Important Egg-Based Announcement

This may be the last thing I ever write. Probably not, but if so, please blame the really weird egg I had for breakfast. This thing was nuts. And this post, I realise, is a timely corrective to today’s Age article about blogging as an intelligence-enhancing and happiness-making activity.

Anyway, this egg. I first noticed something awry when I took it from the fridge. It was unexpectedly heavy, and I softly murmured “what have we here?” for dramatic effect. I paid it no mind, however, and this egg’s companion was already a-sizzling away in the pan so I shrugged off my trepidations and continued in a neat and orderly fashion.

A few minutes later as I sat down to eat and as I raised a forkful of egg and toast towards my waiting gob, the egg went flying off to hit my chin. This is a really unnerving experience which I won’t dwell on. Suffice to say, egg is a horrible thing to have on your face, although I was wishing someone else was present so I could make a joke about literally having egg on my face. Since that joke wouldn’t have been particularly funny and the image would be a bit gross, I would then figuratively have egg on my face too and I could round out the rest of my days on earth knowing that at least once in my life I had been a human pun.

Anyway, the point about the egg was that it leapt off my fork as if it were a sentient being with no desire to be eaten, just like me or you. Well, assuming you’re not one of those people who goes trolling the internet looking for someone to eat them (or to offer to be eaten by them) in which case: Hi! Why in God’s good name are you reading this site? How do these posts relate to your interests? Really, I’m genuinely interested.

I mean I suppose I should unpin that prejudiced scowl currently affixed to my face and consider the fact that even internet autocannibalism fetishists probably have other interests too and that it’s only my small-mindedness that makes me think that everything they do must somehow relate back to the whole dinner-for-one part of their lives. I suppose it’s common for us to see someone with a marked difference to ourselves and reduce them to that difference, but of course that’s a mean-spirited thing to do.

So some dude enjoys being rolled naked in egg and flour and pelted with breadcrumbs and then dipped in hot oil. There’s no reason why schnitzel-man mightn’t also enjoy mixed tennis, Grey’s Anatomy and the weekly office footy tipping competition.

But I can hear you all clamouring to hear more about the egg, so let’s return to that mysterious yet compelling scene. Not long after finishing the egg, I was outside and noticed a little bit on my jumper that had obviously made a break for it during the egg-on-face moment. It took me a second to work out what it was because it was the most radioactive orange you can image, this thick, bright, iridescent colour. I was a bit shocked because, well, a whole heap more of that stuff had just gone into my stomach. So here I sit, facing an uncertain future of digestion or death or something unimaginably worse.

Also, I bought this huge orchid yesterday.

I’m not sure why. I think I harbour a secret desire to be an old man doddering around his rooftop conservatory in a silk dressing gown, trying to breed the elusive black orchid while entertaining callers with tales of my adventures battling psychic leprechauns and inventing a three-way mirror and the time I infiltrated an insidious occult organisation’s annual fundraiser in a gorilla suit. Since I’ve never managed to keep a plant alive for any measurable length of time, I might be a bit ambitious here.

Well, I think this extended bit of tomfoolery is enough to have supercharged my brain a bit and even as I type this I feel a tiny part of me running around yelling LEVEL UP! Though really, I don't think blogging makes anyone smarter or happier. That's just toxic egg talk.

I caught Toby Sullivan’s new solo show Not Quite Right the other night and it’s really really good.

Toby is the Business Manager (I think) for the Comedy Festival but has been doing his own comedy stuff for years now. He doesn’t perform very often, though, and this is the first extended thing I’ve seen him do on his own. It’s a simple little story about a trip he took to Sydney, but it’s seriously packed with more funnies than most shows you’ll see in the comedy festival itself. It comes across as someone who has been able to study the form for a long time and has learnt a lot. Plus he’s a very skilled performer with a pacy delivery and plenty of smarts. It’s on for a couple of weeks at Trades Hall.

I also saw Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky on Sunday and it’s easily my favourite film of the year. Some people will hate it, others will be unmoved either way, but I think it’s a profound and brave film with some unforgettable moments and brilliant characters. In fact, I don’t think that character is even the right word, since Leigh’s process really produces people as much as types. There’s no sense that anyone is ‘acting,’ but equally there’s no earnest attempt at the kind of non-acting that usually makes such films very boring. Whatever. It’s about a primary school teacher with an indefatigably sunny outlook on life and a desire to just make the people around her happy. Of course, that’s put into contrast with various other ways of living, and there’s lots of undercurrents concerning different kinds of teaching and the unnoticed effects we have on others. Plus some irresistibly funny parts – the juggernaut bit, the ‘My Space!’ flamenco, En Ra Ha. You must go see it, and apologies if it’s not your thing.

Between.

I’m just back from the premiere of Brit kids’ 1927 Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea at the Malthouse and I raaaather liked it. 1920s-style mayhem celebrating silent cinema on the cusp of sound, but not quite there – the road not taken. An art form that could have gone another way – if the Big Five production companies hadn’t ganged up to force the talkies on us unsuspecting folk.

1927’s shtick is charming nostalgia for a time we postmoderns never experienced but know too well. It’s a mostly B&W combination of live action and silent film – often cunningly blurred – telling post-Victorian tales of animated mayhem and cautionary tale nastiness. The cast is three-girled, finger-curled and eye-kohlled, their victims gingerbreaded and innocently pantalooned. Coles’ Funny Picture Book tales with unexpected shadows. It’s lovely, fun, terrible strangeness. Sit in the fourth row and be transported to another realm. I dare ya.

Silent cinema has been on my mind of late. I’ve been listening to the Norwegian band Je Suis Animal.



Je Suis Animal’s sound is a reminder of the stuff I listened to 15 years ago – the Brit shoegazer stuff experiencing a revival in mainland Europe right about now.
Je Suis Animal most remind me of Stereolab’s early years.



Stereolab was one of my favourite bands when I was a teen and after making it to England at 19 I hunted the bastards down and scummed an interview. I was there in Tim and Laeticia’s kitchen being served red cordial and asking questions they couldn’t answer about songs they couldn’t remember. They were hardly older than I was, but I was their biggest fan, so I blagged the story – well, my sociable buddy Mr Monk did – after we ran into Stereolab’s backing singer Mary at another band’s gig. Mary was from Queensland, and the national connection was enough to score us an afternoon with the band I’d been idolising for years. We drank the cordial and talked the music. That was a good day.

Mary was cycling through London a few years later and was killed by a car.

Je Suis Animal also remind me of Lush, another shoegazer band I was once familiar with.



Monk and I spent a few nights with the Lush kids. We went on a pub crawl with singers Miki and Emma, and in the wee hours Miki walked us through her family photo album. We slept on her couch and gawked at the guitar pedal setup as we snuck past the band-room in the morning. We felt part of the band now, and a few nights later went drinking with drummer Chris – he's the guy at the start of the clip above. Soon after, Chris hung himself. He was a fan of Red Stripe Beer. That’s about all I remember.

Hey Theatre! (and Circus)

Hey, theatre! What’s with the not-being-that-good – except sometimes! I’ve been with you for ages now and I think we’ve been out 68 times this year not that I’m counting. Well, obviously, I’m counting. And you’re still not that good, sure. But we’re old friends. Like, I’m the old friend who turns a blind eye to your staggering inadequacies and you’re the old friend who promises to turn up in a tailored suit for an evening of sparkling wit and fancy-dancing and ends up falling out of a taxi with vomit on your Crocs and a banged-up tale of how you got waylaid by Billy Bragg and a Russian wolfhound and then proceeds to label your drunken alley-bound urinary antics “theatrical graffiti”.

Even though a goodish part of my life is misspent knocking elbows with theatre crowds, I’m not really one for plays. Plays have all these hang-ups about characters and story and theme which really get in the way of a good production. Not that those things don’t interest me, but it’s obvious that nineteenth century realism left a big dirty pawprint that no amount of modernism has managed to squeegee away. And modern theatre, too, has a lot to answer for, but I’ll conduct that trial another day (perhaps employing The Trial as an ironic model, but more likely just pretending that the inclusion of the term “trial” and some shitty acting and a judge in a bowler hat will allow me to review my uninformed rant as “Kafkaesque”).

The idea of psychologically “real” characters, for instance, would be the first casualty of my fantasy one-man crusade against theatre. Actors are as intrinsically fascinating as anyone else who walks past my window, but usually when I see an actor trying to cosset themselves into the character a playwright has managed to burp up, I feel like I’m watching an Hieronymus Bosch painting being used as a placemat. I guess that’s the point of acting, though. If someone we met was painfully trying to appear to be someone else, we’d likely edge away slowly. The miracle of theatre is that we pay for it.

Finally, most plays just don’t speak to my demographic. That might be a demographic of one, but I don’t really care to see stories about most of the things that plays seem to be about. I’ll put it bluntly: I want to see plays about monkeys, robots, ghosts, and zombies. Of that list, I’ve only seen two shows about monkeys in the past month and nothing dealing with the rest. And contemporary theatre pretends to speak to the people.

I was a bit wary of The Devil’s Dictionary for a few reasons. Firstly, it’s by a first-time playwright. Secondly, the promotional material noted that it deals with big themes like Ambition, Art, Law and Marriage. Thirdly, it’s a play.

Thank god it was pretty good.

I don’t know much about Ambition, Art, Law or the other thing. I don’t know much about anything capitalisable.

The Devil’s Dictionary is exactly what the MTC aims for but fails to deliver when it programs David Williamson. It’s a complex and sophisticated think-piece shrink-wrapped into the kind of accessible packaging even the simplest viewer could enjoy – Sex and the City in the hands of Sondheim. Easy laughs with an undercurrent of contemporary urgency. Theatre, are you starting to redeem yourself?

At 61, this is Helen Heritage’s first play. I was worried at first, not by Heritage’s age but by my own fear of first-time playwrights. I’ve been one, once. I was rubbish. Heritage is better.

Recently I made it to the opening do for Circus Oz’ 30^th Birthday Bash. It was a lot like my 30^th, but with more people and a massive freak-out circus. Not much like my 30^th then, but there were no animals which wasn’t unlike my 30^th (as I pointed out to an ABC doco crew who seemed uninterested in interviewing me).

The Circus Oz 30^th Birthday Bash was pretty sweet. I’ve seen C-OZ do better. But then, I’ve looked out my window and seen uni-cyclists casually pedalling their way to non-stardom, and six-year-olds quad-back-flipping their way to anonymity. Right now there’s a man in a three piece suit bench-pressing the grass while a three-year-old makes sport of his dog. Australia knows how to circus, and Melbourne is the hub of it.

WTF Paris? Or, You Need Help, Mann.

Sometimes when life gets a bit much or my work is piling up or the cat is wailing like she wants food or something I’m compelled to close my eyes, corkscrew my fists into my temples and take myself to a happy place. Sure, my happy place consists of a dull-looking carpark, but that’s where most dreams are made. I start my low-rent reverie by pumping up my Reeboks and before I know it I’m carrying oversized letters towards a beige-brick backdrop before finally finding myself free to bust out with the equally oversized dance moves I’ve been keeping pent up in my soul for so long. Pretty soon I’m pleased to discover that I mustn’t be too troubled, since my bust-out moves are pretty tame. It looks a lot like this (especially the two champs who start frogwalking at about 0.55).

Oh no! That’s not my special place at all. That’s the most important dance craze sweeping Paris (since 2000). Why have I never heard of Tecktonik until now? Perhaps it’s because I’ve been too busy with more important matters. Perhaps not. Either way, I’ve lost count of the number of people who’ve recently stopped me on the street to say “Born D, Tecktonik is just a lame mashup of vogueing, krumping and wacking set to Euroclash music with a weird hand-spinning-around-the-head movement, dude.”

My enthusiasm for this new (I’m tempted to write neu just to sound more European) dance style matched with my lack of credibility adds up to nothing less than a total endorsement of Tecktonik, and I have the lack of friends to prove it.

At its “best” (and I use the term under legal counsel), Tecktonik is supposed to look like it does in the video above. But more often than not, it comes out like this.

Did Reebok actually pay someone to make that last ad? Seriously. That's not good dancing. And it's not even a good video clip - drive to a desert and get people to half-heartedly dance around, occasionally on top of a mirror or piece of aluminium foil or something. How was that pitched? I don't know that it makes the difficult leap to "concept", fitting more into the class of "random neuron activity".

Overall though the phrase I’d use here is HYPNOTIC LAMENESS. I know that describes 90% of the internet, but I really am transfixed by these kids and their low-energy arm windmilling, their pretty basic footwork and their unselfconsciousness. Best of all, Tecktonik is all over the streets of Paris. Someone I know took a trip there not long ago and reported that very average Tecktonik dancers were to be found hawking their wares on the rues and boulevards at every turn. It’s not that they’re any good – quite the opposite, according to my insider – it’s that they are there. That’s what I find really rad. People dancing in public with no discernible motive is always worth voting for. This article suggests how Tecktonik can be a good thing for Troubled Teens:

"Dancing has changed me," says Sofian, a 15-year-old from a tough Paris suburb who discovered Tecktonik recently.

"Before I was on the street. I was at the police station everyday. It's been two or three months now since I did anything stupid."

It's refreshing to see the thing figured as a positive social phenomenon, not a Kids on the Street are Dangerous and Probably On Drugs beat-up.

I spent the month of May in Japan for some damn reason, and when I was there I saw an incredible amount of street dancing. It was mainly centred in Nagoya. I’d walk past a park and see dozens of groups of people dancing. Everything from hip-hop and R&B style to old fashioned fan and drums dances. I couldn’t work out why. Someone told me it was because studio space is expensive so it’s cheaper just to do it on the street.

These people seemed to be on a break from work, just having an old knees-up during lunch.

These girls were practicing some R&B moves in a park.

This huge outfit wase doing some kind of old-fashioned traditional thing.

I’ve seen a good bit of dance since getting back – Michelle Heaven’s Disagreeable Object and Jo Lloyd’s Apparently That’s What Happened were the best of the bunch – but I’ll review them elsewhere. For now, I wish there were more street-dancing here. Even if it was vaguely irritating French dudes in Reeboks doing it.

In other news, I've just gotten back from the Helpmann Awards nomination announcements. A pretty wham-bam affair, competently compered by Rob Guest, a no-nonsense Helen Dallimore, Lisa McCune phoning it in and Ian Stenlake delivering more laughs than anything in Guys and Dolls. Here are a few that may be of interest to someone reading.

Best choreography in a dance thing that's not a musical

Tanya Liedtke, Construct

Lloyd Newson, To Be Straight with You

Gideon Obarzaneck, Glow

Christopher Wheeldon, After the Rain

Best contemporary concert or something

Bjork on the Sydney Opera House steps

Bon Jovi

Justin Timberlake

Rufus Wainwright

Best comedy performer

The Umbilical Brothers, Julia Morris, Ross Noble, Frank Woodley

Best dancer (dude)

Steven Heathcote, After the Rain

Akram Khan, Sacred Monsters

Gavin Webber, Roadkill

Paul White, Construct

Best dancer (dudette)

Sara Black, Glow

Lucinda Dunn, Nutcracker (I think)

Sarah-Jayne Howard, Roadkill

Larissa McGowan (can't recall what for)

Best male actor in a play

Marton Csokas, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Martin Nieidermayer, The Tell-Tale Heart

Richard Roxborough, Toy Symphony

Geoffrey Rush, Exit the King

Best female actor in a play

Kate Dickey, Alst

Catherine McClements, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Genevieve Picot, Rock and Roll

Leah Purcell (can't remember what for)

Best dance thing

Glow, Roadkill, The Nutcracker, Sacred Monsters

Best play thing

Black Watch (huh?), Toy Symphony, When the Rain Stops Falling, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Redressing the Imbalance

Given the bad karma I'm probably accumulating with negative reviews, here's some more ways to pass the afternoon in a more spiritually fulfilling and uplifing way.

You could ponder the wonder of guide horses.


You can ruminate on the questions raised by Man Baby.


You can educate yourself as to the social evils of software piracy while soaking up some awesome old school hip-hop.


You can check out some more deserted farms in Iceland.

You can look for a reason behind things that probably, let's face it, you and I will never really understand.



Or you can listen to the full new album by the lovely Sigur Ros while looking out at the park and just accepting that some people will walk their dogs in the rain, and that this is kind of a nice thing. Well, I can do that. I hope you can do something similar, if the urge should take you.

Boeing and Nothingness

Every good film involving a plane includes, at some point, one of the following lines.

“The landing gear is jammed! I don’t know if I can bring this bird down!”

or

“I’ve never flown a real plane! I’ve only flown the flight simulator on my computer!”

or

“I’m going to have to go out on the wing and fix it myself. Tell my wife I love her.”

But the best bit – the best – in any plane-centric movie is when someone taps a dial on the dashboard, mutters “that can’t be right”, looks over their shoulder out the cockpit window and then turns to their fellow passengers and says, in a steely and urgent voice:

“We’re losing fuel. Fast. We got a mountain ridge up ahead and a nuclear warhead in the trunk. If we’re gonna make it, we’re gonna have to lighten our load. I want you to throw out everything not nailed down – you got me? Everything! And may God help us all.”

As I reached the one-hour mark of the new show Boeing, Boeing, I found myself in similar circumstances. I started mentally tossing out my concentration, my good taste, my understanding of comic convention and any sensation in the rear compartments. I resisted the temptation to grab my chute and bail, but that may have been due to the incapacitating fear I experienced when I realised that there might well be nobody in the cockpit steering the thing I had found myself aboard.

Bertrand is a ne’er-do-well Parisian with three fiancées. “Qu’est que ce?” vous parlez? Tout juste, Auguste! His thing is to woo airline hostesses, whose international schedules allow him to keep a harem of women who live in his bachelor pad on different days of the week, unaware of each others’ existences. Then his nerdy old buddy Robert turns up, the girls’ outbound flights get cancelled, and we end up with one of those “comedies” where people are running in and out of doors almost but not quite meeting each other and having the confrontation that we’re all waiting for so we can get home for an early bed.

Boeing, Boeing was a movie back in the sixties in the genre known as sex comedies (the film’s tagline really was “The Big Comedy of Nineteen-Sexty-Sex!”). We don’t really get them anymore, since you can actually have sex movies these days rather than fumbling around the issue by padding it up as a goofy laff-fest that manages to not mention sex in inventive ways. The better sex comedies featured Doris Day and Rock Hudson, and usually had Tony Randall hamming it up in there somewhere. Sometimes Tony Curtis checked in for the ride. Writing this, I notice that the 50s and 60s sex comedies sure did feature a lot of gay icons of the time. If I remember the great doco The Celluloid Closet at all, some commentators suggest that this is because sex comedies were all about what wasn’t made explicit, the open secrets that anyone in the know could get, but which others would miss entirely. You know, subtexts. The wink at the audience that says “We know how frivolous this looks, but we know you get what we’re really saying, right?”

The new Boeing, Boeing actually doesn’t get that. There’s no irony to it, no camping it up. Because sex is out there on billboards and prime time TV, there’s no need to deliver it in veiled forms. The play is just a straight (in every sense) rendering of the original play, but given the naughties context it actually ends up seeming like some kind of nostalgic elegy for a period when Carry On and Benny Hill were considered risqué. When sex wasn’t talked about, since it certainly isn’t talked about here. Instead we have a fairly pungent image of a sleazy dude leading along three women for whom “nationality” substitutes for “character”. There’s the American, the Italian and the German. They have names, too, but that’s kind of beside the point.

The cast really give it all they’ve got here, and in some cases that’s a lot. When Sybilla Budd turns up about two years into the show as the fiery German Gertrude, she brings the house down with the kind of performance you wish had been available earlier in the piece. Sadly, with a script so dated and a production so muted, that just wasn’t possible. Shaun Micallef makes an effort to get into his character but seems a bit removed from it all, and Mitchell Butel as Robert mugs his way through Rowan Atkinson’s back-catalogue but can’t transcend the limitations of a character that seems nothing more than a collection of comic asides. I couldn't help but feel that some of the cast were here as the result of losing a bad bet.

I really thought that Boeing, Boeing could have had legs. That it could have taken its source material and had fun with it, playing on the now-painful sexual mores of the 60s while acknowledging the distance between its origins and ourselves. And there should have been some gorgeous design from the era, rather than a cold beige set and unchanging lighting we’re left with.

I’m not sure why you would stage a play with a title that’s so dangerously close to “Boring, Boring”.

At least we didn’t see “Booing, Booing”.

What a Pointless Post

Sometimes after a bad artistic experience you gotta scrub your innards all clean-like any way you know how. After last night's brouhaha with Mr Williamson I used the following things to decongest my aesthetic sinuses.

I was looking for an old version of the 1910 ragtime number Chinatown, My Chinatown, and came across this decent cover. During my search I realised that the song has some pretty racist lyrics, so I guess it's lucky that this one's just an instrumental.

More importantly: I also came across THIS VERSION and have been listening to it all day. It's by Tabby Andriello, and nobody really knows much about him or why he recorded the song on an album titled "The World's Greatest Mediocrity." I did manage to track down the following data:

"Tabby Andriello is Frank Andriello, my uncle... he is deceased, was never married nor did he have any children. He died October 3, 1988, the fifth of seven children born to a Calabrian tailor on April 9, 1920 , immigrated to the US at a very early age and grew up on the East Side... Among other things he made his living as a sound effects man. He won an impressive number of Clios and Andys for his work on many prominent TV and Radio commercials, as well as record albums for the likes of Peter Paul and Mary, Duke Ellington, Quincy Jones and the soundtrack for Jim Henson's award-winning surreal short Time Piece. The scholarship named after him at the Greenwich House Music School was his way of saying thanks; it was there that the GI Bill enabled him to complete a four-year course of study in music theory and composition. Beside his music, his incredible talent and great personality he may be best remembered for his unmanning resemblance to Fiorello LaGuardia when he was cast as the Major of Kovettes in full-page ads for the department store."

You can listen to the whole album here.

Or you can check out Cindy and Bert's "Der Hund Von Baskerville". It seems to be a late 60s narcoleptic rendering of the Sherlock Holmes classic set to a Black Sabbath tune while lost-looking hipsters dance as if someone is holding a gun to their family off-camera.


I don't know that I can really get through all of 20 Minutes to Go, but I just like that it exists. That somewhere out there someone felt the need to raise an (admittedly tiny) budget so that finally a short film/music clip could be made explaining The Rapture to the rest of us. We're all going to blow ourselves up while wearing awesome 80s clothes, it suggests, but then we'll all be taken bodily to Heaven where flowers talk, people wear togas and everyone can fly.



The Leave Me Alone Box is a nice philosophical curio that I dig. A box with a switch. When you flick the switch and turn on the box, a hand emerges and turns it back off. A machine whose only function is to deactivate itself. I love it.

And finally, Dell linked to some amazing photo art today that just rocks out like a person who hasn't learnt or doesn't totally get social inhibition. It's great. By a Korean artist named Yeondoo Jung, the Wonderland series is the best. Children's drawings used as the basis for stunning photographs.





I would like to live in this world.

Scarlett O'Hara at the Crimson Parrot

David Williamson and I have had our share of run-ins over the years and I can safely say that he usually comes out dusting his knuckles while I slink away nursing mental and emotional wounds which may lead to scarring. I can’t stand the guy’s plays for various reasons but he's a super-rich dude who could take a crap, stuff it in a PostPak and watch it interpreted by the country's leading theatre companies a year later, so I think I know where I stand. When my spidey senses picked up Williamson’s impending presence in Melbourne theatres late last year, I darted straight to my cupboard and removed the false backing which conceals my secret identity. It looks just like my normal identity, but is a bit meaner in reviews.

We all thought we’d seen the last of Williamson a few years ago but like any good supervillian he just keeps on coming back. I was doubly worried since his new play, Scarlett O’Hara at the Crimson Parrot, was clearly one of those team-up cross-over dealies where he enlists the help of another superpower to wreak menace on unsuspecting aesthetic sensibilities – in this case Simon Phillips. Phillips isn’t a supervillain, of course, but more one of those wild cards who sometimes uses his powers for good, sometimes for evil, and sometimes for Priscilla which was good but also kind of evil.

It’s with great pleasure and a certain amount of relief, then, that I stand here before you today to proclaim Scarlett O’Hara an unqualified success, rich with meaning and utterly contemporary in every way. It’s a credit to its makers, and a challenge to my preconceptions as to what dynamic, timely Australian theatre can really be.

No it’s not! It’s fucking awful! I was just playing a trick on you! When theatre is ghettoised as dull, pointless drivel for people whose cultural shoulder-chip prevents them from enjoying Big Brother, I point the finger at Williamson.

The MTC has had a rollercoaster few years of great and terrible plays, with only a couple occupying the middle-ground. Love Song, Season at Sarsaparilla, Holding the Man – all good shows I thoroughly enjoyed. On the other hand, some see last year’s season finale The Madwoman of Chaillot as a nadir in the MTC’s recent history. I’ll confess that after suffering a couple of hours of Williamson’s unfunny satire, tin ear, one-dimensional characterisation and narrative narcolepsy I was getting all nostalgic and misty-eyed for the big sets and bright colours of Madwoman. Gone is the frou-frou flouncing of an over-acting Magda assuming a steely rictus in the face of overacting bit-players ousted from a Yoplait commercial. There, I thought, was a show that was so dumb as to be enjoyable.

Scarlett concerns a 36-year-old waitress who is one of life’s losers. Unlucky in love and burdened with an annoying mother who attempts to dominate her life, she turns to classic Hollywood love stories as a refuge, and pretty soon we realise that she sees everything in her life reflected through these films. We know this because the play tells us so every forty seconds. When the 800^th bit of golden oldie footage is projected behind the players to comment subtly on the goings-on going on, we’ve seen enough. Especially when the goings on are something like “a person is going somewhere” and we’re forced to watch a bit of Hollywood celluloid depicting someone going somewhere, except on a horse or something. There’s a pretty fine line between “multimedia suggesting the fantasy-inflected interior life of our protagonist” and “padding required to stretch a fifteen minute scenario into a full-length play”.

The scenario? Tuck in, children. Scarlett is unlucky in love (I know I’ve said that already, but this play treads water for so long that everything gets presented to us at least twice). She decides that the owner of the restaurant in which she works, The Crimson Parrot, might be a bit alright and so promptly falls in love with him in that dizzy, head-over-heels way that that always seems so crazy and romantic and bewildering to friends (and, in this case, the audience). He’s what romantic comedies dub the Wrong Partner, though, since her real true love is the shy guy who keeps turning up to the restaurant alone and soiling his grundies whenever she speaks to him. Wrong Partners are necessary as they keep the audience guessing as to who the heroine will end up with. They’re usually of a higher status than both the lead and the Right Partner, but less sympathetic and rounded. This is the formula behind even the best rom-coms, from It Happened One Night to Bridget Jones' Diary. It’s how you play with the familiar concoction that counts.

In this case, Williamson doesn’t really play with it at all. Occasionally we shift into first gear but most of the time it coasts along in neutral with nothing done to alter the initial setting. Scarlett pines after the head chef while her dorky beau keeps returning and making gaga faces at her. You can only imagine the romantic complications that ensue. I mean that literally, since Williamson decides not to clue us in on them. There’s some vague drama surrounding the potential closing of the restaurant which might make the odd sous-chef clench his fists at the injustices of the fickle dining industry, but I just grimaced like I’d just been served a dodgy curry.

Thing is, I’ve seen Scarlett before. From Emma Bovary to Nurse Betty, she’s just another stinky incarnation of that offensive image of the woman who over-invests in romantic fantasies and loses the ability to see things as they are. She’s daffy and wacky and cute but she’s so caught up in the love myth that she can’t see it staring her straight in the face! For upwards of two hours with nothing resembling a subplot or complication! Excuse me for wondering out loud why there are so few representations of men who can’t tell the difference between images and reality. Oh wait, there’s that whole tradition since Don Quixote. Difference being that the female version is always mixed up about love, but I guess that’s because girls are into love stories and boys are into fightin’ and stuff. Good to see Mr Williamson establishing his place in a long literary lineage, I suppose.

But even Jane Austen satirised the whole notion of the woman who is really, really into stories and fudges up the distinction between fantasy and reality (Northanger Abbey). And I know, I know, Scarlett O’Hara is just a light comedy satirising, like all of Williamson’s work, the “Anglo-Celtic middle class” (that’s a quote from the program). But this is, according to the same program, an “urban, ambitious, literate tribe”. I think that this tribe is only allowed to think of itself in such a way because writers like Williamson present to itself that distorted image. I’d be surprised if the clumsy language, outdated pop-culture references and cringe-worthy slapstick of Scarlett O’Hara didn’t give your average urban, ambitious and/or literate tribesperson the kind of scowly face you get when an inept waitress spills your drink all over you (this situation marks the height of the play’s comedy, too).

I won’t even start on the constant gagging on the “edgy” talk that goes on in professional kitchens, too – Williamson’s Greek guy and his penchant for underage girls; the air-headed waitress nearly assaulted by a pack of footy players; the older gay man whose job I never even understood but whose main reason for existing seemed to involve pouting, camping about and being told to “shut up, you old poof”. Oh Williamson, you irascible devil. Don’t be so un-PC!

If I seem unfairly disposed towards SOATCP, it’s simply because vast sums of money are thrown towards the writing and production of plays that would barely receive a passing grade in a remedial scriptwriting class. Slap DW’s name on it and it’ll have people punching the air and slapping their thighs till they bleed. There are plenty of great writers in Australia today, whatever anyone tells you, and I’d never really gotten the whole Gangland argument in a visceral way until tonight. When I spent two hours clenching my fists like a sous-chef. Check!

Be Kind

Old man outside my window harshly scolding crying toddler just now:

"It's just a whinge, is all you are is a whinge, always crying all the time. Waaa waaa waaa. Stop right now crying. And why you wipe your nose on your shirt. Here, he is a tissue."

Suited young businessman talking intensely into mobile phone at train station yesterday:

"They're saying that because they're ugly people. You're surrounded by those people and they're all ugly. You're in an empire of idiots."

Young woman talking rapidly to friend on tram a few weeks ago:

"I'm not talking to her now. Firstly, the other day I was saying something and I said the word longjeopardy and she said ' I think it's longevity' and I said no, it's longjeopardy and she said it wasn't and even looked it up on google on her phone and I thought she was tricking me somehow. And then I got home and looked it up and she was right, so now I'm not talking to her cos I'm mad."

Kurt Vonnegut:

"Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind."

Just Some Questions About Some People

From my window I can see across the park opposite my house. In fact I have a park behind my house too which I think makes me lucky and/or astute in the ways of real estate. But it's the front park - one of inner Melbourne's bigger parks - that is offered up to me every single day and there are people who wander past on almost every one of those days.

Hipster Pug Man

This one man turns up on a daily basis in his vintage hepcatmobile and lets his awesome pug loose on the park. He always dresses like a real hipster (the man) in big shades and sweet shirts and an icebox attitude and he lets his pug go nuts on the field. He throws sticks and jives along the path and sometimes talks to other park-goers. But he does it daily and I wonder: why are you driving here? You can't be a local, Hipster Pug Man, or you'd walk here. And you can't be too far off, since you check in every single day. Is it possible that you live in a house so close that this is the nearest place to walk your dog, but so distant that you have to drive? You confuse my sense of scale, Hipster Pug Man!


The Guy Formerly Known As Basketball Guy

This guy's arrival used to be heralded by the PFUNGGG... PFUNGGG... PFUNGGG of a basketball lazily bounced in front of him as he walked. One of those old school deals in faded purple and orange with the tiny raised bumps for grip. He was tall and broad and had thick curly brown hair and usually smiled a little bit even though he was on his own. He would amble up the street and head for the court in the middle of the park, always on his own in the middle of the day. I wondered if he would find someone at the court to "shoot some hoops" with. I hoped so.

Then one day he began dribbling his basketball with a girl walking alongside him. They were both young and talking amiably and though she didn't seem interested in the basketball they seemed interested in each other. I thought: good for you two.

Now the guy has mostly stopped going to the park, but occasionally he appears on his own. No girl, no basketball. Like today, he arrived and lay down on his back on the grass with his eyes closed. I went out for a few hours and when I came back he was still there. Eyes still closed, still on his own. Now I hope everything is alright for the guy I once knew as Basketball Guy.

Child-Walking Lady

Child-Walking Lady walks her four- or five-year-old toddler for long stretches. The little guy cavorts in the park, having adventures with tan bark and discovering the secrets of trees. All the while, Child-Walking Lady keeps a close eye on her charge while remaining entirely unusually dressed for the position. She wears clothes better suited to a star-studded event opening - expensive black dresses or shiny suits. Her hair is short and slicked-down and she spends long serious periods on her phone. She dresses like she has somewhere important to be, somewhere where she will be seen. Why do you dress like this for a stroll in the park, Child-Walking Lady? I imagine you have your reasons.

Old Pants

Poor Old Pants! That might be condescending, but he is poor. Old Pants drops by the park most days to walk up to a particular spot of hedging and lower his pants. He's very old and kind of dirty looking, but I don't think anybody would be offended by him. He keeps a large and baggy pair of boxers on when he drops his trousers and doesn't actually do anything once they're around his ankles. If anything, he does this in such an organised fashion that the casual passerby would probably think he was just a liberated older fellow dropping his pants momentarily in order to adjust some otherwise inaccessible undergarments. Then the pants are back up and belted before you know it. Nothing to see here, folks. It's just that he does it most days, and in the same spot. If you look closely, his belt is a length of rope. His face is tanned and unwashed. And nobody talks to Old Pants.

As I say, it doesn't seem particularly offensive and he's technically keeping decent. But it's an odd routine. Maybe he's only enjoying the air. Do you even know, Old Pants? Will anyone ever stop to find out?


Bike Waiter

Lots of people ride their bikes past my window, often without helmets. I envy their care- and helmet-free ways. And lots of people ride bikes to the park throughout the day and dump their wheels on a patch of green and lie down for some quiet time. One woman takes this practice to epic, Lawrence of Arabia levels. She'll often arrive in the early afternoon and sit down in a nice sunny spot for hours at a time. Not just a couple of hours, either. I've clocked her at seven hour stretches. She'll read, sometimes, but more often she'll just sit thinking or maybe cat-napping. At first I thought she was waiting for someone, and sure enough a friend would often turn up. But this would be after a good three or four hour wait. And just as often she'll leave alone, not disappointed at having been stood up or anything. Why does she spend an entire working day thinking in the park? Who does this? Who is allowed to do this?

Sleazy Chest

One man in his 50s used to turn up during summer and settle down for some tanning time. He would strip off his shirt to show off the ripped abs under his crinkly newspaper chest. And he would make a point of his tanning routine in order to justify his staring at women like the Bike Waiter. Maybe he thought his partial nudity was some kind of concession pass, but from my window his 20-minute long sideways looks at people nearby came across as creepy. He hasn't been around lately, which saved me from having to yell "quit the leching, lechy!"

Cos I woulda.

Bird Dude

I have a quiet respect for the Bird Dude. He doesn't raise the same kinds of questions my other cast of characters pose. He does what he does, and what he does is walk past my window with a bird on each shoulder. He seems about my age and his birds are small. One bright yellow and one bright blue. They're about the size of canaries, but neither my eyesight nor my knowledge of birds is enough to identify their breed. Hell, I don't even know if breed is the right word. But Bird Dude probably knows. He walks past modestly, like the opposite of someone screaming "look at me - I'm a bird dude! I'm actually walking down the street with birds on my shoulders!" If there was an opposite to someone like that, he would be it.

Even though I don't know why he walks with these birds, I don't feel the need to wonder that much. Maybe because of his beatific calm which is matched, I should add, by the chilled demeanour of his avian buddies. I get the feeling that if I asked him "Why are you walking with the birds?" he would simply shrug and reply "Because the birds need walking, you know?"

The Race

Oh, to live in a world of birds.

Innocence is No Defence

So I woke up this morning to find my house without water. No hot, no cold, no nothing except a little in the kettle from last night which at least allowed me to brew up a cup of joe and settle down to nut this one out. I'd paid the bills, there were no leaks to be found, and after I heard a neighbour blast my cat with a hose I knew it wasn't something to do with the local mains.

I took up a position at my desk with a pen and notepad and began jotting down the facts I knew, calling out to my imaginary friend to make up another batch of coffee because we weren't going anywhere until we cracked this case. After writing: "WATER - NONE" I quickly realised that I didn't know any more facts, and did what anyone in my position would do which was to lean back and throw my pen across the desk in disgust.

Shortly after, I squatted in front of the water meter out front, trying to determine whether there was any flow. This took a good five minutes since it was a gas meter, but once that little detail was cleared up I fast discovered that someone had turned off the nearby water meter at the tap. Who could have done such a thing, I wondered as I restored water and order to my home. What kind of person would commit such an act, I asked myself as I enjoyed a warm shower. Are there really such reckless but relatively petty criminals walking our streets at night, I pondered as the room began to shiver and echoey harp music filled my mind.

And suddenly I was in the midst of a flashback to my teen years. I must be 15 or 16, I guess, judging by the hypercolour tees and slapbands people are sporting. I'm outside the Russell St Greater Union cinema, where Kurt Russell is stinking up the screen in Escape from LA and the Disney version of the Hunchback of Notre Dame is not doing great business. And I'm being interrogated by a pair of policemen on suspicion of carrying drugs. I'm shocked and amazed, but they tell me I "fit the profile". How a floppy-haired pimply nerd in a tee-shirt and old man pants fits any kind of profile besides "unlikely to find a girlfriend before university", I'll never know. But then I'm just a kid, not a cop, and I don't know police procedure. All I know is that my friend and I had, not two hours ago, left a screening of Escape from LA and walked straight across the cinema foyer into the Hunchback of Notre Dame without buying a ticket. You're looking in the wrong places, constable.

I indulge myself in this lengthy stumble down memory lane in order to demonstrate that I've walked a mile or two in the shoes of a hardened con, and if I hadn't seen the error of my ways I'd probably be Chopper by now (but hopefully still with my ears, of which I'm reasonably proud). And I say all this to warn the water-depriving punk who turned off my taps last night - there's still hope, dude. You can always turn your life around.

Last night I also witnessed some police procedure when I went along to Haneef - the Interrogation at the Carlton Courthouse. It's a two-man play based around the 6000-question interrogation of the first guy charged under Australia's new anti-terrorism laws, and it's pretty interesting. It's kind of ham-strung by the fact that a real interrogation isn't that action-packed or full of sudden twists, being more inclined towards infuriating bureaucratic circling and repetition and wearing down the suspect over 12 hours of numbing boredom. Not great theatre, then. But the writer and cast do a great job of hurdling that little obstacle by a) cutting it back to a lean 90 minutes or so, and b) adding an extra meta-theatrical level by which the two actors themselves have an antagonistic relationship with each other.

The guy playing the interrogator (Simon King) is sympathetic to his character, believing that he was just doing his job and playing it by the book. Haneef's performer (Adam McConvell) can't understand this, since it's obvious that Haneef was treated unjustly. Moreover, he suggests that King's character is only downplaying the unfairness of it all because he thinks this could never happen to (white, middle-class) him.

You get a good sense of the inherent flaws in the new terrorism act, but the play does an even better job at simply showing how the System simply isn't geared towards individual realities, putting abstract concepts of truth and process ahead of everything else. Haneef fits the profile, so he's already guilty, and all that remains is to find the evidence.

Luckily there are some hilarious bits along the way, and the $8 million gasp near the end is fantastic. It's not "political theatre" and the based-on-a-true-story angle prevents it from really launching into something amazing, but it's worth a look if you're interested in the contemporary Australian social landscape and the changes which have occurred in the past decade.

Mohamed Haneef

Comedy Festival Wrap Up

Well, that's that then and thank god. The last week of the fest was a killer what with comedy fatigue and a head cold which is only now subsiding. It's all done with, however, so if you missed some good shows, sucks to be you. If you missed some bad ones, well done. Here are a few notables worth a look in the future for those of you still reading with nothing better to do (how about Yahtzee?)

KRISTEN SCHAAL - As You Have Probably Never Seen Her Before

I really enjoyed Schaaly but she came in second for me (after Nina Conti), given that I thought she was doing really well something that isn't quite as hard. SNL-style New York quasi-absurdism isn't really as tough to pull off as ventriloquism, and more people are doing it. That said, her Kristen Schaal is a Horse routine will probably be the thing that lasts longest in folks' memories of the 2008 MICF.

REGINALD D HUNTER

Hunter does straight-ish standup but does it super-well. He's one of the rare standups heading into button-pushing offensive territory in a way that I appreciate, mainly because his terribly perilous quips about paedophilia, anal exploration and rape aren't coming from a bad place, but from a decent-seeming guy who doesn't mean what he says any more than you would. He's talking about stuff knowing that it skirts the very edges of acceptability, but never quite tips over that edge. Very funny, very likeable chap.

FEAR OF A BROWN PLANET

Winners of the Best Newcomer Award - and worth it. These two guys aren't quite at the top of their game, but watching this year's show suggests that they'll likely one day be a force to be reckoned with in local comedy. They're a pair of Muslim Aussie comics who take on racism and xenophobia in an utterly hilarious way that uses anger to fuel some brilliant humour.

PAPPY'S FUN CLUB

Totally stupid British private schoolboy sketch comedy. Loathed it, then loved it, then ended up onstage miming to a Bob Dylan track.

SAMMY J IN THE FOREST OF DREAMS

Winner of the Age Critics Award. Sammy J's star keeps on rising, but the star of this puppets-go-wrong show (think Meet the Feebles, Avenue Q etc) is Heath McIvor, the puppeteer behind the dozen or so weirdo critters who share the stage with Sammy. Highlight for me was the sudden appearance of an 11-foot tall fightin' fox called Mega Squire.

KENT VALENTINE - A Fistful of Rainbows

Valentine hasn't been around that long but you wouldn't tell given the sweet little piece of storytelling he provided for this year's fest. It's two tales - the first pretty inconsequential but the second an absolutely charming recounting of his time spent in Denmark on student exchange, where he befriends a trio of unlikely men in their 90s who are obsessed with reliving the Viking adventures of their ancestors.

DAVE CALLAN - Daylight Savings for the Doomsday Clock

I've liked Callan for years, but haven't seen him for a few. His show this year was a winner, even if it was a bit Powerpoint-heavy. It's a lecture on what's wrong with the world and what to do about it, but it manages to be both insistently funny and not-too-preachy. It also manages to be over now, so there you go (went).

Comedy Festival Round Up 4

ITS NOT OVER

Sometimes you need a break from comedy, and thankfully there are comedy shows that give you that. Not bad comedy, but kind of anti-comedy. Puts things in relief, the way a punch in the genitals will. Here are two comics who fit the mould:

NICK SUN - Fisting the Soul

DAVID QUIRK - Kathleen Grace

I don't know what to say about either. Here's a quick impression. Play together. It's probably how you'll feel halfway through each show. Take it however you want (I enjoyed both, is all I can say).

Comedy Festival Round Up 3

COMEDY THAT WASN'T

MARK BUTLER - Body Language

UK expat Butler is on the borderline of funny. Unfortunately he was stopped at that border and must have had visa issues because instead of crossing into big LOL territory he stayed on the other side of the border, which is a place of casual racism, homophobia, misogyny and paedophilia jokes that - had they made it across the border - would have been jokes but since they also didn't make it through customs instead felt like paedophilia comments. The usual lazy dissing of bogans: I think he targeted Broadmeadows and Dandenong in particular but it could have been other places he's probably never been and has heard arrogant stereotypes regarding. Hard to agree with his superiority to said bogans when much of his act involves trying to pick up women in the front row with "c'mon, you want it" asides and instructions for spotting gay men through their mincing walking styles. Subject matter involves the subtleties of body language and what it really reveals about us, but I left feeling like the whole notion of body language is rubbish. I would have crossed my arms during the show if he hadn't made it clear he'd pick up on it as a defensive response.

AL PITCHER - Idiot Wind

Like comedy, but not.

This festival has taught me that seriousness is not the opposite of humour. The two are pretty close, really. The really funny stuff is the most serious, or the stuff that a comic finds serious but is sorting through using comedy, or is inherently funny but is given a totally serious treatment and is thus more funny. I guess that's why I've been least impressed by comedians trying to make light of utterly banal things. Traffic lights - what's with those moody jokers?! Nobody has actually gone that far, but it's been close.

Al Pitcher isn't a bad comedian but he did an ok impression of one the other night. The topics he got into included our wacky tram system, those crazy emo kids, footy! and that perennial laff-fest, IKEA (how hard to put together, chortle, *cry*). It wasn't that he wasn't trying, but did he really care about this stuff? Did it keep him awake at night? I hope not. Some things you laugh at as a way of handling their unpleasantness, their overwhelming complexity, or your own inability to make sense of the world. Some things you laugh at because they offer you a way to negotiate this dastardly life. I didn't laugh at Al Pitcher, because all he was negotiating were the things that might vaguely annoy or mildly interest me, and it felt like these measly engagements were being served up because the real stuff of comedy was too hard to face. I didn't laugh, and eventually I left.

Comedy Festival Round Up 2

TOO TWEE OR NOT TOO TWEE?

Here are some comedians who are very nice. Some people don't like "nice" and so they should perhaps avoid these people. I like them though yes mostly.

JOSIE LONG - Trying is Good

I do like Josie Long. She seems to see the bigger picture of comedy and develops her material as a response. The bigger picture is that most comedians are angry/bitter/dejected men-children spreading poisonous bile one put-down at a time. I'm not dismissing this style of comedy. Maybe the world can be split into categories of:

a) crazy people not like us
b) stupid people not like us
c) other people not like us

But people like us run the world and sometimes the world is pretty bunko, so maybe the people not like us are worth a look-see and when a comic like Long gives them a go, you hopefully realise that most of us are not like us.

Whimsical optimistic comedy has surprisingly become prevalent at this year's festival, but Long doesn't make it feel too twee or forced.

MAEVE HIGGINS - Ha Ha Yum

Like hanging out at your best friend's house for an hour while she makes cakes. She's also your "funny" friend, but you don't know if its because she's your friend or because she's actually funny. Is she actually funny? Or is it because she's your friend? Hang on, she's not your friend. You don't even know her. But you forget that a bit. Does actually make cakes on stage (well, her friend Claudia does) while telling nice jokes that don't really stick with you.

THE BOY WITH TAPE ON HIS FACE

I found this boy a bit twee - then again, my favourite comedy is the twee-est of the twee, the whimsiest of whimsy, the nicest if it wasn't an ugly anagram. TBWTOHF is great stuff, physical humour that blends mime and stand-up and puppetry and a helluva lot of audience interaction with only a few words supplied by voiceovers and the occasional audience comment. That he makes laughs nonetheless should be recommendation enuff. INSERT MIMED GAG OH WAIT ITS THE INTERNET

COMEDY!

Will have to wait. I have about 800 comedy reviews to spew out here but have been too busy seeing said comedy to write 'em up. Gimme a day or two and I'll cough up the goods, I swear. For now, though, I just have to mention the squalid orgy of hatred and misanthropic degeneration I witnessed last night before I lose the angry fire it has stirred in my belly.

THE EMOTIONS RAGE STRONG WITHIN YOU, CHILD

Too true. I'm speaking (typing) of GUYS AND DOLLS which is a musical (musical theatre) that has me wanting to barf (blog).


Just when I was beginning to rethink my stance on musicals.

So here's the deal: we have a Guy and a Doll who have been engaged for 13 years because he refuses to set a date. Good comic set-up with plenty of potential. Which after about five seconds made me wonder: who would endure such a thing for 13 years? Clearly a guy of Olympic patheticism and a doll so self-loathing that she'll put up with the dude. Or maybe she's that in love with him? 13 YEARS, people.

And we have another Guy who bets that he can make any woman come with him for what can euphemistically be called a "party flight to Cuba" (actually that's literal, not euphemistic) and the Doll he's matched with, an uptight Salvation Army worker whose main talent is disapproving of anything that actually exists and who has a chorus line who don't even get to dance once. That's how uptight she is. Until she meets her Guy, goes to Cuba - there might have been some light-hearted wooing in there but that's probably wishful-thinking/REM activity on my behalf - and gets duped by her Guy into downing a few litres of Bacardi, getting into a scragfight with a Havana local and "losing her inhibitions" with the "man of her dreams". The idea that a positive sexual awakening is the result of drink-spiking, girl-on-girl violence and waking up to find some seedy gambler licking your tonsils - well, I fear for the previous generation, I really do. In my day that would (does) result in moral panic and the demonisation of youth. I guess date rape was different back in the day.

Once we've left our Girl Gone Wild in Cuba and returned to New York, the Guys are back to their no good ways with constant gambling and fiancee-neglecting and fear of commitment expressed through dance. The Guys in question seem to have a near-pathological obsession with playing the game of "craps" which forces them to huddle in sewers where they can play with their craps and wave guns at one another. The Dolls up above try to get the Guys to resurface and give up the whole crap thing, but they just can't help themselves. The show itself doesn't condemn them either, suggesting that it's only natural - a Guy's gotta do what a Guy's gotta do. Or, given the crap metaphor, when a man's gotta go, a man's gotta go.

All of our Guys end up with their respective Dolls - and let's face it, the terms are suggestive - but how do these independent women reconcile themselves to the fact that their fellas are way more interested in anything that doesn't actually involve them than with anything that does? I'm omitting, of course, the intermittent scenes at the strip club in which the Guys and the audience whoop up the disrobing of females in ways that involve none of the plot whatsoever. Well, the eventual merging of sexes is allowable after a poignant song in which our two lead heroines realise that the best thing to do is to marry whatever beau will take you, failings and all, and then attempt to change his disgusting ways once the merger has been made legally binding. There's an empowering message: snare any shitty guy who'll have you and then hope you can plead him into submission.

Guys and Dolls makes a certain amount of sense in an historical context. As a postwar Broadway musical, I can see it as an attempt to appropriate the sexual liberalism of an earlier exotic Weimar cabaret style and introduce it as a commercially acceptable expression of American freedom in the 1950s. But beneath its apparent sauciness is a rigid, almost hysterical conservatism which suggests that Guys are inherently monstrous and Dolls oughta learn to put up with that and let's just shut up and dance because the alternatives are too horrific to consider. I'd like to see a version of this show that brings to the surface its subliminated nastiness. That shows the characters in all their self-hatred and misery and failure and doesn't dress it up as nostalgic rom-com nonsense

Maybe the unanimous standing ovation at opening night was a crowd saying damn you, Born Dancin', for expecting of a musical something resembling a social statement. Damn you for considering our response as a possible expression of our own submerged frustrations with the concessions we made decades ago when we married our wealthy opening-night-worthy spouses in the hopes that we could change them, one day, just like in the show. Because come on - the songs were pretty sweet.

Comedy Festival Round Up 1

After suffering through my fair share of bad comics over the years, I guess I've developed some kind of internal standby setting that flicks on after about ten minutes of unfunny antics on stage. The brain shuts down to conserve energy and only the vital processes keep running. I'm just like most domestic appliances that way.

This year's been pretty good, though, so I'll try to ladle out some hot steaming reviews onto your waiting plates while I still can.

THE SMARTYPANTS SHOWS

A few comedians this year have been really clever and astute-like so I'll start with them.

NINA CONTI - Complete and Utter Conti

I'm not a fan of ventriloquists (who is?) but sassy UK comic Conti has used the form to craft a complex narrative which does very strange and sometimes sad things. It seems very loose and unstructured and old-fashioned for quite a while, but you gradually become aware that everything happening is very precisely measured to accomplish a particular effect which is, eventually, one of deconstruction. Barry contender. Very highly recommended. I'd go see this show again (HIGH PRAISE INDEED).

JUSTIN HAMILTON - The Killing Joke

Hammo won Director's Choice last year. I missed his trilogy then. Caught his new one. It's a bit like:

PLUS

Hamilton plays Jason Harrington and Justin Hamilton in a dialogue between two comedians - one of whom is urging the other to kill himself for some reason. It's a series of musings by a comedian asking himself what he's all about - smart meta-comedy that isn't really laugh-out-loud but raises lots of interesting questions. Hamilton is clearly influenced by the self-referential comics of Alan Moore and Grant Morrison (he namechecks them in the program) as well as some nice cinema of the past couple of decades. Like I say, it's not a gutbuster but it's worth the Barry he's been nominated for.

SAM SIMMONS - Where Can I Win a Bear Around Here?

I have not a lot of ideas why I enjoy Sam Simmons' comedy but I rather do and hope you do too. WHOEVER "YOU" ARE?

You shitheads.