Lou Sanz is Not Suitable For Children
Lou Sanz @ Adelaide Town Hall – Green Room
8:00pm, Fri 11 Mar 2011
Things weren’t really off to a good start; the volunteer staff who were controlling access to the Green Room seemed to have no idea there was a show scheduled for eight o’clock. Despite the presentation of a ticket that clearly stated the time and location of the purported show, belief was hard to come by.
No matter; eventually, the existence of the show was verified, and it initially looked like a small crowd would be present in the tiny Green Room (peak population maybe thirty. Forty, if everybody sucked their stomachs in). So, as usual, I sit down the front and put my smiling face on.
Now, I’d never heard of Lou Sanz prior to this Fringe, but there was something about her précis in the Guide that made me think that she’d present a series of dark, potentially smutty tales in a spoken-word (as opposed to stand-up) form. And my guess was right on the money; with little fanfare, in front of less than a dozen people, Sanz took the mike (then discarded it, favouring the more “intimate” room), and started reading short stories and poetry from her notebooks.
And she’s a bloody good spoken word artist, she really is. Her sing-song style of delivery would work wonders with the kiddies… but the content of her stories is most certainly adult fare, and the manner in which she sweetly enunciates words like “cock” and “fuck” in the middle of sentences was pretty bloody alluring. And with tales surrounding being jilted by homosexual boyfriends, golden showers, and a letter written to her own love-life, there’s plenty of opportunity to insert profanity into her performance. The arrival of a cadre of Sanz’s friends a third of the way through the performance seemed to spark a short improv bit, though that may have just been conversation; it’s hard to tell, and entertaining nonetheless.
Short and sweet, Not Suitable For Children was a delightful spoken word event; one quite unlike any other I’d seen at the Fringe this year. The only problem surrounding the show (besides the staffing of the Room) was that I bumped into Sanz (much) later that night, and thanked her for the show. “Oh great!” she sweetly exclaimed, gorgeous dark eyes glinting in the low light of the Fringe Club, “what did you think?” Clearly the discovery of the cocktails at the ‘Club had taken their toll on my mental thesaurus, because all I could respond with at the time was “It was really… different.”
Which is bloody insulting, really. Accurate, but easily taken to be something it’s not. Because I thought Lou Sanz was great.