Karate Man: A Live-Action Video Game review | Melbourne International Comedy Festival | The Butterfly Club

It's 1988 and Karatetown has been overrun by pesky goons. Luckily Karate Man is here to save the day. But can he expel all the goons AND get the girl? Karate Man: A Live Action Video Game comes from the ingenious minds of BEAK (Daniel Scarratt and Bruno Dubosarsky) where the entire story takes place in the style of an 80s arcade game.

The audience gets to dictate the narrative and all of Karate Man's movements, because as the show title subtly alludes to, this is a live-action video game. We are given a demonstration of the controller functions and then it's up to us to lead our hero to victory. Through some creative use of Bluetooth technology, when someone presses 'punch", the word is boomed over a speaker and Karate Man punches. If "left" is pressed, then the word left is announced, and Karate Man moves left. It's a fantastic way to get audience invested and engaged in the story.

Spice Up Your Life - Midsumma Festival review

Say what you will but the 90s were one of the best decades for music. After all, it was an era that included Britney Spears, Tina Arena, Backstreet Boys, S Club 7 and the Spice Girls. Presented as part of Midsumma Festival, Spice Up Your Life takes the audience back to a time where music was pure and fun and where neon windbreakers, bandannas and overalls with straps down were considered fashionable.

The six performers, Jacqueline Irvine, Rachel Bronca, Alexia Brinsley, Nik Murillo, James Terry and Finn Alexander, blast their way through a number of some well known 90s pop tracks with half the fun being guessing which one will be next. There was a wave of approval that seemed to flow through the audience with each new song, indicating that the cast had done their research well.

The Ultimate Vegas Show review

The Ultimate Vegas Show is a night of magic, illusion, circus, songs, dancing and music. It's got all the ingredients for a brilliant and captivating show, yet sadly this experience left me feeling underwhelmed and wanting to head back to 'Melbourne'.

Host/MC, David Cotter did pleasantly well with his Dean Martin impersonation but that's all there was to it. Cotter's Martin did not possess enough dynamic stage presence or charisma to keep the audience strongly entertained and generate excitement about the upcoming acts, although perhaps in a more intimate setting as opposed to the expansive space of The Palms, he might have had more of an effect.

The Classics preview

These days, circus is littered with young, up and coming performers in acts that push the boundaries of what circus and contemporary circus is. It has become a thriving art form. Batton & Broadway are one such circus troupe, with a catch; instead of young circus artists, The Classics is completely comprised of cinquegenarian (folks in their fifties) performers.

Circus veterans Deb Batton and Sue Broadway share decades of combined experience in the circus and met when they were teaching Directing Skills for Physical Theatre and Circus. "Through this we began to wonder what we might do as performers NOW and to explore what we are as artists and what we have learnt over the years. Mostly the purpose was to enjoy each other and our audiences and remind ourselves of how funny we can be," Broadway explains. "The Classics was in response to demand from both performers and the public. People wanted to see the legends that they had only heard about perform live, and older performers wanted a place to strut their stuff again."