Every year, as the Melbourne International Comedy Festival approaches, I vehemently urge people go and see a Neal Portenza show. It's comedy like you've probably seen before, only much much better. Well this year will be the last year I will recommend him because Neal Portenza is hanging up his little red beret and performing his final ever show.
"The rumours are true. This will be my last live Neal Portenza show. I expect there will be a national day of mourning followed by a blood moon at the conclusion of the festival," the brains behind the beauty of Neal, Joshua Ladgrove tells me. For his final send-off, Ladgrove has named his show Fafenefenoiby II: Return of the Ghost Boy, a title that is slightly different to previous shows P.O.R.T.E.N.Z.A and Neal Portenza: Neal Portenza Neal Portenza Neal Portenza Neal Portenza Neal Portenza Neal Portenza Neal Portenza. Tracey, but equally as perplexing and random. "Fafenefenoiby is a Shaun Micallef reference. Hopefully he won’t sue me, but what wonderful publicity if he does. Audiences can expect a shell of a man performing his 22 last ever live shows with a mixture of genuine abandon and cavalier intimacy," he says.
She was the winner of Deadly Funny at the 2014 Melbourne International Comedy Festival, and now in 2018, Steph Tisdell is presenting her debut show, Identify Steft at this year's festival. Tisdell, who has also been named the Funniest Aboriginal Woman in Australia looks at what 'sorry day' means to her and sharing her thoughts on white guilt and racism However, her show will also delve further into the more personal with Tisdell sharing her own mental health struggles and identity issues.
"Both my awful mental health and my identity crisis were actually what inspired this show. I desperately wanted to know more things about my culture but there were roadblocks everywhere. From every angle," she explains. "I needed to tell MY story. Which is one of feeling pride and fear at the same time. And I know it's one that a lot of Aboriginal people feel, certainly if they're mixed race."
In Hand To God, members of a Christian church in a small Texas town are preparing to put on a puppet show, however when a demonic sock puppet possesses a performer's hand, everyone's inner thoughts and intentions are brutally revealed. Billed as an irreverent and filthy comedy that is the love child of The Book of Mormon and Avenue Q, Hand To God spends so much of its time trying to shock its audiences that it fails to create characters we care about, or a story that grabs us.
Director Gary Abrahams has gathered together a formidable cast led by the brilliant Alison Whyte as Margery, who gets herself into all sorts of situations while attempting to prepare for the puppet show. Gyton Grantley, Jake Speer and Morgana O'Reilly remain highly committed to the teenage characters of Jason, Timothy and Jessica but the script can't decide if they are ignorant and self-absorbed teens or intuitive young people. Grant Piro as Pastor Greg is the most defined and consistent character in the show, and subsequently his performance is as close to a realistic performance as we can expect in a story around puppet possession.
Combining Indian classical dancing with the camp theatrics of Bollywood through a queer lens, Bent Bollywood was a definite must-see show during Midsumma Festival this year. Created and Performed by queer performance artists Raina Peterson and Govind Pillai, the show explored how different sexualities, genders and cultures can co-exist and complement each other.
Bent Bollywood began with a nod to traditional dancing and gradually grew in its exploration of queerness within these heavily steeped traditions. "Raina
particularly was using lots of gendered mudras (hand gestures) in their spiritual solo opening piece, doing the gesture for
female and male repeatedly. They were working
with those traditional gestures and dissolving them into
dust to almost disestablish the notion of binary genders," Pillai tells me.
Set in 1979, Falsettos is an entertaining yet affecting musical of a New York family trying to keep it all together. With music and lyrics by William Finn and the book by Finn and James Lapin, the story explores the complexities of life and the struggles we face to find the balance in the different roles we lead.
Dom Winsor as Marvin manages to show the varying facets of his life with an intimacy that is rarely seen in musical theatre with his relationship with his son (played by Riley Flood on the night attended) being one of the most rewarding ones to watch unfold. Flood delivers a highly convincing portrayal of a teenager who is intellectually on the same playing field as the adults around him. Playing Marvin's on/off boyfriend Whizzer, Sam Ward brings confidence and charm to the character, however the chemistry between Marvin and Ward, which is integral to Falsettos, feels the weakest of all the relationships in the show.
