HOT: Philip Escoffey, Six More Impossible Things to Do Before Dinner, Arts Centre, 100 St Kilda Rd, Melbourne

Posted on September 22, 2010 by Jetsetting Joyce

YAY for my first show of the Melbourne Fringe Festival – a two and a half week extravaganza of comedy, song, dance, cabaret, art and general wackiness.

Philip Escoffey is a well-known performer famous for his mind-reading skills, so I’m not entirely sure whether you’d consider his show Six More Impossible Things to Do Before Dinner ‘fringe’. Nevertheless, he’s playing in Melbourne after an extended season at Sydney Opera House and popular shows at the Edinburgh and Melbourne comedy festivals. If you haven’t had a chance to see him yet then I highly recommend that you grab a ticket for his two week season at the Arts Centre.

Let me say now that I do not believe in mind-reading, or psychic powers, or things like astrology, tarot cards or other forms of fortune telling. If you do believe in those concepts, then you’ll be captivated by Philip’s ability to guess seemingly random cards, shapes, words and colours. If you’re a sceptic, you’ll be highly entertained because you’ll spend the whole time twisting your mind, trying to decipher how he did it. In fact, when you type ‘Philip Escoffey’ into Google, one of the most popular suggested search terms is ‘Philip Escoffey how does he do it’ – seems that everyone is fascinated by the experience and wants to discover the methods behind his show.

RM and I are guessing that stooges are used, as well as marked objects and a practised ability to read body language tics. Whatever you think, I guarantee that you’ll come away from the theatre discussing the baffling 60 minutes you just witnessed.

Philip Escoffey, Six More Impossible Things to Do Before Dinner, Arts Centre, 100 St Kilda Rd, Melbourne

NOT: Dead Man’s Cell Phone, Sumner Theatre, 140 Southbank Boulevard, Southbank

Posted on July 7, 2010 by Jetsetting Joyce

Way back in January this year I ordered my usual 3-play mini subscription for the Melbourne Theatre Company. As July rolled around, I realised that I had tickets to see Dead Man’s Cell Phone….and I had no idea why. The blurb for the play stated:

“A surrealist fantasy. Dancing out of the light-footed imagination of Sarah Ruhl, Dead Man’s Cell Phone traces one woman’s accidental quest to make a few people feel just a little bit better about themselves.”

Surrealist. Fantasy. Two genres of theatre of which I’m not particularly fond. And ‘making people feel a little bit better about themselves’ sounded twee and contrived.

Anyway, tickets had been bought, the date had been fixed, so RM and I trooped along with relatively low expectations.

The story begins with Jean (Lisa McCune), a lonely woman sitting in a cafe who becomes embroiled in the life of a dead man whose mobile phone she answers. She seeks out his mistress, his wife, his mother and brother and tries to bring them all comfort and final words while untangling the lies of his life.

Was the play supposed to be a meditation on life, death, family and the way we’ve lost the ability to connect to other people on a human level due to technology? Hard to say as I found the text generally lacked focus. I also didn’t like the slow pace, the loose prose and mostly the switching from magic realism to film noir to slapstick. I did like the laundromat set design and the cast’s general performance.

Dead Man’s Cell Phone was neither funny nor dramatic nor exciting nor excruciating. If you already have tickets for it, then go ahead and see it and you may have a pleasant, though relatively forgettable, theatre experience. If you don’t have tickets, then I’d say don’t bother spending $65 and 2 hours on this play.

To read other reviews, check out Sometimes Melbourne and Theatre Notes.

Dead Man’s Cell Phone, Melbourne Theatre Company, +

NOT: Dangerous Melbourne, Next Wave Festival, Fitzroy Town Hall, 201 Napier St, Fitzroy

Posted on May 30, 2010 by Jetsetting Joyce

When I was reading through the Next Wave 2010 Festival program, the show Dangerous Melbourne caught my eye.

“Is living in Melbourne a danger to your a) health b) wealth c) safety d) sanity? Are you taking outrageous risks a) riding down Collins Street b) walking home at night c) just waking up every morning?

Fear not – help is at hand.

The Dangerous Melbourne community information evening will provide you with the things you need to know to survive the terrors of our fair city. Be informed, not alarmed. Cups of tea and biscuits also provided.”

It sounded like it could a humorous show which exposed the potentially irrational fears of Melburnians subjected to news stories of increasing CBD violence, the bashing of Indian students and innocent pedestrians being run over by packs of hoon cyclists.

On entry into the lovely Fitzroy Town Hall we were ushered into an area and provided with the promised tea and biscuits. The actors were already in character, fussing over us to be careful with the hot water urn and making sure we didn’t leave our things in the path of others who might trip. Dangers everywhere!

We were then seated in alphabetical order and the slide show started. It began with a flip through about a dozen innocuous Melbourne landscapes – St Kilda beach, Bourke Street Mall, Collins Street etc. Not very dangerous, right? Wrong. Paula van Beek, the creator and performer of the show, then repeated through every slide pointing out all the hidden dangers we’d missed. Bad tan lines, skin cancer, credit card debt….all of which ended in death.

This was amusing for about three slides but then the repetitiveness of the death finale wasn’t very interesting anymore.

After that, I wasn’t sure in what direction the show could go as I felt that perhaps the slide show might have been the complete joke done in 5 minutes. Well, it transpired that the remaining 40 minutes were filled with banalities which had me contemplating my to-do list, imagining my dinner and plotting an escape route.

First of all, a recitation of statistics. Yes that’s exactly as interesting as it sounds. I don’t know whether the statistics were real or not (she had conducted a survey of 18-30 year old females for the show), but it was sleep-inducing.

Next up, listening to an answering machine with hard-to-hear recordings of people’s fears. Then we counted the number of cyclists we could spot in each slide. A bit of audience participation of repeating the five principles of safety.

I can’t even remember what other dull segments followed because everything was overshadowed by what I am calling the Alphabet of Fears. Yes, we sat in the dark, looked at some photographs of deserted parking spaces and windswept streets while a recording intoned an alphabetical list of genuine, existential and silly fears. Armed robbery, acne, ambush, ants and so on of about 20 fears starting with A, and then B…..

Oh. My. God. I watched my life draining away as I came to realise that the alphabet had 26 letters and we were going to have to sit through every droning one of them.

If I hadn’t left my coat on the other side of the room I would have quite happily got up to leave.

All this was sort of in aid of the plot twist at the end. I’m not sure whether Dangerous Melbourne will get another outing at another festival but read on if you want to know about the twist. [Spoiler alert] Basically a piece of paper that we’d been instructed to write on for the last 45 minutes was actually an order form for the ultimate safety device – a balaclava with yellow reflective strips sewn on it. The whole presentation was a ruse to sell us some crappy gear! I couldn’t even rustle up a smile at that point as the ‘twist’ was obvious from a mile away and I really couldn’t wait to leave.

Perhaps with more thought and development Dangerous Melbourne could have been a quirky, humourous, out-of-the-box take on the culture of fear and the nanny state. In its current form, it was about as entertaining as tax accountant’s powerpoint presentation. Or did I miss something?

Thank you to Next Wave for inviting me to Dangerous Melbourne.

NOT: Burning Daylight, Marrugeku, Meat Market, Arts House, 5 Blackwood St North Melbourne

Posted on November 21, 2009 by Jetsetting Joyce

Burning Daylight is a contemporary dance and theatre production about the remote north-western coastal town of Broome by the indigenous and multicultural troupe Marrugeku. It was a reasonably entertaining production but on balance I have given it a NOT based on a single criteria – would I recommend it to a friend? And the answer, my friends, is no.

Firstly, the positives. Some of the dancing was really exciting – vigorous and energetic and sharp. Many of the movements incorporated acrobatics/gymnastics and muscle-heavy hip hop choreography, which worked most effectively when the dancers moved in unison. I was particularly impressed by the dynamism and physicality of petite Aboriginal dancer (and joint artistic director) Dalisa Pigram. Finally, the production’s exploration of cultural history, multi-racial cohabitation, deportations and forced removals through a melding of contemporary and indigenous dance, live music and spaghetti-Western video was reasonably effective.

Now, the negatives. I felt that some of the dancers were amateurish in their movements – their limbs lacked tension and intention and I felt like I was watching a person off the street following an aerobics instructor. Some theatrical devices didn’t really work – bubble blowing, Japanese dancing, the final tango number. Finally, it was too long – after about three-quarters of the way through I stopped anticipating what the next vignette would be and just started wondering about how it would finish.

Burning Daylight, Marrugeku, Meat Market, Arts House 3051 +. Until Sunday 22 November.

HOT: MTC Garage Sale, 129 Ferrars St, Southbank

Posted on November 14, 2009 by Jetsetting Joyce