Bonza and LJ
Lindi-Jane and Bonza Mate @ Puppet Palace
9:00pm, Fri 13 Mar 2009
It doesn’t bode well that there was a long and drunken queue at the Puppet Palace, chock-full of Friday night pissheads looking for some puppetty adult laughs… perhaps they were thinking they were going to be getting something akin to Randy, or Puppetry of the Penis.
The human-sized dog Bonza is supposedly chock-full of attitude. The problem is that the performance was heavily reliant on video accompaniment to flesh out Bonza’s character – after all, there’s only so much a mute chap in a re-purposed Fat Cat suit can impart on the audience – and the video projector was on the blink, leading to eighty drunk audience members squinting to see the pre-recorded bits on a portable DVD player. Lindi-Jane was clearly hamstrung by this, opting to skip a lot of the video bits after seeing (and hearing) the audience’s dissatisfaction – but this, of course, hacked huge chunks out of the show, which started twenty minutes late… and finished five minutes early.
And the bits that remained were horribly, desperately, unfunny. Seriously, go back and watch bits of “The Late Show” (a great old D-Generation show, prior to Working Dog being formed)… Shirty the Slightly Aggressive Bear shits all over Bonza from a great height.
I’d like to give Lindi-Jane props for soldiering on, despite the technical difficulties… but I can’t. This was a shocker, plain and simple.