Adventure Hour!: A 29-and-a-half minute Time Bending, Old-Fashioned Adventure With Intrepid Explorers Professor Gorski and Miss Ellaneous
Mr Gorski and Miss Ellaneous @ Gluttony (The Bally)
4:00pm, Sun 20 Feb 2011
There’s always a bit of danger when going to a show targeted at children – sometimes the writing just isn’t engaging enough for the adult mind. And when it’s a circus show, there’s the secondary danger that the spectacle being presented is also going to miss the mark.
Unfortunately, Adventure Hour! suffers from both these maladies.
There’s no doubting that the Adventure Hour!‘s cast – Mr Gorski, a colonial English explorer, and Miss Ellaneous, a… erm… wonderfully costumed lass – exude buckets of enthusiasm and character, and they certainly work the children sitting on the mats in the middle of the Bally. There’s lots of smiles and eye contact and wide expressive gestures… but when it comes to the circus content, it’s a whole other story.
Miss Ellaneous performs some hoop tricks but, perhaps impeded by the nature of her dress, there were a few slips and staggers. Likewise, some of their combined juggling antics went awry, but thankfully no children were struck as a result of the spills. There was, however, some pretty clever hat tricks, along with a bit of plate-spinning (which is certainly a unique feature in the current crop of circus acts).
But, at eighteen bucks for half-an-hour of performance, there just didn’t seem to be enough content… and a few too many spills in the content that was there. And, given that the Bally suffers mightily from the afternoon sun and the audience were left sweltering, it was almost mercifully short. As I mentioned before, the pair are blessed with a great sense of theatre and engagement with the kids… it’s just that this kid felt like he was well outside the target audience.