Doom Riders
The 4 Noels @ The Dining Room
8:30pm, Fri 22 Feb 2002
Score: 3
Short Review: Disappointing
Let me preface this review with a story. At the beginning of each Festival/Fringe assault, I scoot through the respective guides to decide which shows to see. Sometimes I pick acts because their blurb just looks interesting; sometimes I pick acts because of a positive prior experience with the artists; sometimes I pick acts because someone I (somewhat) trust suggested I go see it.
It was the last of these reasons that dragged me to see The 4 Noels in “Doom Riders”. After the high I was on after “Strindberg (In Paris)”, I thought that a recommended comedy would go down well.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. This was bad. Really, really bad. Not just bad, but it just felt… fake. The 4 Noels (of which there are three, ha ha) seemed to crack up at each other with “spontaneous” laughter during the show. Often. And I use the quotes there carefully, because I doubt it was as spontaneous as they would have you believe.
The acting was OTT, the plot was dead-in-the-water, and the one or two genuinely amusing bits were milked ad infinitum. The constant crack-ups did nothing but annoy the piss out of me, and cause the show to run long. I can’t believe I nearly missed the start of “Brookly to Beechworth” for this.
So, in essence, what I saw before me was three men that could have a bit of a dance and a sing, over-acting a lame half-plotted story, and laughing at each others exploits. To be fair, my SO really enjoyed this show: “It was just fun”.
I, however, would rather have gone to the dentist.