Fun, subversive, and occasionally kinky: Here’s what not to miss at Fringe

The Melbourne Fringe is in full swing. Here you can find a collection of reviews covering performances by some of the 2500 artists in this year’s festival.

COMEDY
Assigned Magician At Birth ★★★★★
Tricksy Collins, Festival Hub: Trades Hall - Archive Room, until October 20

“Magic is just a hobby. Being a comedian is who I am,” Tricksy Collins loudly exclaims as she bounds on to stage. Assigned Magician at Birth is irrepressibly steeped in both, as Collins wields the illusion of misdirection, mystery and surprise to elucidate deep truths about identity and gender as she grapples with a “wardrobe drastically reduced in pockets”.

Pre-recorded audio, masterful props and simple outfit changes are utilised to great effect to portray the numbing fatigue of interacting with transphobic relatives, the shedding of an identity that never once fit, and the journey towards self-acceptance.

Assigned Magician At Birth is on at Trades Hall until October 20. Credit: Alexis D’Lea

Collins is commanding on stage, generous and gentle as audience members are gifted different coloured wristbands highlighting their openness to interaction. She adheres to their wishes, spinning gold from the ones who do consent to being featured.

Tricksy Collins is a polymath. The show traverses several different artforms and conceits, from magic and comedy to puppetry, noir and finally, a side-splittingly funny and prodigiously impressive rap about she-who-must-not-be-named.

Clever and subversive, quick-witted and logic-defying, Assigned Magician at Birth is a magician-comedian at her best.
Reviewed by Sonia Nair

COMEDY
Virtuoso ★★★★★
Casey Filips, The Improv Conspiracy, until October 20

In my 15 years of reviewing Melbourne Fringe, I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many audience members doubled-over in laughter as I have in Virtuoso. Truth be told, I also had tears in my eyes throughout the entire hour.

Casey Filips plays the character of Tobias Finlay-Fraser, an aspiring actor with visions of his name in lights and billboards across Hollywood. He’s auditioning for the role of his dreams. He’s hoping it will finally land him an Academy Award.

Virtuoso is on at The Improv Conspiracy until October 20. Credit: Nick Robertson

It doesn’t go well.

The use of audience participation and multimedia is superb. Some of the biggest laughs of the night come from a member of the audience asked to impersonate a manatee; a faux Uber Eats delivery with chips shared amongst the crowd; and another directive to beg someone in the front row to, ahem, not “shit themselves”.

It’s a piece of utterly brilliant and bizarre comedy. If you’re seeking absurdist mayhem, I couldn’t recommend it more highly.
Reviewed by Tyson Wray

THEATRE
Ballkids (or, scenes from a friendship) ★★★★★
VIMH, La Mama Courthouse, until October 13

For me, Liv Satchell’s glorious and adorable comedy about friendship was like trying Vegemite ice-cream for the first time. As a Xennial theatre critic, I had to overcome some ingrained prejudices to savour its deliciousness.

Ballkids (or, scenes from a friendship) is on at La Mama Courthouse until October 13.Credit: Jack Dixon-Gunn

Seriously, a play focusing on BFFs (as if critics have friends!) flavoured with lashings of late- Millennial earnestness (kill me now) sounded like a terrible idea. A terribly awkward idea trying too hard to be cool.

Most people fit that cringe description by 13, the age Sam (Izabella Yena) and Holly (Michelle McCowage) are when they first meet on a tennis camp for aspiring ballkids. In exquisitely crafted scenelets, we follow them from the early 2000s to 2024 as they live through adolescent optimism and anxiety, through grief, university, travel and adult milestones – from horrendous 21st parties to moving queer wedding celebrations – and the moments of stillness and silent comfort that only true friendship can bring.

Satchell’s condensed script textures extroverted hilarity with emotional nuance. A one-sided rant about lesbian internet porn at a teen sleepover, for instance, plants a humorous generational marker while giving the side-eye to the near-universal challenge of discovering who you are as a sexual being.

The acting is an extraordinary masterclass in embodying characters who age over decades. McCowage and Yena inhabit the intricate physical and emotional changes involved in a way that’s so loveable and intimate and funny and true you won’t be able to help grinning in recognition. They possess such inseparable stage chemistry that they should share any award they might win for this.

Lively and sensitive direction, tennis-inspired set design, intelligent lighting and sound all support the performances, enlivening material which could easily have been flattened by nostalgia or stretched on the rack of sentimentality.

It’s uplifting, mature theatre, guaranteed to leave you smiling.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

CIRCUS
Apocrypha ★★★★
Darebin Arts Centre, until October 19

Apocrypha is on at Darebin Arts Centre, until October 19.

There are no death-defying stunts or freakish acts of dislocation in the circus of Mitch Jones and his Oozing Future ensemble. What they offer is high-quality acrobatic work, striking imagery, cabaret sensuality and very funny sketch comedy.

It’s all very atmospheric. The setting is a remote and imaginary past that vaguely recalls the temples of old Egypt or the churches of Byzantium. It’s a properly decadent vision full of twitchy priest-like figures, naked captives and solemn ceremonies.

The small ensemble fills out the evening with memorable moments. Rindi Harradine does the splits on a rope of heavy chains. Chloe Fazikas performs a series of backbends and balances that make the very stones weep. And Adam Malone introduces his explosive queer hoop act.

What really impresses, however, are the strangely involving theatrical vignettes. This is circus that combines subtle clowning, physical theatre and visual poetry. It’s consistently amusing but also unexpectedly poignant.
Reviewed by Andrew Fuhrmann

EXPERIMENTAL
Girl’s Notes ★★★★
Su Pin-Wen, Melbourne Recital Centre, until October 12

Girl’s Notes plays with discomfort. After an uneasily long introductory silence, Su Pin-Wen strolls purposefully on to stage – a thick etiquette book on how to behave balanced expertly on their head. The book remains there for the near entirety of the performance.

Girl’s Notes is on at the Melbourne Recital Centre until October 12. Credit: Weiwuying - National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts

Wheeled luggage in tow, Su partakes in the ritual of using everyday objects – grinding coffee, pouring water into a soda machine, plugging electrical appliances into a powerboard. They coyly gesture towards the flimsiness of the slip they have on, discarding it altogether early on so they’re fully naked.

Contorting their body into various configuration of limbs – squatting, splaying, splitting, slithering, lying, vibrating – Su showcases the wrinkles, reverberations and contours of their body in incredibly precise poses and movements. They’re careful to never portray their body in a state of repose – it’s always performing.

Self-possessed and playful at the start, a litany of expressions – pain, anguish, anger, acceptance – pass over their face as they grapple with the burden of gender, expertly encapsulated by the book still perched on their head.

Lin Mai-Ke’s accompanying classical music on the piano ranges from joyful and triumphant to torrid and grotesque as Su’s relationship to their body evolves. Lin Ping-Hsin is masterful with the lighting, bathing Pin-Wen in gradians of shadow and luminosity, shifting how they appear to us at every turn – simultaneously young and old, feminine and masculine.

Girl’s Notes plays with our perceptions of gender, ageing and physicality to weave a moving, tense and unsettled treatise on embodiment and the everyday performance of self.
Reviewed by Sonia Nair

THEATRE
Colin Ebsworth – Me, My Cult & I ★★★★
Trades Hall - Music Room, until October 13

“Everything is absolutely true in this,” says comedian Colin Ebsworth, as ominous evangelical music plays softly in the background.

Colin Ebsworth – Me, My Cult & I is an intriguing show about how Ebsworth’s parents were part of a cult. By his own admission, the show took him out of his comfort zone, sharing a part of his life that was so deeply personal.

Colin Ebsworth – Me, My Cult & I is on at Trades Hall until October 13.Credit: Tony Knight

Ebsworth confidently engages the audience, asking them whether they want a serious or lighter version of the show. He ends up performing a hybrid, going over time and having to end it abruptly, unintentionally. Ebsworth is a compelling storyteller, often injecting his boisterous, stand-up persona between anecdotes, which clearly helps ease the emotional toll of delivery, but would also occasionally detract from the climactic build-up.

Photos from his family album paint an image of austere normalcy, despite living under the cult’s expectations of unwavering commitment. Nevertheless, you leave questioning how easily cults exploit vulnerability, and your own susceptibility to their draw.
Reviewed by Vyshnavee Wijekumar

THEATRE
Feast, Pony Cam ★★★★
The Substation, until October 19

Heading out for dinner and a show is how most punters experience theatre. Usually, they’re separate. On the expansive and ever-growing menu of live performance styles, however, niches exist that serve food with or inside a show, from the lowbrow cheesiness of themed theatre restaurants to more high-concept immersive work.

Feast is on at The Substation until October 19.Credit: Cameron Grant

Experimental theatre outfit Pony Cam ventures into the latter at this year’s Fringe. If I didn’t know that Feast was originally conceived when the artists were students, I’d think it was a direct response to Gluttony, a work Red Stitch created for the Melbourne Food & Wine Festival in March.

Gluttony offered three-course fine dining amid a fly-on-the-wall tale of a Gen X reunion – a successful middle-aged chef, warped and exhausted by the cutthroat world of the high-end restaurant trade, summoning university friends for a last supper. It was quality theatre with a price tag to match and I feared only cashed-up Boomers could afford to go.

This show lobs an anti-capitalist grenade primed by flexible pricing – $5 to $100 for a ticket, depending on your means – and the feast itself launches a fusillade of rockets at entrenched inequality. Structured mayhem skewers and deconstructs everything from the dehumanising forces that blight the lives of hospo workers (and artists), to how the politics of respectability alleviate the guilt of the privileged few.

Feast is genuinely subversive and wildly kinky.Credit: Darren Gill

Leave your comfort zone at the door. Feast is genuinely subversive and wildly kinky – so kinky that Virginia Gay (Winners & Losers star and all-round musical theatre legend), who sat next to me throughout the banquet, volunteered to explore her sub side for the evening, hands hog-tied behind her back with a napkin. Getting enough wine to pass her lips was an absurdist sideshow of caregiving through constraint … and don’t even ask how we unfroze our entrees.

It would be remiss of me to reveal too much, but I can say you’ll be eating beige. Poverty food augments the parody of fine dining. Generosity unfurls from highway robbery (you’re not getting your bottle of red wine back); a sense of community emerges from precarity, risk, a willingness to disavow any sense of status or exceptionalism.

That isn’t to say there aren’t artfully served performances to witness without participating. There are plenty. Cello music. Improvised nonsense opera. Snippets of culinary memory. Storytelling sommeliers. A vicious family fight.

Greco-Roman wrestling. Private divertissements. Nude pageantry. It’s food theatre with the lot, and the more you throw dignity to the wind at this collaborative happening, the fuller your experience will be.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

THEATRE/EXPERIMENTAL
Speed: The Movie, The Play ★★★★
Act React, Prahran Town Hall, until October 20

You need not be a fan of the ’90s Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock blockbuster to enjoy this comedy theatre romp.

Speed: The Movie, The Play is on at Prahran Town Hall – Car Park, until October 20.Credit: Media Strategy Australia

The wonderfully silly show takes place mostly on a bus stationed in the Prahran Town Hall car park. An energetic cast amps up the ridiculous film plot, which sees a baddie stick a bomb on a runaway bus that will explode if it goes below 50 miles an hour. Enter our hero Keanu with his ridiculous “dude” accent.

The C-grade stagecraft deserves A-plus for ingenuity: a black curtain lifted around the audience standing in for a busted elevator, or blow-up palm trees shooting past the windows to simulate the bus speeding down an LA freeway. A peppering of cheeky puns and references to Reeves’ patchy career, plus clever improv with the audience, keep things as fast-paced as the “death bus” itself.

There’s ample audience participation, but don’t let that put you off – by the end the entire busload of hostages is committed to the ride.
Reviewed by Hannah Francis

DANCE
Guild Fringe: Pictures & Ghosts ★★★★
Arabella Frahn-Starkie, Guild Theatre, until October 12

Dance lives on at the University of Melbourne’s Guild Theatre. The venue was crucial in the development of the city’s contemporary dance scene through the 1980s but was shuttered as part of the redevelopment of Union House.

Pictures & Ghosts is on at Guild Theatre until October 12.Credit: Trudi Treble

Now a new theatrette has opened under the old Guild banner in the university’s Student Precinct, and dance is back on the program.

Last week, it was a joyfully dreamy premiere by Caroline Meaden and this week something more contemplative by Arabella Frahn-Starkie.

Pictures & Ghosts, aptly enough, is about dance and its history. It begins with a charmingly analogue presentation of dance images using transparencies and a projector. Research becomes a form of choreography as archival traces are shifted and annotated.

Photography yields to video and video in its turn yields to live dance as Frahn-Starkie performs an extended solo – very poised, very careful – that connects with the images as the reanimation of a ghostly past.
Review by Andrew Fuhrmann

COMEDY
Mel McGlensey is MOTORBOAT ★★★★
Trades Hall – Archive Room, until October 13

A comedy show featuring a woman performing as a psychosexual boat with father issues? Oh yes, it must be Fringe time.

Mel McGlensey is MOTORBOAT is on at Trades Hall until October 13.

Having taken out Best Comedy at this year’s Adelaide Fringe and being nominated for the Golden Gibbo at the Melbourne Comedy Festival, Mel McGlensey’s hour of nautical nonsense is a glorious feat of clowning, buffoonery and pushing the boundaries of bad taste.

Wishing for nothing more than to please her ‘Captain Daddy’, McGlensey and her sailor-dressed tech take us on an oceanic adventure which has audience members inspect her for barnacles, gratuitous honking of the “boob deck”, and a well-deployed Q&A session with the artist responding as, well ... a boat.

Some material is crass; it becomes borderline burlesque; and the double entendres do become tiresome at a point; but the utter ridiculousness of the show leaves the audience immersed in mirth throughout.

That said, if you want to avoid being invited to join in the titular (sorry, couldn’t help myself) eponymous act of the show, I’d suggest sitting in the back row.
Reviewed by Tyson Wray

COMEDY
Jeromaia Detto: When I Grow Up ... ★★★★
Trades Hall – Old Council Chambers, until October 13

Two months ago, I saw Jeromaia Detto perform for the first time. He was stark naked with Garry Starr and half a dozen other men in front of 500 people in Edinburgh. He gets his kit off tonight, but only following a prompt from an audience member and after seeking consent from all attendees.

Jeromaia Detto: When I Grow Up ... is on at Trades Hall until October 13.

When I Grow Up … is an hour of sketch and improvisation that asks the audience to recollect their childhood wishes for their own future. Having been written out and placed into a bucket, Detto then reads them aloud and acts out the various scenarios. I want to be “happy”; I want “to go to outer space”; I want “to be naked on stage in Edinburgh with Garry Starr” (no points for guessing who put that one in the bucket).

Detto’s commitment to turning every childhood fantasy into an acted-out reality is idealistically wholesome. While all sketches don’t quite land with aplomb, you’re left with a sense of unrelenting imagination and optimism.
Reviewed by Tyson Wray

THEATRE
Comedy On The Rocks ★★★
Motley Bauhaus, until October 20

Strap in for a Sunday sesh with a difference: six short comedy plays with a drinking game woven in via three key trigger moments in each. When these motifs arrive, the audience is invited to wave sparkly pompoms, make some noise and take a sip.

Comedy On The Rocks is on at The Motley Bauhaus until October 20.Credit: Ina Parr

The offerings are varied, from quirky monologue to pastiche period drama. Some are more developed than others, but each is written with plenty of heart. A highlight was a double act exploring sexuality and relationships with funny and clever pop tunes.

While it’s a fun way to get the audience engaged, the drinking game novelty is by no means integral to the afternoon – and may even deter some prospective punters. With a 2-hour run time, if silly and sloshy is the aim then a late Friday or Saturday slot would make more sense.

Go for the afternoon of refreshing and irreverent theatre instead.
Reviewed by Hannah Francis

EXPERIMENTAL
FUTURE ★★★
Trades Hall – The Quilt Room, until October 20

The zoomers are terrified by what the future might bring, and they have every reason to be.

Growing up as digital natives with the omnipresent shadow of Big Tech, amid ongoing climate catastrophe, the burgeoning resurrection of the far-right, rising cost of living and other horrors, this generation rightly can’t see a steady future.

FUTURE is on at Trades Hall until October 20.Credit: Jaimi Houston

Responding to this is the queer theatre collective PIGEONPIGEON, whose experimental play FUTURE invites the audience to think through and about the future alongside them. In this devised verbatim work that incorporates visual poetry, performers Geo and Em begin the show by laying out their worries; but how will they get an unpredictable audience to emphatically engage and speculate about an equally unpredictable future?

That’s the challenge. Through activities that are at first softly encouraging, FUTURE culminates in selecting a random (but consenting) audience member to enter the performance to chat about their thoughts.

This is a performance that’s clearly still in development; its format may very well serve as a preliminary act towards more. Still, PIGEONPIGEON’s attention to accessibility should be applauded – as perhaps it’s one of the first things many like them would like to see made commonplace in the future.
Reviewed by Cher Tan

EXPERIMENTAL
I’m Ready to Talk Now ★★★
Trades Hall – The Temple, until October 13

That Oliver Ayres tucks in most of the people who come to see his show before it begins should tell you everything you need to know about this intimate and deeply personal one-on-one production.

I’m Ready To Talk Now is on at Trades Hall until October 13.Credit: Iz Zettl

We’re tucked into the hospital bed where Ayres was diagnosed with Stevens-Johnson syndrome, four months after starting his transition in 2016. With noise-cancelling headphones and a bucket of sensory fidget toys, we’re no longer audience members but one half of Ayres’ mind, immersed into his experience as if it were shared. What follows is a meditative 30 minutes as Ayres reflects on his diagnosis with a disarming honesty paired with graceful physical theatre.

Rich imagery and conceptual depth ensures Ayre’s confessional-style monologues avoid being too solipsistic, while a sumptuous ambient score and creative shadow play elevate his choreography. But the show is ultimately just too short to feel fully realised, and more work is needed to tease out the relationship between dialogue and physical theatre.

Still, there’s a lingering poignancy here; a technically impressive experiment into a way of relating to audiences that elevates Ayre’s vulnerability until it thrums with fragility and power in equal measure.
Reviewed by Guy Webster

EXPERIMENTAL
Marg is All Ears ★★★
Cyrus Art Lounge, until October 17

Research shows one in five older Australians experiences loneliness. This sprightly octogenarian is flipping the equation, offering a sit-down, a cuppa and a yarn to anyone quick enough to book her in.

Marg Is All Ears is on at Cyrus Art Lounge until October 17.Credit: Sarah Walker

Marg is warm and very well-read - the kind of person who can talk to anyone. She’s got eight decades of life experience to bring to the table, and asks that I bring something, too.

To help things along, Marg prods me with gentle questions, searching for a thread to pull on. She cannot compute my day job in digital/social media, but we find common ground unravelling memories of free-range childhoods in the countryside, moments of spiritual discovery, and our next travel destinations.

Part of me wants this concept to have more meat on the bones than “seeing where the conversation goes”; another part of me appreciates the simplicity.

Either way, it was a pleasure to meet you Marg – and thanks for the excellent book recommendations.
Reviewed by Hannah Francis

COMEDY
Pope Benedict the IX ★★★
Trades Hall - Old Council Chambers, until October 13

Pedro Cooray’s Pope Benedict the IX is a campy, cheeky and thirsty bishop with a penchant for orgies and murder.

Pope Benedict the IX is on at Trades Hall until October 13.Credit: Nick Robertson

Based on a real 11th-century figure who ruled Rome for three periods – the only pope to have assumed the title more than once – the show details the corruption, debauchery and plotting that governed the youngest-ever pope’s term in power.

Cooray sits on a throne wearing a red and white cassock and bejewelled papal tiara, speaking in a questionable Italian accent. The characters and storyline are introduced fast, making it a little confusing to understand the plot without knowing the full historical context. Cooray does break character and provide an explainer at one point, and encourages the audience to read up about some of the harder-to-believe points after the show.

A small fake business called Pope N Sonz (with the ironic tag line “A legitimate business”) is used to detail the corruption within Benedict’s multiple terms. As a device, it works to varying degrees.

Cooray’s portrayal of Benedict and the various popes preceding and succeeding his reign are farcical – the whole show itself is ridiculous. Leaning into the absurdity is your only salvation as a member of the audience, even when you don’t completely know what’s going on.
Reviewed by Vyshnavee Wijekumar

CABARET
Cabaret Unscripted ★★★
Festival Hub: Trades Hall - Solidarity Hall, until October 13

Cabaret Unscripted is on at Trades Hall until October 13.Credit: Nick Mick Pics

It’s 1932 and Michelle Sootie and Ken Brûlée are resurrecting the glitz and glamour of the old-world cabaret scene. With names bestowed to them by the audience, the night can go anywhere and everywhere and it does – personal histories, vengeances and preferences are improvised on the spot as Isabella Valette and Greg Lavell craft a night of comedy and cabaret based almost entirely on audience suggestions and their own quick wits.

Improv cabaret is both harder and easier than straight-out improv comedy. There’s a need to calibrate each song according to the mood of the improvised lyrics, but there’s also music and vocals to enliven things. Lavell’s well-honed musicality and prowess on the piano coupled with Valette’s powerhouse stage presence as she sashays across the stage belting out tunes in her soaring voice culminate in a thoroughly entertaining, if sometimes uneven, show.

As you’d expect with improv, some bits work better than others. Some punchlines land, other routines feel laboured. But with a healthy dose of gentle audience interaction and accents, characterisations and punny rhymes performed with general aplomb, you’re promised a fun night that’s different every time.
Reviewed by Sonia Nair

Lotus Root Support Group is on at Trades Hall until October 13.Credit: Adeeb Fazah and Mark Benedict Cheong

THEATRE
Lotus Root Support Group ★★
Trades Hall - Old Council Chambers, until October 13

Broke theatre-makers Miriam Cheong and Shannen Tan have forged a sisterhood with cysts.

A creative collaboration inspired by a shared love of acting and anime, Cheong and Tan’s show Lotus Root Support Group is an exploration of their friendship, and the challenges they’ve faced with Polycystic Ovary Syndrome, body image and typecasting.

The Singaporean duo arrive on stage dressed in propeller caps and gym gear, armed with toy hammers and a catch ball set. They interchange between prerecorded video and live performance, playing with familiar formats, including a Seinfeld-inspired stand-up comedy piece, Variety’s Actors on Actors conversations and hip-hop music videos.

The show feels dense, constantly deviating between performance styles and topics. The pair have an endearing vulnerability, but some moments felt like an in-joke or a private conversation, with the audience waiting to be let in.

A scene drenched in red stage lights, where Tan and Cheong take turns narrating as the other acts out their aspirational selves, is a defining highlight, but not enough to bring the show home.
Reviewed by Vyshnavee Wijekumar

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