[2015040] Media Release
Isabella Valette @ Producers Warehouse
6:00pm, Wed 18 Feb 2015
April Fools wants to be a star, and isn’t afraid of a little compromise to get it. After an ex-schoolmate suggests that reality TV would offer an easy path to stardom, April worms her way into the faux-reality star factory… and, along with the cast of characters that surround her, discovers that there is a price to be paid.
Isabella Valette wrote and performed all the characters in Media Release: April gets the majority of her time, but April’s agent is a wonderfully insidious creation, with her (closeted gay) brother bringing both humour and a hint of darkness. The characters of April’s celebrity boyfriend and sister-in-law, however, feel a little less developed.
Her performances were sound, but I found the plot – and a fair amount of the dialogue – to be hopelessly familiar and stereotyped… and maybe that’s the point, except that there were few twists or surprises in the script. Sprinkling musical mash-ups into the performance helps liven things up a little: Valette can certainly sing, but her voice was often drowned out by a hot mix, meaning that the satire and snark of her songs was mostly lost.
Media Release‘s saving grace is its denouement: rather than some contrived happy ending, an appearance on This Is Your Death puts a deliciously grim spin on the preceding actions, and appealed mightily to the misanthrope in me. But it’s not really a sufficient payoff for the effort of wading through the hackneyed majority; I’m sure Isabella Valette will produce some great work in the future, but Media Release should probably be considered a well-intentioned stepping-stone.
(40) Media Release: Cheeky reality TV "celebrity" musical satire. Great voice drowned in the hot mix. #ff2015 #ADLfringe
— Pete Muller (@festivalfreakAU) February 18, 2015