Category: Reviews

Kitchen Cosmology by Chris Lassig

By Noel P Kelso

This will be my second review of a science-related show this Fringe Festival, this time the subject matter is the larger scale of the Universe rather than the origins of life itself.

This show held a special attraction for me as I have always had a fascination with physics, but lacked the mathematical abilities to pursue it as a career. Similarly, the show includes lots of cooking which is another interest of mine. All that this show needs would be conjuring and it may well be my ideal show.

As the title suggests the intention of Kitchen Cosmology is to simply explain the current understanding of how the Universe formed and progressed to its current state with the help of baked goods.

If you are fascinated by such exotic concepts as the Big Bang, Galaxies, Dark Matter and Radioastronomy but – much like myself – lack the necessary understanding of the finer points of maths and physics, then this is the show for you.

Beginning with a nice gag about needing a space License, Chris Lassig takes the audience through the first few microseconds following the Big Bang with the aid of popcorn and the following seconds using a raisin pudding.

This is a well-structured show delivered with clarity of ideas and excellent comic timing to ease the understanding of some of the complex ideas being used. Lassig uses his props and projections well and ropes-in a couple of audience members to assist with one segment involving the collision of galaxies represented by two chocolate tarts.

The audience laughed along to such unlikely humour based around complex chemistry, radio telescopes and Stephen Hawking which is no mean feat and a testament to the performance skills and timing of Lassig himself who is ably directed by Ben McKenzie.

Along the way there are bad puns, pop-culture references and lollies and the ideas clearly fire the imagination of the performer as he keeps track of key events in the formation the Universe and his baking with a digital timer which beeps at key points throughout.

Lassig’s enthusiasm for his subject is clear from the very beginning and does not flag throughout his performance with him putting energy into each segment. The pace of his delivery keeps the ideas flowing, whilst allowing for clarity of understanding and leaving room for laughter.

Kitchen Cosmology by Chris Lassig is on at Tuxedo Cat on Wills Street at 6pm until September 28th.

Loman Empire: The Sitcom – An unauthorised satire of Death of a Salesman

By Lisa Clark

Who can resist such a delicious idea of a comic sitcom version of the Great American Tragedy Death of a Salesman with such a fabulous cast? Danny McGinlay has done the inspired re-imagining of Arthur Miller’s play and manages to satirise the great American sitcom at the same time.

The audience is part of this production, playing the part of a live studio audience at the recording of a sitcom called The Loman Empire. The cast are being made up as the audience enters.  The warm-up guy (Lachlan Millsom) sets the mood well, introducing us to the stars of the show and prompting us throughout. An applause sign flashes as characters enter and at end of scenes and the tech guy at side of stage also helps remind us that we are in a studio. The pre-recored filmed segments work beautifully including cute cliched opening and closing credits and some very silly ads, most of which are hilarious. There was a great moment where the actors improvised around a prop that played up which made a very funny potential ‘blooper reel’ moment.

The performers are all brilliantly cast and throw themselves into their two-part roles which include the actors behind the scenes as well as the on camera characters. Russell Fletcher as the has been star and patriarch Willy Loman is amusingly overbearing and annoying (in both characters) with a catchphrase and a relationship with his downtrodden wife Linda, played with a twinkle by Lana Schwarcz, that is reminiscent of The Honeymooners. Off camera Lana’s obnoxious animal rights actress character create’s more drama and fireworks with him than on. Jimmy James Eaton is a surprise standout as favourite son Biff (and manages to squeeze in one of his trademark funny raps) and Danny McGinlay has fun playing his little brother Happy as well as the actor who, thanks to Danny’s previous festival show is a drunken Ukranian. We get to see Director Damian Callinan on stage playing the wacky neighbour Charley and Denis Manahan does a fabulous job playing various important characters. Other actors who pop in for short cameos are Lucy Horan, Katharine Burke and Chris Masters Mah. There are some rough edges in the timing of dialogue but these will be improved as the run progresses.

Like Willy Loman’s hazy memories there is a very vague sense of the period this is set in, which actually works well, it mostly feels like 1949, then a modern reference turns up or a modern product placement, like an anachronism you might notice in MASH or Happy Days, shows that seemed to gradually forget which period they were set in. There are many clever digs at sitcoms, their clichĂ©s and wacky situations that are part of giving the audience a sense of the history of this long running successful sitcom at the same time echoing Willy Loman being haunted by his past.

My only issue with the production (apart from the line ‘A man is not a piece of fruit’ being absent which is a bit like doing Hamlet without ‘To Be or Not To Be’) was that the backstage shenanigans, though fun, didn’t really affect the TV performance and lacked focus and the comedic tension that would have come out of a situation such as the cast finding out the show is axed or one of the cast is leaving or this being the final episode which would have reflected the sense of doom and hidden secrets exposed in the play.

Death of a Salesman is about dysfunctional families, false fronts and the rot at the core of The American Dream so it fits a sitcom scenario perfectly. You may not know the play but you will get a sense of it from the play’s dialogue and a lot of laughs that come from clever zingers, groaners and sending up sitcoms. The Loman Empire – The Sitcom – An unauthorised satire of Death of a Salesman (note this is a recent name change) is the sort of creative, intelligently put together performance that makes Melbourne Fringe so wonderful and will no doubt be one of the highlights of 2014.

Loman Empire: The Sitcom An unauthorised satire of Death of a Salesman is on at the Northcote Town Hall at 8:15pm until September 28.

http://www.melbournefringe.com.au/fringe-festival/show/loman-empire-the-sitcom-an-unauthorised-satire-of-death-of-a-salesman/

Rough Science : Life

By Noel Kelso


Melbourne Fringe festival throws up some unusual performances each year, some of which defy categorisation. This can be because they are just plain weird or perhaps a little unfocussed or sometimes so original that one is so overwhelmed that placing a label on the show seems like vandalism.

Sean Elliott has created a show which is part lecture, part performance piece and part comedy – some parts being more successful than others. Somewhat unusually for a Fringe performance, there are rules to this show (which may or may not be broken as the evening progresses) which Elliott asks the audience to ensure are adhered to throughout. These rules are as follows – Don’t break the equipment; No pop-culture references; No explosions and no magic. After all – this is meant to be a serious scientific lecture (yeah, right
)

As the title might suggest this is primarily about one of the biggest questions people have ever asked – ‘How did we get here?’ Sean first tries to answer this question with a reading from one of the many Creation myths before proceeding to the first ‘Act’ of the show in which we are introduced to a young girl in the early nineteenth century who collected fossils on a beach in the UK and who made perhaps the single most important find of its kind which helped inspire further study of these curiosities and inspired Wallace and Darwin’s theories on evolution.

There follow three further ‘Acts’, each preceded by a reading from a different Creation myth. The audience are introduced to such pioneers as Robert Hooke, the inventor of the microscope and Urey and Miller, who managed to boil-up the basic building blocks of life in their lab from scratch. The various gags and props along the way help to make the information being imparted less dry than it could have been in the hands of a less exuberant performer.

Elliott is primarily a science communicator and certainly knows his role well, employing techniques from stand-up, conjuring and storytelling to impart his message. This results in a show which is both funny and educational which is no mean feat. His use of props is well deployed throughout with impeccable comic timing for maximum impact and – as this was the first night – often hilariously badly behaved.

The general impression left by the show is that it is an often amusing and always entertaining lecture for those with an interest in the origins of life and how we arrived at the current understandings of what might have happened. If you feel like an evening of educational silliness then this should be right up your street.

Rough Science: Life is on at Tuxedo Cat on Wills Street until September 20th.

http://www.melbournefringe.com.au/fringe-festival/show/rough-science-life/

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/