Category: 2015 – News

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).

87. Boris & Sergey Origins
88. Pants Down Circus ROCK!
89. Only You Can Save Us
90. Felicity Ward – The Iceberg
91. Dr. Professor Neal Portenza’s Catchy Show Title
92. 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.

Opening night of the Festival. Initially thought Blinc was a fizzer, until we actually saw it… pretty! Lots of people at the opening to the Festival & Blinc launch party.

85. Azimut
86. Tomás Ford: Electric Cabaret

My Significant Other is in town. We drank lots of champagne. May have been prudent to do that after Azimut.

Pretty good day today, show-wise.

81. White Rabbit Red Rabbit
82. Fake it ’til you Make it by Bryony Kimmings and Tim Grayburn
83. The Awkward Years
84. Set List

White Rabbit Red Rabbit, with its unique-script-unique-actor-cold-reading hook, has every opportunity to become one of those shows that you want to see every night. Which is kinda what I expected Set List to be, too, but I wasn’t as grabbed by that.

Anyway: it’s time for a bit of a quieter weekend. My Significant Other is arriving for a fleeting visit tomorrow, and there’s a bit of catching up to do. And there’s also a little thing called the Adelaide Festival of the Arts that kicks off tomorrow…

What a weird old day. Had another(!) photo shoot(!) in the afternoon, and then my first two shows were bloody great. The last one, though, was one of the worst Fringe experiences I’ve ever had. Ever.

77. Frank, the Mind-reading Hotdog
78. Cut by Duncan Graham
79. Mush and Me by Karla Crome
80. Karl Redgen: Rapid Fire

I’ve never walked out of a show before, but I seriously considered it this evening.

A bit of a weird day for me today. Housework. Oh, and a little phone call… but more on that later.

73. My Life in Boxes
74. Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind: 30 Plays in 60 Minutes
75. FUSION GUITAR: CLASSICAL & PERCUSSIVE GUITAR
76. Best of Adelaide Fringe: Late Show

Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind is a cracking way to spend an hour, even if I did feel a bit ripped off that I didn’t see the thirtieth play in the performance. “Performed later in the double-decker bus” – really? Harrumph.

Mondays are turning into TuxCat days, which is lovely. Great vibe there tonight, and it looked like good crowds for most shows (including Calypso Nights, which really does deserve huge audiences).

69. POP POP
70. Destroyer of Worlds
71. I Still Call Australia Homo
72. Lisa-Skye’s Lovely Tea Party

Called up onstage (again) during POP POP. The last line of the script I had to read (which had previously featured a menagerie of animal noises) included a stage direction to kiss performer Penny Greenhalgh… and I know better than to mess with the wishes of the writer. I was expecting a lookaway stage kiss (as I’d experienced in a Dr Brown bit), but… nope.

So that’s a first.

Day thirteen: unlucky for some!

63. Smashed
64. The Bureau of Complaints
65. Everything Is Under Control
66. Aunty Donna
67. Zoe Coombs Marr is DAVE
68. Tripped

Not me, though. After a visit to the Double Shot! Coffee Fiesta at Unley, I had a cluster of quality shows: DAVE is an amazingly good piece of work, Smashed was fantastic (even within the stifling confines of the Panama Club sauna tent), and – once I realised what it actually was – Everything Is Under Control is another cracking contemporary clown piece (though totally different from the likes of Dr Brown & Trygve’s work).

Mind you, a late start at The Bureau of Complaints meant that I had to jog to make the subsequent show… but whatevs, it was only forty degrees today! ;)

Another eight-show, forty-degree day. Including two cross-city powerwalks in high temperatures.

55. Funny Stuff For Happy People
56. How we stopped the end of the world : The adventures of Broer & Zus (brother & sister)
57. [title of show]
58. Kids’ Party Confidential
59. STRANDS
60. Nicole Henriksen – Honeycomb Badgers on Acid
61. My Brain Made Me Do It
62. Lunatics Beer Garden – Late Show

Bought my first alcohol of the Fringe tonight, too. Christ I’m a cheap drunk.

And so I scooted past 50 shows for the year… and there wasn’t a dud amongst them today.

50. The Fifth Horseman
51. Vanity Bites Back
52. JON BENNETT: IT’S RABBIT NIGHT!!!
53. Jono Wants a Wife
54. Sunglasses at Night: The 80s Apocalypse Sing Along Cabaret

The crowd at Geraldine Quinn’s Sunglasses at Night were totally up for a good time this evening. The Deluxe looked pretty full, and there was scarcely a person who wasn’t belting out Total Eclipse of the Heart at full volume. Fantastic fun :)

Closing in on a milestone.

45. This Can’t End Well
46. A Hip Hikers Guide To The Galaxy
47. Gravity Boots presents: Sassy Monkey and the Black Onion Pudding
48. Adam Knox – Listen Closely, We Haven’t Much Time
49. Calypso Nights

Calypso Nights is some properly silly good fun. Totes worth rounding off a night of Fringing with that :)

Well, I made it to all my shows today. Didn’t miss a second of any of them. The only problem is, it was not a good day for my Fringing…

40. Media Release
41. Handle It – A One Woman Show
42. Marcus Ryan – Love Me Tinder
43. mix juice
44. HEX

…until, that is, HEX.

HEX is one of those dance pieces that I will start recommending to everyone, such is the beauty in the work. That it can take such dark material and make it legible in a wordless medium (and make it enjoyable to behold) is worthy of more credit than I can bestow upon it. Get it seen, people!

More Dr Brown! A double dose of Celia Pacquola! It’s all happening!

35. Pale Face Cold Blood
36. Celia Pacquola – Let Me Know How It All Works Out
37. Matt Price: A British Bloke’s Guide to Being a Man
38. Dr. Brown: Bexperiments…with Terry Nameo
39. Rhino Room Late Show 10th Year Anniversary!

Tomorrow: possibly the dumbest scheduling I’ve ever done. Let’s see if I can pull it off.

Another day, another show involvement. Or two.

30. Flying Dreams
31. Discover Ben Target
32. Stuart Bowden: Before Us
33. The Sound of Nazis
34. Come Heckle Joshua Ladgrove whilst he talks at you for 52 minutes in exchange for some of your money.

Ben Target was an interesting chap – at least I didn’t have to get onstage for that, but he flicked cards at my head in rapid order – but the Josh Ladgrove stage bit was a little weird. After I refused to moan as he stage-fucked me – “I’m not a moaner,” I maintained, “I can’t do it realistically” – some of the audience (a lot of performers in the crowd) turned – “that’s stage rape,” they said only half jokingly.

52 minutes? Try double that.

Today started out hot. Real hot. The first two shows were almost stifling, and the third was only bearable due to the wonderful performance. But then, sometime during the fourth show, the weather broke; it was a completely different city after 5pm.

22. Frank’s Survival Guide
23. The Big Giggle
24. Zephyr Quartet presents Cult Classics
25. Golden Phung Go To Hell
26. Chris Knight is The Difference Between Women And Airline Food
27. The Show Must Goon
28. Justin Stone in Who’s the Boss? The Tony Danza Experience
29. Shotspeare presents Romeo & Juliet

A couple of firsts today: the new Royal Croquet Club seems to have a much friendlier layout than last year, and E For Ethel is a nice smaller venue (with lovely staff and crew).

It was Valentine’s Day, and my Valentine was on the other side of the country, so I had to make do with the best Fringe day so far.

16. Dr Brown Brown Brown Brown Brown and his Singing Tiger…Again!
17. Anna Log – The Saboteur
18. Trygve Wakenshaw’s NAUTILUS – a work in progress
19. Medicine
20. STOP START
21. Sex Idiot

Dr Brown is still wonderful with kids, and Trygve’s first performance of Nautilus was amazing to watch. Then the return of TJ Dawe to Adelaide and Dawson Nichols’ new pieces (both incredible) before the first of Bryony Kimmings’ two shows. I’ve no idea why I thought Saturday night was the right time to see something called Sex Idiot in the Garden – the audience was full of drunkards and teenage hen’s nights – but the show worked out pretty well.

So… yeah. Great day.