Plaza Parlour at Royal Croquet Club. 9 Mar 2018
Help! I Think I Might Be Fabulous is a highly recommended uplifting, biting, and oh-so-funny show about self-affirmation and the joie de vivre that can come from being true to one’s self. It leaves a smile on your face that is still there long after the show is over. It’s completely feel-good!
Alfie Ordinary is anything but ordinary, he is ‘fab’! ‘Fabulousness’ is of course knowing your own strengths, appetites, limitations and reasons for being alive, including being ‘out’ if you are ‘not out’, and then proudly and passionately living that way all the time, rather than suppressing one’s real-self for some or all of the time.
Alfie takes to the stage dressed in costumes that have consumed nearly every sequin, splash of glitter and eye-lash left in Australia, and it would have been difficult to find any with Mardi Gras having barely been put to bed for another year. He announces cheekily that he is the son of a drag queen which makes him a drag prince, and from then on the laughs come thick and fast!
The show can almost be described as juke-box musical for a solo performer. Not far below the surface of the hilarity and hilarious antics there is a serious narrative, and the songs that Alfie sings, or are sung by guest stars Whitney Houston and Bette Midler in the form of gorgeous and side-splitting puppets, become part of the story.
Deservedly, this is an award winning show, and it is one of the best hours one has spent at the Fringe. Don’t hesitate to see it yourself, and enjoy the ambience of Fringe across the river at Pinky Flat. (Warning: It’s a cashless society at Pinky Flat, so take a card if you want to buy a Pimms or a G&T or a …)
Kym Clayton
4.5 stars
When: 9 to 18 Mar
Where: Plaza Parlour at Royal Croquet Club
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Due Bus Ltd. The Howling Owl. 8 Mar 2018
Not happy, Jan, that Monsieur Lucont started up 20 minutes late. Doesn't he realise there's a festival on, and people have other things to do? Lucont's laconic insouciance was perfectly aligned with his unapology, and he got the audience laughing at itself for mucking up the timetable. Well done! Or very rare for the comic to get away with it so easily.
I've seen this handsome French devil before in the Fringe and the Gaul with the gall is as funny as ever. This show relied heavily on participation and the whine list was provided by the audience before the show. Lucont had no trouble satirising whatever anybody said with such aplomb that you had to laugh. His fine singing voice was expressed in a risky, cringe-worthy song about love lace. Much humour was made of the British and Brexit.
While Lucont's laid-back style is precious, a critical breakthrough energy must still be attained, and he needed more wind, sun or gas on the evening of my attendance. Not more whine.
David Grybowski
3.5 stars
When: 6 to 17 Mar
Where: The Howling Owl
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Joanne Hartstone & Gavin Robertson. Treasury 1860. 7 Mar 2018
There's literary earnestness at Writers’ Week and rowdy theatrical hi-jinx at the Unearthly Garden.
But in the quiet centre of town in a rather streamlined and elegant bar where people can sit in comfort with a fine wine or cocktail and some yummy hot nibbles, there is Greg Byron, performance poet.
He’s a wonderful wandering bard and, of course, there’s no better bard space than a bar space.
Byron rolls up in a wonderful costume, waistcoat and long buttoned dress coat, very period and English and also very warm.
He’s here from the UK under the umbrella of the Joanne Hartstone season so one knows he has class.
He has a little black book which is full of his poems. He picks and chooses among them, sizing up his audience and the mood of the moment. He skips over Brexit poems and things he deems dark and dull. The US election, there’s a spot of fun. He reads a poem about the orange man. He has a poem about British political apathy, but he can’t be bothered to read it.
The audience is liking him already.
He’s a personable poet and has something of the actor about him. It turns out that he has had an acting career but that he has chosen life as a troubadour of rhyme and perhaps reason.
His poems have a bit of a satiric edge to them. A political whammy sometimes. Whimsy. Wit. Nostalgia. Surprise, surprise, even a Fibonacci poem. That feels like a first. It’s a ripper.
There’s an Attenborough poem, an eco-poem on the polluted sea, a Postcard from the Beach in Spring and there are recorded sound effects operated by Anna Thomas, behind the bar of Treasury 1860.
Just for variety, he throws in some prose.
It is easy to settle back and let Byron regale with his North England accent.
Greg Byron is his character name. The actor behind it is Gavin Robertson and one just has to admire the very essence of him, wandering the world with nothing but a talent and poetry. It’s a perilous living.
But he certainly breathes good and mindful air into the Fringe.
And. methinks, he may just be first poet ever to rhyme “Aristotle" with "golden wattle".
Samela Harris
4.5 stars
When: 7 to 18 Mar
Where: Treasury 1860
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Also at Stirling Fringe - Coventry Library 9 to 11 Mar
Anya Anastasia. Queen's Theatre at The Lab. 8 Mar 2018
Social activism, politics, varied media and popular culture of many modes have commingled as long as humans have created social structures. Anya Anastasia’s The Executioners is one sharp and very subtle satirised blend of such elements in our times, built to leave you seeking the genuine article from cravenly false bullshit.
Pairing up with fellow musician Gareth Chin, Anastasia’s cabaret polemic finds delicious voice through her super hero, super hi tech, super white costumed, snarky activist/futurist character. She struts her stuff on a set design screaming ‘I’m a star activist,’ in the mould of your least favourite such celebrity.
She is engagingly smug. A bitchy songstress of popular causes against the eroding influences of social media, climate change politics, people power, freedom movements – you name it, she’ll have a rant to fit. Yet this star is as trapped by the alluring dangers she sings against, as much as she figures herself an executioner of evils. At the forefront of her, is her iPhone with torchlight on, shining the light on her and the audience in modern collective solidarity, supported by an iPad attached to the microphone stand. Social media sharing in collective algorithmic ensnarement.
But behind the extreme modernist front, exposed through costume and fantastic film projection work by Underground Media, lies the music and in that, the trick of this production if you know your history.
Listen closely. You’ll hear the styles of folk and 60s protest songs written for piano, ukulele, and piano accordion along with the lilting strains of the peace movement embodied in the sitar. You can’t pick a song of the era, but the style Anastasia links her cracking lyrics to is unmistakable.
This tack brilliantly marries past and future takes on politics in which the urgent heartfelt, blood-and-sweat, passion infused activism of the past meets socially pretentious and selfish causes rallying of today.
This is one show political junkies with a cause to scratch definitely need to see, and embrace its musically sharp one, two, jab right, upper left, to flaky activism.
David O’Brien
5 stars
When: 8 to 12 Mar
Where: The Lab at Queens Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Gluttony & Highwire Events & Entertainment. The Octagon at Gluttony. 7 Mar 2018
Red is the colour of power, passion and sensuality, and Rouge has all of that. On entering The Octagon there are warning signs about adult themes, and this show has them in buckets. There is much flesh on display: tight chiselled men and voluptuous lithe women. There is ambiguous sexuality. The show is cheeky and lusty, but its not sensationalist or gratuitous. It’s just plain fun but it’s not a complete winner, because there is unrealised potential.
Circus has become a significant part of the Fringe program, and over the years there have been some exceptional acts. Rouge is good, but it doesn’t rise to the same heights as say La Soiree or Soap. Rouge comprises an eclectic range of acts: fire eating, balancing, aerial, tumbling, dance, burlesque and singing. It’s fast paced with all acts set to a toe tapping suite of up tempo songs that form both a backdrop and a quirky but intelligent rationale for the acts. When this works, the show is at its best, and most naughty!
The red diva singing coloratura soprano lines while harbouring an androgynous guy and a voluptuous woman beneath her skirts is a case in point. It was titillating and naughty and edgy! (What were they doing to her?!)
The small amount of audience participation was risqué, thankfully, and it was oh-so-funny and well scripted. We wanted more of that, and less of the traditional circus acts. (Why bother with fire eating when Fuego Carnal is just around the corner in another venue doing the same stuff but a hundred times better and more spectacularly.)
The hard stuff is always in the title. It’s Rouge. It should be sexy and edgy and fun – all of it.
Kym Clayton
3.5 stars
When: 7 to 18 Mar
Where: The Octagon at Gluttony
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au