The best, the weirdest and the most risky of the final Fringe weekend

It’s the final week of the Melbourne Fringe, but for some shows things are just getting started. Here you can find a collection of reviews covering some of the 2500 artists in this year’s festival.

COMEDY
He Had it Coming ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
The Provincial Hotel, until October 20

He Had It Coming is on at The Provincial Hotel until October 20.Credit:  Jon Quinnell and Laura Irish

Women have been victim-blamed since the beginning of time, but have men seen similar treatment? No. That’s the premise behind Jemimah Ashleigh’s comedy show He Had It Coming, where the title tells you enough.

Constructed akin to a game show, He Had It Coming is opened by a host named Little Fan (Amber Louka), who quickly introduces us to three women (plus one surprise guest) from history – Giulia Tofana, Marianne Bachmeier and Lorena Bobbitt, played by Eleni Vettos, Bridget Sweeney and Tina Manoussakis respectively – who tells us of being compelled to kill men who had wronged them and others.

Here, they are part of Femme Fatal’s “Broken Hearts Club”, and after each story, the audience is asked to judge: did these men really have it coming?

While the obvious answer may be yes, that’s not the point. This is a show that takes true crime to its limits. Look what you made me do, this show tells us. There might be such a thing as justified murder.
Reviewed by Cher Tan

COMEDY
Gets You Going ★★★★
Festival Hub: Trades Hall – Corner Store, until October 20

Ashley Apap wants to ask: what gets you going? That’s the premise behind her new show, Gets You Going, an hour of improv that involves Apap selecting random, pre-written questions out of a jar and lobbing them to random audience members.

Gets You Going is on at Trades Hall until October 20Credit: Nicholas Robertson

Questions include “What’s the best secret you’ve ever kept?” and “What’s your favourite magic trick?” among other delights. Crowd-work shows like these can be difficult as they are highly dependent on the audience’s mood, but Apap’s energy is impressive – she manages to get a mostly lacklustre crowd warmed up and smiling by the end of the show.

As she says, Gets You Going was devised to counteract apathy in today’s world. And Apap has largely succeeded. Perhaps the questions can be weirder and more surprising next time.
Reviewed by Cher Tan

THEATRE
Werewolf ★★★★
Arts Centre Melbourne, until October 26

Van Badham’s new play has the courage to face the public recrudescence of white supremacist groups in Australia, and to interrogate the polarisation of political discourse which made that possible.

Werewolf is on at Arts Centre Melbourne until October 26.Credit: Mark Gambino

It imagines the arrival in Melbourne of a fascist speaking tour, with young leftie activists, talking heads on the ABC and actual neo-Nazis all implicated in the savage political satire. Badham goes fang and claw at the rage and hatred and dismay, the puritanical conviction and the moral superiority, the siloing and the echo chambers, and the overwhelming sense of persecution shared by the radical right and left.

Werewolf imagines the arrival in Melbourne of a fascist speaking tourCredit: Mark Gambino

Like her lurid investigation into the QAnon conspiracy theory, Werewolf is ferociously smart and fascinated by the irrational. The plot spirals around the fascist tour. There’s an awkward romance between a Blairite professor (Simon Corfield) and the head of a ‘progressive’ economic think tank (Alexandra Aldrich) who meet through an ABC TV producer (Michelle Perera).

Meanwhile, an ardent and sexually frustrated young leftie magazine editor (Ben Walter) falls into the clutches of a sinister and alarmingly media-savvy fascist (Eddie Orton), whose white supremacist group gathers for weird rituals in the bush.

A desperate sense of black comic menace takes hold at the ease with which ideology or prejudice can shut off access to reason or empathy and make monsters of people, well before the ’80s horror tropes pile up and the fake blood begins to flow.

Short scenes play out on an anarchic set scrawled in occult fascist graffiti, with the cast energetically lampooning media and political players, and shifting rapidly between multiple characters as anger rises and the clash over the fascist speaking convention reaches a gory climax.

If there’s a criticism, it’s that Badham’s buttocks clench when it comes to portraying the complexities of race. Perera, the lone actor of colour, would have been fabulous as a figure based on right-wing commentator Rita Panahi – rather than the somewhat sidelined and victimised characters she does play.

Given that one extended sequence is literally set at Sky News, you have to wonder why Badham shied away from the fact that its successor to Andrew Bolt is a conservative Iranian-Australian woman who fled here as a refugee with two words of English.

Werewolf is still brilliant political satire, incisively dissecting arguments across the spectrum. Everyone from right-wing ratbags to identity politics fanatics will find points of agreement in this play’s invective, as well as views to despise and fear. Don’t think your own political views – which are, of course, irreproachably sensible and correct – will get off scot-free. Badham rightly insists that for our political culture to improve, we all have a responsibility to avoid turning into werewolves.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

COMEDY
Prune ★★★★
Trades Hall – Quilt Room, until October 20

This wilfully bizarro comedy exudes the confidence of someone who yodels while using a public restroom. Listen up.

Prune is on at Trades Hall until October 20.Credit: Pat Mooney and Isabelle Carney

Prune is a 65-year-old mother and wife who has permanently retired to her bath. That description is deliberately reductive – for most of the running time here, we’re viewing her existential crises through the lenses of her hilariously dysfunctional partner and offspring. She has her reasons, but we’ll have to wade through her family to get to them.

It’s close enough to typical main stage comedy to deliver a satisfying narrative arc while remaining weird, wild and brimming with manic energy.

The cast is a comic Who’s Who, clearly relishing every line, and the writing has such an original edge that each audience member probably feels at least one gag has been written for them alone.

The humour is so specific and so expertly delivered that you can’t help but lean in closer to hear what’s actually being said.
Reviewed by John Bailey

EXPERIMENTAL
Locus ★★★★
Secret Location, until October 20

We arrive at a mystery address, collect a numbered lanyard and choose a word that most appeals to us from a miscellany of paper scraps. Entering a space hitherto unknown to us, we’re asked to forget our names, suspend disbelief and have faith in the redemptive powers of memory, regeneration and magic.

Locus operates on participants knowing as little as possible about what’s about to unfurl and trusting in the three hosts – Lawrence Leung, Vyom Sharma and Dom Chambers – completely.

Locus is on at Melbourne Fringe until October 20.Credit: Vyom Sharma

The experience moves through different spaces with different conceits; one is a room encouraging play and craft, the next is centred on the preservation of memories, the one after that a place where dreams can materialise.

We divulge parts of ourselves and watch in astonishment as they’re revealed back to us, which is scarier than it sounds for a show that trades in audience interaction and improvised imaginings. The hosts are gentle and thoughtful, the room of strangers convivial and warm – how much you share and participate in Locus is (mostly) up to you.

Our trio of charismatic hosts, each taking turns at steering us through different exercises, attribute the high jinks to an alternative universe impinging on our current one. Combining mind-boggling instances of magic and pop psychology with the promise of self-actualisation – no mean feat for a Tuesday night – Locus elicits reactions as disparate as crying, WTFs and stupefied silence.

Cynics will be challenged on two fronts: the improbability of the magic being witnessed, calling into question the possibility of a co-conspirator in the audience, and the fleeting need to be earnest.

At one point, we’re asked to close our eyes while filming what’s taking place before us with our phones. We can watch the footage later, or we can choose not to. But seeing something happen doesn’t bring us any closer to understanding why or how it did. Therein lies the beauty of Locus. And life.
Reviewed by Sonia Nair

THEATRE
I Watched Someone Die on TikTok ★★★★
La Mama HQ, until October 20

At this stage in the content life cycle, talking about social media being a toxic cesspit is par for the course – but in Charlotte Otton’s hands, it’s infinitely thrilling and terrifying.

I Watched Someone Die on TikTok is on at La Mama HQ until October 20.Credit: Liam Forcadilla

Her breakneck hour-long show combines cultural analysis, shitposting, nostalgia-baiting and theatrics with a scrolling screen, recreating the experience of endlessly consuming content on TikTok.

From fashion videos to beheadings, viral dances to funeral live blogs, Otton lampoons the absurdity of online life without being didactic or predictable. She’s a confident and convincing performer, whether belting out a song from Aladdin or begging a virtual priest for forgiveness (he speaks through AI animation, as does TikTok boss Shou Zi Chew – very uncanny valley).

Whereas millennials on the early internet could choose to engage with shocking content, Otton posits, now it’s no longer a choice. This clever, layered show cuts to the bind of modern times with humour, intelligence and absolute chaos.
Reviewed by Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen

COMEDY
1925 ★★★
The Burton Brothers, Trades Hall, until October 20

A sketch show set in the roaring 20s could be a stale affair but the latest outing from cult faves the Burton Brothers extends well beyond undergrad flappers-and-gangsters mush. The comedy here runs from vaudeville to Pythonesque to the kind of 00s edgelord irony that feels – ironically – its most dated element.

1925 is on at Trades Hall until October 20.Credit: Simon McCulloch

The postwar pre-Depression premise affords satirical targets from tent show evangelists with marital issues to monster movie stars enjoying a pass-agg night on the tiles. The highlight might be a circus sideshow in which the audience is the freak. It’s the closest the piece gets to mining the similarities and differences between 1925 and now, which are otherwise mostly ignored in favour of, well, laffs. Of which there are plenty.

These boys are unashamedly silly. Their tight physical comedy, close harmonies and improv skills generate the kind of actual-funny absurdity that might make them our next Lano and Woodley. Fingers crossed.
Reviewed by John Bailey

DANCE
The Bloom ★★★
Dancehouse, until October 19
Jessie McCall’s The Bloom is a curious study in replication and fragmentation that features such disparate objects as an old video cassette player, a flatbed scanner, a breast pump and gardening paraphernalia.

These items are used to create disquieting little scenes that resist interpretation. What to make, for example, of the opening tableau in which the video player is delivered of a human mother, nursed, then stowed in a bar fridge?

The Bloom is on at Dancehouse until October 19.Credit: Jinki Cambronero

Around these vignettes, we also get a series of queer pop-inflected dance sequences. The best of these – such as the tumbling duet with Raven Afoa-Purcell and Sasha Matsumoto – are very impressive: precise, witty and attractively strange.

The show is not always effectively lit, with whole sections performed in a brownish gloom. At such moments you do at least get the sense of things stirring under the earth, roots struggling and insects hatching.

Overall, however, there’s plenty in this unusual efflorescence of images that will stimulate and provoke.
Reviewed by Andrew Fuhrmann

CABARET
SUGAR ★★★
Trades Hall – Common Rooms, until October 20

Want to succeed in life? Choose your parents carefully. Nobody knows that truth better than Generation Z. Inherited wealth is the main way they’ll be able to afford a home, though if you’re young and hot and mercenary you can always pick another daddy or mama; side-hustle generational inequality aside with a little pinch of sugar.

SUGAR is on at Trades Hall until October 20. Credit: James Reiser

Such pay-to-play relationships have developed a formalised niche online. In genderqueer pop cabaret SUGAR – starring the super-talented Tomas Kantor – the performer tells of making a profile on a sugar baby website. The aim? To hook up with a sugar daddy and create a cabaret from the experience.

Anyone who saw the vampy androgyny of Kantor’s cabaret-inspired Feste in Bell Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, or their compelling turn in Matthew Lopez’s queer epic The Inheritance, knows Kantor is a star in the making.

Vocal talent and epicene presence shine through scattered clouds of doubt in this show’s very first public performance.

Cabaret veterans might feel as if they’re witnessing a baby Meow Meow or Paul Capsis. And there’s enough eye and ear candy, quirky queer shenanigans and inventive arrangements of up-to-the-minute pop bangers to fascinate a Gen Z audience, too.

Opening with Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance might be a tired noughties throwback, but Kantor soon stakes a claim as a new brat on the block, interpreting Chappell Roan’s Hot to Go! and Good Luck, Babe! in striking, intensely charismatic ways that dispel the effects of hearing them on high rotation and make them sound fresh.

To anchor the persona created here in authenticity, though, SUGAR needs a less psychologically and emotionally inchoate dramatic line. There are too many notes missing to believe in the transition from shallow cynicism to tormented vulnerability, and the complex power dynamics of the transactional relationship – involving inequalities of age, wealth and gender – could be more precisely explored.
This review was written from a preview.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

EXPERIMENTAL
Where You Were ★★★
Trades Hall – The Temple, until October 20

Where You Were is on at Trades Hall until October 20.Credit: Oliver Cowen

What is Fringe for, if not to be transported to alternate worlds ripe with possibilities?

As an audience of one, I enter a starlit room full of earthy scents and ambient music (provided by an actual musician on keys and banjo).

I take a seat opposite our narrator, whose smile and witchy black velvet set the scene for the story they begin to weave: one that fuses the everyday struggles of a nine-to-fiver with the Epic of Gilgamesh. It’s a choose-your-own adventure, where my selection of curious objects leads us to encounter deep life questions, and invites me to see my own life reflected in the epic.

I leave uplifted, feeling one’s small everyday battles are worthy, and that finding moments of magic in one’s own imagination can be enough.

A bewitching way to set the mood for an evening at Fringe, with an added dose of ASMR for those so inclined.
Reviewed by Hannah Francis

THEATRE
To the Moon and Back ★★★
The Motley Bauhaus – Theatrette, until October 20

At a time when digitality is taken for granted, screen-based communication may very well be the only way some get to interact with others.

This is the case for Her (Bridgette Kucher), the unnamed protagonist in Michelle Yu’s play To the Moon and Back. Brought up by her callous older brother (Tom Worsnop) after the death of their parents, Her is trapped within a certain codependency marred by economic and emotional abuse.

To the Moon and Back is on at The Motley Bauhaus until October 20. Credit: Chatarina Hanny Angelita Teja

This is an ouroboros of loneliness: Her tries to reach out to friends to no avail. There’s a brief respite with one friend (Jayden Chu), but he’s decided that gaming and cats are more fulfilling than other people. Her’s only solace comes from a distant Oracle (Beray Uzunbay), who tries to offer advice and comfort from a world beyond.

It’s a raw performance. While highlights include Worsnop’s rendition of a brutish, misogynistic young man and Chu as dorky cat dad, the treatment is uneven. Lighting and subtitle cues are often missed, resulting in a disorienting audience experience. The dialogue, as well, feels written to be read rather than performed.

Nevertheless, To the Moon and Back deals with ever-pressing questions: how do we express true vulnerability and find companionship in our screen-mediated society?
Reviewed by Cher Tan

THEATRE
A House of This and That ★★
Trades Hall – Evatt Room, until October 20

“No human being should do customer service for money,” says Caitlin A. Kearney.

Veteran usher Kearney is an “insult comic”, harvesting the interactions she’s had with colleagues and theatregoers, as well as her own musings, for this lengthy late-night monologue.

Kearney stands solo on stage, vintage jazz playing in the background. She blurs the lines between perspective and reality, meandering between metaphors, personal crises and the mundane business of an evening front-of-house shift.

A House of This and That is on at Trades Hall until October 20.Credit: James Ellisdon

We get introduced to a slew of colleagues including the annoying Nate, who she trades barbs with, and shift supervisor Esther, who she has an obsessive crush on. The anecdotes are a little clunky, making it hard to get immersed in these stories or be invested in her encounters.

By the end of A House of This and That, your mind has already checked out, like a coat from the cloakroom. Reviewed by Vyshnavee Wijekumar

COMEDY
Never Gonna Die ★★
Trades Hall – Evatt Room, until October 20

In 2021, Maddy Weeks’ psychologist told them that young people these days act as if they’re “never gonna die”. They took that phrase, turned it into their personal mantra and got it tattooed.

Never Gonna Die is on at Trades Hall until October 20.Credit: Rory Gillen

Unsurprisingly, their debut hour is a bildungsroman that shares stories of the embarrassment of their childhood trauma growing up in a regional town: be it coming out as gay and non-binary to their family; having a sexual experience backstage at a community theatre play with a clown; or getting their first period at the Eiffel Tower. Plus a sordid insight into their father’s internet history after he was “hacked”. It’s all solid fare, though far from groundbreaking.

However, it’s the weaving in of actual experiences of death – namely a schoolmate’s suicide and a man requiring CPR at a restaurant – that jolt the flow of the show and ultimately leave it stunted and without a recognisable structure.

When used deftly, death can make for brilliant and captivating comedic fodder (see Joshua Ladgrove’s Baba or Ahir Shah’s Ends) – but only with full commitment to the sentiment. Weeks’ bubbly effervescence in their delivery of lowbrow humour starkly belittles the more serious content dealing with the reality of our own mortality and seeking vulnerability in the room when discussing mental illness. Making fun of Nickelback? Sure, if not terribly dated. But on the back of a story about fatal self-harm that traumatised an entire school? Errr, maybe not.

Weeks is an affable performer. They have the cadence and ability to turn their voice demonically for a punchline that is reminiscent of Zoe Coombs Marr’s formative years. Let’s hope they can pick a lane for their next hour – instead of an ill-informed amalgam of fisting jokes and poignancy.
Reviewed by Tyson Wray

COMEDY
Truth Be Told ★★
Theory Bar, Meyers Place until October 20

A couple of New Zealanders walk into a bar – actually the teeny room at the back of a bar – and tell stories.

Truth be Told is on at Theory Bar until October 20.Credit: Tom Noble

Gabby Anderson goes first, regaling the crowd with titbits about moving to Melbourne, her exes, learning a new language and being a teacher.

There are a few giggles, but a number of anecdotes get the silent treatment. Anderson, who’s dedicated five years to stand-up, presents with a joyous disposition and expressive face. It’s easy to picture her doing improv, which is referenced during her 25-minute spot.

Orin Ruaine-Prattley, four years into his comedic journey, then takes the floor with a sharp, yet laid-back delivery in a separate 25-minute sequence of observations.

Tales of sports, trying to fit in and eking out a life as a comedian garner some laughs.

The show flyer suggests “you can handle the truth, if it’s funny”. I braced for an onslaught of wit yet left bristling with disappointment.
Reviewed by Donna Demaio

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