[2014031] Nath Valvo – Almost 30
Nath Valvo @ Garden of Unearthly Delights – Campanile
9:30pm, Wed 19 Feb 2014
Too much pissing about on the walk back from the Grace Emily meant that options were rapidly drying up; I pulled out my iPhone, opened up the (hideous new) Fringe App and desperately tried to find a pair of shows that I could fit in the remaining evening. Ah – Nath Valvo… he was on The Shortlist, and I’d seen snippets of his work at the last Feast Festival, so that was a good option.
But it was only after I’d sat through the first ten minutes of his show that I realised that I’d actually seen the entire thing in the Feast Festival, not just snippets… well, almost the entire thing.
Not that it mattered. Valvo’s delivery is confident and gleefully camp – which, I suspect, may have been a bit of a surprise to the cluster of drunken muscle-bros in the front row, who heckled his first cock-sucking joke with fiery homophobic bravado… only to be shot down in no uncertain manner by the diminutive chap with the microphone. In fact, the manner in which Valvo kept the rowdy element in line would have to rate as some of the best bogan-wrangling I’ve seen.
Daunted by the prospect of his thirtieth birthday (awww, poor lad), Valvo recounts the unsuccessful birthday parties of his past. The mini-golf party ruined by a ring-in “friend” when he was ten. The glorious story of his drunken mother re-enacting his birth at his sixteenth. One of his few forays with girls being stymied by an allergic reaction on his eighteenth. The eye-opening accidental viewing of Zoo (instead of the latest Harry Potter) for his twenty-first. The vicious break-up of a couple of friends that cut short his twenty-fifth. And the New York-based twenty-ninth birthday present to himself in Roland, the big black masochist.
And, as I noted before, this was all largely familiar material to me – even the break-up quiz game show (pitting a couple’s knowledge against each other) I’d seen before. But what was new was the denouement: Nath’s sixtieth birthday party. After Valvo leaves the stage, an older gent ones out and, in a minute or so, ties the show into a neat bow with about half-a-dozen callbacks, each funnier than the last.
That was a surprise, and a genuinely excellent way to round out a bloody good show. Despite my existing knowledge of the material, Valvo’s delivery (and his crowd management skills) made this a real treat to take in again.
(31) Nath Valvo – Almost 30: Fantastic camp comedy with bogan-bashing crowd wrangling of the front row. #ff2014 #ADLfringe
— Pete Muller (@festivalfreakAU) February 19, 2014