Category: 2015 – News

ff2015, Day 34

So… that’s the end of my 2015 Festivalian activities (with the exception of a handful of visual arts exhibits I plan to check out before they close). A quick snooze, then off to Melbourne for In Dreams: David Lynch Revisited. No rest for the wicked! Or, rather, the wicked will rest very well on Tuesday night (…and the rest of 2015).

  1. A Simple Space
  2. Fully Furnished
  3. Trygve Wakenshaw’s NAUTILUS – a work in progress
  4. Wizard Sandwiches – Lettuce Play

Some preliminary stats for ff2015:

  • 167 unique shows: 12 Festival, 155 Fringe.
  • 170 total shows (saw 3 Fringe shows twice).
  • 171 tickets bought (two shows were free, and there were three shows that I missed for various reasons).
  • 42 Fringe Visual Arts exhibitions seen (so far).
  • Total Fringe Guide Coverage: 18.8%

And now, to write up the 162 shows I’ve not written up yet…

ff2015, Day 33

I attended my last Festival event today, leaving me with a tidy dozen shows for the year – my least-attended Festival year since I started writing, but there were a few cracking shows in that dozen. Also finished my Blinc experience; I didn’t quite manage to see everything on offer (most notably the hour-plus loops in the Blinc Bar, and the Pinky Flat pieces left me really cold), but Ryoichi Kurokawa’s piece (projected onto Festival Theatre) was totally worth every second spent in the cold.

  1. Spring Alibi
  2. Trash Test Dummies
  3. The Cardinals
  4. I Liked You Better Online
  5. We may have to choose
  6. Dr. Professor Neal Portenza’s Catchy Show Title
  7. Shake

I returned to Dr. Professor Neal Portenza’s Catchy Show Title after the tense debacle my SO and I attended on Clipsal weekend; what a difference a great audience makes! So much fun.

ff2015, Day 32

Just got home from A Young Man Dressed As A Gorilla Dressed As An Old Man Sits Rocking In A Rocking Chair For Fifty-Six Minutes And Then Leaves 3. It had everything that one could have hoped for: drama, suspense, laughs, and bananas. And drunk “normies” that thought the whole point was to drop trou and show your cock onstage.

  1. #nofilter
  2. Sous Vide
  3. Bully
  4. Ro Campbell: Road Warrior

What’s that? 158 unique shows? Isn’t that a Personal Best, Pete?

Why, yes. Yes, it is.

ff2015, Day 31

Today was the last of the Fearful Days for me: seven shows, some potentially tricky transitions, and a whole lot of unknowns.

But it all worked out… and there were some genuine surprises in amongst those shows. Mr Stuart’s distant range, for all its faults and lecturing, was super-enjoyable, and Paul Currie was absolutely mental.

Oh, and Beckett Triptych was a bit special, too.

  1. Beckett Triptych
  2. Rip, Drag & Ruminate
  3. Luster
  4. Mr Stuart’s distant range
  5. LEFT
  6. Paul Currie: Release the Baboons
  7. Fancy Boy Variety Show

Cancellations permitting, I just purchased the last of my tickets for the year…

ff2015, Day 30

Great day, really – except for the massive turd of an experience in The Experiment. Did not like. But I did manage to sit in on the “pilot” recording of Marcel’s new podcast, which was fun.

  1. Professor Mounteforte D. Hamsalami in ‘Life Science! a Career Retrospective’
  2. Nick Nemeroff – You’re All Dumb Idiots
  3. The Experiment
  4. The New Cabal

So glad I caught The New Cabal – an almost blistering jazz set with some amazing musicianship.

ff2015, Day 29

A relatively lazy day was capped off by a wander down to Elder Park with the intention of sitting around and watching Blinc for a few hours. Alas – everything was shut down by midnight. Harrumph.

  1. Dave Bloustien: The Tinder Profile of Dorian Gray
  2. Sarah Bennetto’s Funeral
  3. RAW Comedy Winner 2007 Jonathan Schuster presents I Won RAW Comedy In 2007.
  4. Gary Portenza: Apologies in Advance

Jonathan Schuster, eh? He’s a bit good.

ff2015, Day 28

My birthday was lovely. Not only did I see my 135th show of the year (equaling 2014’s effort), but I managed to snag some Hot Star chicken and a pulled pork burger from Low & Slow at Blinc Bar. Also: a stunning Girls’ Generation box set thing. These things make me happy.

  1. Strangely Flamboyant
  2. ODDBALL
  3. A Bit of an Overshare
  4. Dave Warneke Dates The Entire Audience
  5. Dan Lees: Brainchild

‘Tis a pity Becky Lou was unable to perform Shake tonight; hoping I can still squeeze that show in.

ff2015, Day 27

Today brought forth the only shows that really leapt out and grabbed me at the Festival launch back in October: the two Cedar Lake performances. And boy, they did not disappoint. Mixed Rep was worthy of a standing ovation on the strength of the third piece alone.

  1. Orbo Novo
  2. DivaLicious: Opera Rocks!
  3. Law and Disorder
  4. Alice Fraser: Everyone’s A Winner
  5. Mixed Rep
  6. EUROWISION Adelaide 2015

Of course, Mixed Rep ran long (or, rather, had two intervals that weren’t mentioned), so that meant I missed my planned 10pm show. But it also meant that I got to have a drink with Helen and Tina at Blinc Bar, so that was nice :)

Also: it’s currently my birthday. Yay :)

ff2015, Day 26

So – Cadence is a belter of a performance (despite starting late and running long, leading to the need to bum a car ride to my next show). And We Are All left a bitter taste in my mouth, like I’d just been conned.

  1. Nufonia Must Fall
  2. Cadence
  3. Tales of a Strongman
  4. Promise and Promiscuity: A New Musical by Jane Austen and Penny Ashton
  5. We Are All
  6. The Moon in Me
  7. Darkness and Light

Weird old day.

ff2015, Day 25

A weird bunch of shows today; a couple that I was really looking forward to didn’t quite live up to expectations… but one most certainly did meet expectations.

Far exceeded them, actually.

Vampillia were – to be quite frank – fucking amazing. Support band Fourteen Nights at Sea were brilliant – all hipster power chords and drones that carried me like a wave (their first post-introduction song saw the bass player play the same two notes for six minutes, in which I found great joy), but the Japanese “brutal orchestra” lived up to their name: superb strings, operatic vocals, and lashings of funk, punk, metal, grind, and guttural growls from a frontman who roamed through the audience regularly.

Amazing.

  1. Sweep Under Rug
  2. The Sounds of Silent
  3. Excavate
  4. Vampillia
  5. Ronny Chieng – You Don’t Know What You’re Talking About

The really weird part, though? A guy on the fence near me tapped me on the shoulder during Vampillia’s warm-up. “Do I know you?” he asked. I struggled, but couldn’t help him. Suddenly, he remembered: “Aren’t you that guy in the The City Messenger? The one who sees all those shows?”

So, yeah. There’s that.

ff2015, Day 24

OK… so. Right. I have to admit to having been a little underwhelmed with my Festival viewing so far.

Not anymore.

La Merda is absolutely brutal, in the best way possible. It gently lures you in and then batters you senseless, leaving your ears ringing; the third act is positively incendiary. I’ve used that word to describe it on every medium I can, because it’s the perfect description.

In short: go see La Merda.

  1. Disney Guy
  2. Gillian Cosgriff: Whelmed.
  3. La Merda
  4. Marcel Blanch-de Wilt: Death of a Disco Dancer

The other shows today were pretty good, too! But go see La Merda. Seriously.

ff2015, Day 23

When I got a text message within the opening minute of Bok & Fahey’s (fun) show, I immediately thought it was a cancellation… and, sure enough, I was right. But every cloud has a silver lining, yeah? And what that cancellation led to was a bunch of opportunistic plan changes, on the back of my new-found confidence in getting from venue-to-venue in record time. Bakehouse to Gluttony (via FringeTIX) in six minutes? No worries. Gluttony to Producers in one minute? Cool.

  1. SmallWaR
  2. 2 States of Lauren Bok and Bridget Fahey
  3. Marathon
  4. Boris & Sergey’s Vaudevillian Adventure
  5. Grabbin’ a piece
  6. Set List

The upshot of that was that I managed to squeeze in one extra show than I’d planned for the day. Nice for me, but maybe a bit grim for the cancelled act.

ff2015, Day 20

After a quick run through dotMaze (don’t expect to start on-time at the beginning of the day!) and bidding my gorgeous Significant Other adieu (after an all-too-brief visit which had her taking in one Festival & eight Fringe shows), I tried to get back into the swing of things. So much to see, so little time!

  1. dotMaze: Get Lost!
  2. Who’s Your Daddy? the funny side of parenting
  3. Marilyn Forever
  4. Icarus Falling
  5. Kirsty Mac – Feminazi
  6. Smile Practice

Things really picked up after I chased away the dozes in the first half of Marilyn Forever. The second half was solid (with a great climax), Icarus Falling is proper Fringe awesomeness, Kirsty Mac presented some great standup, and Smile Practice was quite spectacular in the most WTF way possible. I mean, I had one of the performers sitting naked (well, with his pants around his ankles) next to me for most of the show. His genitals were covered in purple glitter. On stage, a super-drunk freeloader was kissing the other performer before stumbling down the stairs and heckling incoherently.

So, yeah – good times!