Starting with a sex scene is gratuitous but it works

Where’s a bucket of cold water when you need one? That was my first thought when Fourthcoming kicked off with gratuitous dry-humping, but there’s more to shake & stir’s latest show, writes Phil Brown.

Cece Peters and Johnny Balbuziente in the new choose-your-own-adventure style theatre show called Forthcoming at QPAC. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen / The Australian

I didn’t know where to look. They stripped down to their Reg Grundies and started dry humping in front of us. My inner Anglican minister was getting very uncomfortable with this. If I’d had a bucket of cold water with me I would have rushed on stage and doused Johnny Balbuziente and Cece Peters.

Sex on stage makes me feel very uncomfortable because you never know what could pop up. Or out. Yikes.

Thankfully that raunchy beginning was the raunchiest it got in shake & stir’s Fourthcoming although there was quite a bit of smut and naughtiness in this spoof on reality television and dating shows. It’s 18+ show which is unusual for this company.

Fourthcoming by shake & stir is on at Cremorne Theatre at QPAC until November 7.

Normally you would be rubbing shoulders with schoolkids at a shake & stir production … 1984, Dracula, Wuthering Heights, Animal Farm. They tend to stage the classics but occasionally they go off-piste and get a bit jiggy with it.

Fourthcoming is an interactive romantic comedy and when I heard that I baulked. I don’t interact with anything.

But it’s actually subtly done and the audience gets to vote, via a QR code on their phones, on outcomes and on which of the four characters played by Balbuziente that Gwen (Peters) ends up with.

Gwen is looking for love on Tinder and in this show she meets four dudes who are prospective partners and they are all played by Balbuziente who causes a bit of a stir when he takes his shirt off. It appears he’s been working out. Shrieks emanated from the audience at opening night on Thursday … shrieks from girls and boys, just to be appropriately diverse about it.

Balbuziente plays Sebastian, Franco, Aaron and Sandy and let me just say that he is freaking hilarious. His characters are introduced televisually and as usual the audio visual presentation is slick and very professional. Designer Josh McIntosh, lighting designer Jason Glenwright and sound designer Guy Webster are the A-team and masters of creating slick productions like this one.

I like a bit of audio visual stimulation but you need more than just that and thankfully writer and co-director (with Nick Skubij) Nelle Lee has done a terrific job and has created four very amusing roles for Balbuziente. When we first meet Sebastian he is reading A Picture of Dorian Gray and when Gwen meets him he’s leafing through a volume of Proust so that gives you some idea of what a pretentious tosser he is.

Johnny Balbuziente (actor) and Nellie Lee (writer and director) at the QPAC ahead of their new show Fourthcoming

Franco is more fun but he’s a conspiracy theorist and a nut. Aaron is a bit of an adolescent and their date involves mini golf and Sandy takes Gwen to an art gallery where there is an erotic exhibition on and that gets a bit tawdry at times. Peters is quite vivacious as Gwen and she really puts herself out there and she manages to walk a fine line quite well.

It’s all very pop cultural and was written, and produced, I think, to cash in on Balbuziente’s new found fame as a star of Married At First Sight. He and his screen wife Kerry Knight are still together too, a rare success story from a program that I haven’t really watched. Okay, I confess, I did watch it once but don’t tell anyone!

Fourthcoming is fun. Admittedly I’m probably not the demographic but I did get a few good laughs out of it. And I didn’t look at my watch until well into the production which is a good sign.

Fourthcoming is on at the Cremorne Theatre, QPAC, until November 7