the show with sketches as a team. They allowed each other to show off their own unique comedy style by breaking the show into two separate stand-up sets.

Both brought their own individual style. Harris with her observations on today’s hipster youth, struggles with eviction and great use of pie chart. Harris owned her allocated time on stage. Then Davie with her brave honesty in depicting the people in her life and the role she believes they have played in causing many of her psychological issues. Ending her set with a remarkable audience assisted re-enactment of a Karaoke work function, where even though under great duress, she was able to let those demons out. It was this moment that would have to be up there with one of the highlights of the show.

It was clear they were seasoned pros, both having done their own Melbourne International Comedy Festival shows. Their jokes so carefully written that the occasional slight fumble of words, they were sure to backtrack and make sure that the punch line got its glorious warm day in the sun. There were no awkward pauses or uncomfortable ‘
.Line!’ moments that most ‘Amateurs’ (as they deemed themselves as) may encounter.

Ending the performance on a slightly edgier note, they each became the stereotypical fashion and healthy lifestyle blogger that you encounter these days. There was also some great use of wigs and a lot of tongue in cheek, that made for a memorable finale.

The bells and whistles of the wigs and pie chart aside, what the audience appreciated the most was the celebration of supportive friends, and the back to basics stand up. Real, honest, relatable and just plain funny.

Creeps by Natalie Harris and Elizabeth Davie is on at The Provincial Hotel until Sept 28

http://www.melbournefringe.com.au/fringe-festival/show/creeps/

Bart Freebairn: Ultra Power Lord

By Lisa Clark 

Bart Freebairn certainly has one of the funniest show descriptions in the Fringe Guide and it doesn’t let us down. Bart comes out fighting – in his own kooky comedian kind of way – all energy (even on a Wednesday evening) and ready to give us his best.

Bart is exploring his own lack of machismo; why and how he doesn’t enjoy the sorts of things that men in particular are supposed to get a kick out of. He certainly admires other men doing these things from a distance, with a delightful naughty twinkle in his eye. The bulk of the humour comes from his own inabilities in manly pursuits such as his lack of prowess in fighting, working out or casual vomiting.

He recounts for us his experience at Splendour in the Grass, his lack of joy in camping in general and why he’s staying away from certain substances nowadays. I particularly enjoy his impressive impressions of philosophical bogans, (who I feel like I’ve met and had conversations with at parties). Although he is sending them up there is no sense of malice behind the caricature. There is also a hilarious story about his dog, who like himself is a fairly ineffective master of defence.

His pub stand up and skilful Emceeing experience comes to the fore when he has to deal with disruptive audience members in the small space. Although it does break up the rhythm of the show somewhat it also leads to some delightful tangents and a learning experience for both Bart and his audience. Like the show’s description (or provocation if you will) his attitude is ‘Bring it ON’ and he shows that though he may not be good at street fighting, he can handle himself in a stand up setting where he does prove to be somewhat of a Power Lord.

Bart Freebairn has been doing comedy around the traps in Melbourne for some time or as he explains in his sketchy bio online “for a while now”. It’s clearly long enough to develop a distinctively charming and goofy style. He commands the spotlight with ease and can confidently keep an audience laughing for an hour at his enjoyable stories and quirky way of looking at stuff.

Bart Freebairn: Ultra Power Lord is on at The Imperial Hotel

http://www.melbournefringe.com.au/fringe-festival/show/bart-freebairn-ultra-power-lord/

Wake Up, Sheeple! by Sam Rankin

By Colin Flaherty

With the title Wake Up, Sheeple! and its advertising material (text manually typed with the classified content blacked out) this show had my mind racing as to what it could be. The most obvious scenario would have been the demented rantings of a lunatic played for laughs. Instead what we got was a fun comedic lecture about all things conspiratorial. To top it off, our host was a genuinely friendly fellow; far from the unstable basement dweller or ‘enlightened’ stoner we may have been expecting.

Sam Rankin explored a number of conspiracy theories and showed us the laughably flimsy reasoning behind them. The ridiculousness of those theories were presented with lots of visual aids, audio clips and many witty quips. This field can be easy to ridicule so he used many cleverly amusing concepts to get his points across. He avoided going for the obvious punchlines and added some wonderful jokes from different angles which were so much stronger.

He delved deeper with some songs and a bit of role-playing with audience members. His opening night audience obliged with minimal prompting as he went to great lengths to maintain a non-threatening environment. We were like putty in his hands (gullible fools, perhaps?).

Linking the topics was Dale, a junior member of the Illuminati getting a grilling by an unseen superior. It involved some wonderful character work by Rankin who, with his cape and aluminium foil hat, played an adorably naĂŻve guy whose ambitions for world domination fell well short of those expected by the hierachy. These segments gave the show a fun narrative arc that had an amusing conclusion and a brilliant original song to boot.

This was a tech heavy production with lighting used to set the mood, multiple microphones to enable audience participation and many audio cues for Rankin to react to. His Techie was the straight man in this one man show and was clearly indispensible.

An amusing and informative show, it combined stand up with theatre in a seamless manner. Be prepared to shed your paranoia and laugh heartily.

Wake Up, Sheeple! is on at The Tuxedo Cat at 7.15 until September 20.

http://www.melbournefringe.com.au/fringe-festival/show/wake-up-sheeple/

Sonia Di Iorio : Brain Colours

By Noel Kelso

One of the revelations of the last couple of years of attending live comedy shows has been the quality of sketch comedy which is coming through on the scene. This allows the comedians to keep the laughs flowing in a series of bite-sized segments without the need for a continuous narrative or awkward gear-changes in topic which can sometimes arise in stand-up. Local talents such as Lords of Luxury, Wizards Sandwiches and the sketch Gods that are Jimmy James Eaton and Jason Geary have been joined by a fresh voice from the world of stand in the form of Sonia Di Iorio.

Sonia is perhaps more familiar to regular comedy attendees as a stand-up comedian – her previous show ‘Don’t Kiss The Weird Girl’ being an hour of stand-up based around her experiences of others perceptions of her in contrast to her own which entertained audiences at the last Fringe and Comedy festival. Here she tickles the funny bone with a different tactic inhabiting the lives of over twenty different characters each caught in their own bizarre, sometimes cringeworthy, situations.

Clearly an accomplished performer, Di Iorio has no qualms of allowing each scene to form from its own premise in a clear and concise manner such that the audience are instantly familiar with the scenario being presented so that there is the minimum of dead-air between sketches. Characters are believably sketched in just the first moments of appearing, their form and personalities clearly distinguishable from each other through the performer’s, often subtle, physical and vocal mannerisms.

Through the course of the show we meet the owner of a New Age herbal medicine shop who is really the victim of nominative determinism; learn how blokes form opinions of one another via their chosen nickname and eavesdrop on the readings being made by an honest psychic. There are some running gags also – such as a character who periodically appears and gets lost in the high-energy music to which they are listening or the person listening to tunes about the apocalypse – which have rather satisfying and very funny conclusions to them. One of the most memorable sketches involves very few words and is a testament to the comedian’s ability to communicate largely through body language as she procrastinates and becomes increasingly more distracted by a bag of crisps.

Sometimes sketch comedy can suffer from the need to transition from one scenario into the next, particularly if the show only has one performer but Di Iorio manages these transitions for the most part smoothly and delivers her lines clearly and distinctly so as to leave no confusion as to when we have begun a fresh scenario.

Overall this is a very funny show from a performer who seems to have found their calling and I look forward to seeing more sketch comedy from her in future.

Sonia Di Iorio – Brain Colours is on at the Imperial Hotel at 6pm until September 25th.
http://www.melbournefringe.com.au/fringe-festival/show/sonia-di-iorio-in-brain-colours/