Category: ff2015

ff2015, Day 31

Today was the last of the Fearful Days for me: seven shows, some potentially tricky transitions, and a whole lot of unknowns.

But it all worked out… and there were some genuine surprises in amongst those shows. Mr Stuart’s distant range, for all its faults and lecturing, was super-enjoyable, and Paul Currie was absolutely mental.

Oh, and Beckett Triptych was a bit special, too.

  1. Beckett Triptych
  2. Rip, Drag & Ruminate
  3. Luster
  4. Mr Stuart’s distant range
  5. LEFT
  6. Paul Currie: Release the Baboons
  7. Fancy Boy Variety Show

Cancellations permitting, I just purchased the last of my tickets for the year…

ff2015, Day 30

Great day, really – except for the massive turd of an experience in The Experiment. Did not like. But I did manage to sit in on the “pilot” recording of Marcel’s new podcast, which was fun.

  1. Professor Mounteforte D. Hamsalami in ‘Life Science! a Career Retrospective’
  2. Nick Nemeroff – You’re All Dumb Idiots
  3. The Experiment
  4. The New Cabal

So glad I caught The New Cabal – an almost blistering jazz set with some amazing musicianship.

ff2015, Day 29

A relatively lazy day was capped off by a wander down to Elder Park with the intention of sitting around and watching Blinc for a few hours. Alas – everything was shut down by midnight. Harrumph.

  1. Dave Bloustien: The Tinder Profile of Dorian Gray
  2. Sarah Bennetto’s Funeral
  3. RAW Comedy Winner 2007 Jonathan Schuster presents I Won RAW Comedy In 2007.
  4. Gary Portenza: Apologies in Advance

Jonathan Schuster, eh? He’s a bit good.

[2015005] Angus and Demi are: Best Good Show

[2015005] Angus and Demi are: Best Good Show

Angus Brown & Demi Lardner @ Producers Warehouse

7:15pm, Wed 11 Feb 2015

So: I’ve always been a massive fan of Demi Lardner’s comedy (creepy fanboy alert: I once bought her an Andrew O’Neill t-shirt), but I’ve never actually seen her do a whole show… just five- or ten-minute spots in line-up events. Angus Brown, on the other hand, had never really made an impression one way or the other: his enthusiasm onstage is palpable, to be sure, but his material hasn’t quite hit the mark for me. But the opportunity to see Lardner and Brown together presented itself as part of the Producers’ opening night shenanigans, and was pretty hard to ignore; thus, I found my way into a decent-sized crowd that was bubbling with supportive positivity.

Best Good Show presents itself as sketch comedy, tenuously linked together with an absurd storyline: the two comedians have decided to go to a school for morticians, in a storyline that occasionally threatened to go into zombie territory (one of my pet hates), but instead just veered into semi-demonic happenstances that… kinda… sorta… went nowhere. And then wrapped up almost unexpectedly. Besides Angus and Demi themselves, there’s a few recurring characters (indicated by the slightest of changes – a cap, a limp, a strangled accent), and – my favourite – the duck non sequiturs, in which a duck would waddle onstage in-between sketches/scenes to unleash irrelevant “facts” before disappearing again, no explanation given.

And then, of course, there was a bit of audience participation… which is to say, Pete participation. On went a pigeon mask (onto which I attempted to apply my glasses, to almost-condescendingly polite laughter), and wings were applied to my arms… I can’t even remember the point of that sketch, but I’m not sure that’s a problem in a performance that’s as deliberately ramshackle as Best Good Show.

Lardner and Brown play everything for laughs – there’s (brilliantly) awful puns aplenty, and a wonderful physical contrast between Angus’ physique and Demi’s impossibly flexible dancing. And whilst there’s a feeling that Best Good Show might be a work-in-progress, I’m not sure that this was as unscripted as they would like us to believe; I’m not sure the intent is for this piece to evolve over time. But the enthusiasm and interplay of the two performers makes up for any shortcomings in the script, leaving a positive and likeable impression.

ff2015, Day 28

My birthday was lovely. Not only did I see my 135th show of the year (equaling 2014’s effort), but I managed to snag some Hot Star chicken and a pulled pork burger from Low & Slow at Blinc Bar. Also: a stunning Girls’ Generation box set thing. These things make me happy.

  1. Strangely Flamboyant
  2. ODDBALL
  3. A Bit of an Overshare
  4. Dave Warneke Dates The Entire Audience
  5. Dan Lees: Brainchild

‘Tis a pity Becky Lou was unable to perform Shake tonight; hoping I can still squeeze that show in.

ff2015, Day 27

Today brought forth the only shows that really leapt out and grabbed me at the Festival launch back in October: the two Cedar Lake performances. And boy, they did not disappoint. Mixed Rep was worthy of a standing ovation on the strength of the third piece alone.

  1. Orbo Novo
  2. DivaLicious: Opera Rocks!
  3. Law and Disorder
  4. Alice Fraser: Everyone’s A Winner
  5. Mixed Rep
  6. EUROWISION Adelaide 2015

Of course, Mixed Rep ran long (or, rather, had two intervals that weren’t mentioned), so that meant I missed my planned 10pm show. But it also meant that I got to have a drink with Helen and Tina at Blinc Bar, so that was nice :)

Also: it’s currently my birthday. Yay :)

ff2015, Day 26

So – Cadence is a belter of a performance (despite starting late and running long, leading to the need to bum a car ride to my next show). And We Are All left a bitter taste in my mouth, like I’d just been conned.

  1. Nufonia Must Fall
  2. Cadence
  3. Tales of a Strongman
  4. Promise and Promiscuity: A New Musical by Jane Austen and Penny Ashton
  5. We Are All
  6. The Moon in Me
  7. Darkness and Light

Weird old day.

ff2015, Day 25

A weird bunch of shows today; a couple that I was really looking forward to didn’t quite live up to expectations… but one most certainly did meet expectations.

Far exceeded them, actually.

Vampillia were – to be quite frank – fucking amazing. Support band Fourteen Nights at Sea were brilliant – all hipster power chords and drones that carried me like a wave (their first post-introduction song saw the bass player play the same two notes for six minutes, in which I found great joy), but the Japanese “brutal orchestra” lived up to their name: superb strings, operatic vocals, and lashings of funk, punk, metal, grind, and guttural growls from a frontman who roamed through the audience regularly.

Amazing.

  1. Sweep Under Rug
  2. The Sounds of Silent
  3. Excavate
  4. Vampillia
  5. Ronny Chieng – You Don’t Know What You’re Talking About

The really weird part, though? A guy on the fence near me tapped me on the shoulder during Vampillia’s warm-up. “Do I know you?” he asked. I struggled, but couldn’t help him. Suddenly, he remembered: “Aren’t you that guy in the The City Messenger? The one who sees all those shows?”

So, yeah. There’s that.

ff2015, Day 24

OK… so. Right. I have to admit to having been a little underwhelmed with my Festival viewing so far.

Not anymore.

La Merda is absolutely brutal, in the best way possible. It gently lures you in and then batters you senseless, leaving your ears ringing; the third act is positively incendiary. I’ve used that word to describe it on every medium I can, because it’s the perfect description.

In short: go see La Merda.

  1. Disney Guy
  2. Gillian Cosgriff: Whelmed.
  3. La Merda
  4. Marcel Blanch-de Wilt: Death of a Disco Dancer

The other shows today were pretty good, too! But go see La Merda. Seriously.

ff2015, Day 23

When I got a text message within the opening minute of Bok & Fahey’s (fun) show, I immediately thought it was a cancellation… and, sure enough, I was right. But every cloud has a silver lining, yeah? And what that cancellation led to was a bunch of opportunistic plan changes, on the back of my new-found confidence in getting from venue-to-venue in record time. Bakehouse to Gluttony (via FringeTIX) in six minutes? No worries. Gluttony to Producers in one minute? Cool.

  1. SmallWaR
  2. 2 States of Lauren Bok and Bridget Fahey
  3. Marathon
  4. Boris & Sergey’s Vaudevillian Adventure
  5. Grabbin’ a piece
  6. Set List

The upshot of that was that I managed to squeeze in one extra show than I’d planned for the day. Nice for me, but maybe a bit grim for the cancelled act.

[2015004] 3 Steps Ahead

[2015004] 3 Steps Ahead

Point & Flex Circus @ Producers Warehouse

6:00pm, Wed 11 Feb 2015

After a shaky start, 2014’s Temper was a thoroughly enjoyable show, and demonstrated that Point & Flex Circus really knew what they were doing; that alone had them pencilled into the Shortlist. The opportunity to go to the Producers Launch Party – and stitch together four shows in a row – sealed the deal.

But the Point & Flex numbers have halved since Temper, leaving just Marina and Taylor performing 3 Steps Ahead. And they reprise a lot of their strengths from last year’s showcase in solo pieces scattered throughout the show: Taylor displays the more traditional acrobatic skills of stretching, balance, and hoops; Marina veers towards the freakshow side of the circus, with glass walking, juggling, and a weird & wonderful segment where she inserts a paintbrush up her nose, blockhead style, and proceeds to copy a picture (itself selected through cleaver-throwing).

The spine of the performance is the random selection of timed games that the audience helps order (through the shuffling of cards); these games ranged from assembling and flicking paper frogs into a glass, to eating a cookie without using their hands, to balancing five die on a mouth-held pop-stick. Some of the games are terribly one-sided – blowing up ten balloons is much harder than picking up cotton balls using only your nose – but that just created a sense of good-natured fun between the performers and the audience.

After all the little competitions and games, Marina won this evening’s performance by the barest of margins: eleven points to ten. But (to horribly shoe-horn in a cliché) the audience were the real winners this evening: 3 Steps Ahead was a fun, personable, and entertaining display of Point & Flex’s abilities.

(Of course, the other notable memory associated with this performance was the fact that many of the Gravity & Other Myths crew (who mentor Point & Flex) were in the audience. I said hello, fawned over them & their work, and received some thankyous in return… surprising, to be sure, but super-appreciated!)

ff2015, Day 20

After a quick run through dotMaze (don’t expect to start on-time at the beginning of the day!) and bidding my gorgeous Significant Other adieu (after an all-too-brief visit which had her taking in one Festival & eight Fringe shows), I tried to get back into the swing of things. So much to see, so little time!

  1. dotMaze: Get Lost!
  2. Who’s Your Daddy? the funny side of parenting
  3. Marilyn Forever
  4. Icarus Falling
  5. Kirsty Mac – Feminazi
  6. Smile Practice

Things really picked up after I chased away the dozes in the first half of Marilyn Forever. The second half was solid (with a great climax), Icarus Falling is proper Fringe awesomeness, Kirsty Mac presented some great standup, and Smile Practice was quite spectacular in the most WTF way possible. I mean, I had one of the performers sitting naked (well, with his pants around his ankles) next to me for most of the show. His genitals were covered in purple glitter. On stage, a super-drunk freeloader was kissing the other performer before stumbling down the stairs and heckling incoherently.

So, yeah – good times!

ff2015, Day 19

What a great day. With my Significant Other interested in experiencing a busy day at the Fringe, I arranged the following six shows, plus a run around all the Bill Viola exhibits around the city (and a quiet Festival Patron meet-and-greet with Viola… great food – and Croser! – at Jolley’s).

  1. Boris & Sergey Origins
  2. Pants Down Circus ROCK!
  3. Only You Can Save Us
  4. Felicity Ward – The Iceberg
  5. Dr. Professor Neal Portenza’s Catchy Show Title
  6. Scotch and Soda

Great shows, one and all… though Dr. Professor Neal Portenza was a great example of shithouse over-entitled drunk-crowd antics that left my SO quite irritated.