Locascio talks about various mishaps and adventures, and he shows a great ability to bring up a memory and trail off to another but still return to what he was saying. It’s not off the cuff but he makes it sound natural and that he has thought about how to best tell these stories. So when he begins reminiscing about his Italian grandmother and midway through he gets “side-tracked” with a completely different story about his Greek grandmother he finds his way back to the original anecdote in a highly genuine way.
There are instances where he teeters on the edge of bad taste and most of the time he manages to toe the line, like his monkey escapades in Bali, which contains a wonderful call back, but there are a few moments where he goes a bit too far to get to an unnecessary punchline or a joke that is probably not needed.
As we near the end of the performance, Locascio discusses guilt and how he carries it with him and so on, but this guilt is not explored enough. He also states he’ll be going through about all the bad things he has done in his life, yet we are only given two examples of him being a bad person and even those are not so terrible when you hear the context of how or why they were committed (or maybe I’m just a worse person?).
At one point he lets us know that the upcoming section is where it gets tense and offers us an apology, but if you’re going to go into all the bad things you have done, then you need to lean into that tension and find the humour. Locascio shows potential for Heart of Darkness but in its current structure there a bit too much shock value and not enough heart.
SHOW DETAILS
Venue: Belgian Beer Cafe Melbourne, 5 Riverside Quay, Melbourne
Season: until 22 April | 6:00pm
Duration: 60 minutes
Tickets: $29.73
Bookings: Melbourne International Comedy Festival
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