Sexytime!
Tessa Waters & Kai Smythe @ Adelaide Town Hall – The Prince Alfred Room
7:00pm, Fri 11 Mar 2011
Sexytime! had been a relatively late inclusion on The Schedule; luckily, having witnessed a snippet of its madcap buffoonery at the TuxCat Staff Show the previous evening, I rocked into The Prince Alfred Room confident of a good time.
Of course, the Room itself is completely unsuited to a production such as this – it’s a flat space, with no raised staging, which meant that anytime performers Tessa Water ad Kai Smythe got down on the ground – and, let’s face it, with a title like Sexytime! you’d hope that was going to be pretty frequent – anyone in the crowd more than three rows back would be afforded little in the way of a view. But I’d managed to snaffle an aisle seat, which meant I did get to see what was going on.
Waters and Smythe play Woman and Man, with pre-recorded voiceovers placing them in different scenes in an attempt to trace sexytimes through the ages. Opening with a ridiculous Garden of Eden piece – Woman and Man wearing their flesh-coloured leotards with appropriate leafy adornments – we’re also treated to laugh-a-second pieces at the Blue Light Disco (coming-of-age sexual explorations), and an interpretive dance battle of the sexes. The expected climax of the performance, the bed scene, is wonderfully silly – and completely familiar.
Both Waters and Smythe are superb, mute save for some whimpers and short exclamations (but their facial expressions say it all); Tessa manages to exude a divine furtiveness whilst still managing to veer towards the Madonna or the Whore, as appropriate to the scene. Kai’s seventies porn-star moustache and insecure snickers and chuckles make his Man work; his overt physicality is just bizarre and totally over-the-top, no more so than when he performs a dancing ode to manhood to Queen’s Flash. In fact, the soundtrack throughout was fantastic, and perfectly used – Foxy Lady, anyone?
In short: a wonderfully fun and silly and – yes – uproariously sexy show, only let down by the location.