When I Fall In Love: The Nat King Cole Story Dec 14, 2012 ****1/2

Chapel off Chapel, 14-23 December, 2011
Reviewed by Joe Calleri on Dec 14
Stars: 4.5

Charming, talented Bert Labonte’s homage to legendary black performer, Nat King Cole, is a stylish, deeply satisfying show that should find a broad audience for lovers of fine music.

“When I Fall In Love: The Nat King Cole Story” is a musical journey through the late Cole’s life. At one point of the performance, Labonte tells us that, Cole was a three cigarette packs a day man, and that’s what Cole attributed his silky smooth voice to. Little wonder then that Cole died at the tender age of 45. What a great loss. We learn a great deal about Cole’s life during this performance, including details of Cole’s rise from relatively humble beginnings, to his rise to international, musical superstardom, to his failed marriages.

Labonte is a fine performer, blessed with good looks, and a wonderful singing voice, who rather than seeking to imitate Cole – which would have been a big artistic mistake – infuses many of Cole’s best known songs with his own deep, rich, heart-felt passion.

Backed by a hot jazz trio (John Shawcross on piano, Tim Dunlop on bass, Daniel Zampatti on drums) Labonte delves deep into Cole’s treasure-chest of timeless tunes including the title song, “When I Fall In Love”, the whimsical “Mona Lisa”, the deeply romantic, “Unforgettable”, the up tempo “Route 66”, and the soaring “Love is a Many Splendored Thing”.

With the exception of the overly detailed reference to the inauguration of John F Kennedy, and the fact that, Mueller has chosen to not write the show from Cole’s first person perspective, which serves to diminish the emotional impact of this performance, this is a fine tribute to a wonderful performer who left the world an enduring musical legacy.

By Joe Calleri

DRACULA’S SIN AND TONIC, Oct 26, 2012 ***

DRACULA’S SIN AND TONIC

Venue and Dates: DRACULA’S, Opens October 26, 2012 for a 12 month run.
Reviewed by Joe Calleri on Oct 26, 2012
Stars: ***

Audiences just can’t get enough of vampires. So, it’s no surprise that, Melbourne iconic theatre restaurant, Dracula’s, is currently celebrating its 30^th anniversary of screams.

You’ve probably driven past it thousands of times without stopping, but the interior of this theatre restaurant is a thing of grim beauty with lots of skulls, and severed hands and body parts and other horror-related paraphernalia. Sure, it’s a bit

You are transported to the restaurant in a full-scale working Ghost Train. I’m not joking. That ride, which brings back many fond memories from Luna Park, is worth the price of admission alone.

Once inside the restaurant, you meet the attentive waiting staff, who in their make up look like escapees from Michael Jackson’s Thriller film clip.

Sin and Tonic– which is into its second week of a fifty two week run - of is a throbbing cocktail of hard rock songs, stand up comedy, and burlesque routines performed by a group of very sexy, charming, skilful and hard-working performers.

The show is divided into two halves, with the second half stronger and more cohesive.

If your taste in theatre runs into bright, flashy, loud and kitsch, then stick your fangs into Sin and Tonic. You won’t be disappointed.

By Joe Calleri

Whiteley’s Incredible Blue … an hallucination by Barry Dickins Oct 13, 2012 ***

 Fortyfivedownstairs – 13 to 23 October 2011
Reviewed by  Joe Calleri
Stars: ****

The word tortured often precedes the word artist. Brett Whiteley, one of Australia’s greatest painters, was a tortured individual - a self-indulgent free spirit, and heroin addict. In Barry Dickins’s Whiteley’s Incredible Blue … an hallucination, we join a shambolic Whiteley in purgatory.

Neil Piggott who poignantly channels the body and spirit of Whiteley in this short piece, often bears a strikingly uncanny physical resemblance to Whiteley, right down to Whiteley’s trademark mop of unruly blonde hair.

Piggott is joined on a cleverly lit and designed stage (Meredith Rogers and Kerry Saxby) by musicians Pietro Fine, Robert George and Robert Calvert who provide a sophisticated, jazzy, percussive soundscape to Whiteley’s sometimes rambling, and barely intelligible rantings on some of his most important art works, drugs, women, art, and artists including Van Gogh, Bacon and Pollock.  

Dickins has written a complex, often moving script, that in equal parts depicts Whiteley as a crazed, drug taking, creative genius, and then as a sensitive, lost, scared, pitiful, misunderstood soul starved for love and genuine connection with those closest to him, including his wife and daughter. These tender moments are among the highlights of a play that is rendered truly memorable by Piggot’s remarkable, chameleon-like depiction of Whiteley. 

by Joe Calleri

EDDIE IFFT – WHAT WOMEN DON’T WANT TO HEAR

HI IF BAR & BALLROOM, until April 24, 2011

Melbourne Comedy Festival

Reviewer: Joe Calleri on April 1, 2011
Stars: *

Published in Herald Sun Online

Twenty minutes of Eddie Ifft’s vile, south of the navel stand-up was already too much.

Ifft’s foul-mouthed, toilet humour is better suited to a boozy, sleazy, buck’s night, or end of footy season festivities in a hot, tin shed – not an International Comedy Festival.

Ifft is an angry, not-so-young, sex-obsessed, American comic – imagine an even angrier version of Nicholas Cage.

Ifft lines up big, defenceless targets: Oprah Winfrey (”a big, fat lesbian”), and the Pope (tasteless joke about anal rape) to name but two. Ifft laughs that American audiences did not warm to his Pope joke. Some audience members found it hilarious. It’s incredible what some audiences will laugh at these days.

Robbins, Stilson & Molloy, Comedy Festival, April 22, 2011

Melbourne Town Hall until April 24, 2011

Melbourne Comedy Festival

By Joe Calleri

Published in Herald Sun Online

April 22, 2011 11:57AM

VETERAN stand-ups Glenn Robbins, Mick Molloy, and Jeff Stilson presented a packed house with a 60-minute feast of exquisitely timed, genuinely laugh-out-loud comedy.

Robbins is your laconic, charming host, who delivers his own highly polished material, some involving audience participation, before introducing Stilson and later, Molloy.

US-born, now Aussie resident Stilson looks and talks just like all good American stand-up comedians. He chats about his large family - kids are like bikers in a bar just waiting to fight - married life, and our Aussie obsession with sport.

One hilarious gag compares the methods by which the tied Grand Final and tied Federal Election were resolved. He muses what would have happened if Bob Katter had decided the outcome of the tied Grand Final!

Last but not least, Molloy. Embroiled in heavy-duty litigation in Adelaide, the often self-deprecating Molloy presents much funnier on stage than his celluloid and television personas.

He admits, remarkably, to not owning mobile phones, computers, watches, or a car, before reeling off horror tales of those unfortunates – Ricky Nixon et al - who have fallen victim to their evil mobile phones.

This skilful trio offers audiences plenty of comedic bang for their buck. Recommended!

Wil Anderson, Man Versus Wil, April 2011 ****

• Athenaeum Theatre until April 24, 2011
• Joe Calleri
• From: Herald Sun
• April 05, 2011 12:00AM

Wil Anderson is performing his show Man vs Wil at the Athenaeum Theatre until April 24, 2011. Picture: Erinna Giblin Herald Sun

IT'S easy to like comedian Wil Anderson.

He oozes charm, charisma and personality, and unleashes his broad comedic range in his sell-out, rip-roaring show Man Vs. Wil.

Anderson directs his razor-sharp wit, rapid-fire comedic delivery, keen intellect, and microscope-like powers of observation at a range of everyday subjects: the painfully and hilariously acute differences between American and Australian waiters' service standards (guess who's second best?); various types of addiction (real or imaginary, including to shopping); masturbation; religion; heterosexuality; and homosexuality.

Highlights include Anderson's revelation of a lifelong fear of horses, and what not to do after you ride a horse for the first time.

Another winner is his tale of morning visits to a US Starbucks to be ogled by gay men so he could feel better.

By Joe Calleri

HANNAH GADSBY - MRS CHUCKLES

Melbourne Comedy Festival

SWISS HOUSE, until April 24, 2011
Reviewer: Joe Calleri on April 1, 2011
Stars: **

Published in Herald Sun Online

Tasmanian-born, gay stand-up comic, Hannah Gadsby, warns us that adrenaline makes her sleepy, so, in her comedy, she never gives 100%, but rather, 60% to 90%.

That is precisely the problem with Gadsby’s show. It’s close, but no cigar. The routine is a rambling, time-shifting travelogue through Gadsby’s life in Tasmania and Canberra but it suffers from a serious lack of self-editing.

The show could be a successful 20 minutes , but Gadsby lacks the comedic fire-power to captivate us for 60.

The understated Gadsby studied at the Woody Allen school for self-effacing, self-deprecating, self-referential comedians.

Her show contains some genuinely funny moments. The bookish-looking Gadsby (think KD Lang with Harry Potter glasses) talks about three talents that got her out of trouble at high school: whistling her esses; speaking like Donald Duck, and throat farting. Charming!

Gadsby contemplates her deathbed words and settles for “Oh, no.” If only Gadsby had kept those words in mind while culling her routine.

- Ends -

But, it’s Ifft’s tediously persistent obsession with the most sordid aspects of sex – sex toys, multiple sex partners, threesomes, pornography, unusual sexual positions, and anal sex – that were genuinely unfunny and a big turn-off.

This show is not for those with delicate dispositions so, if it’s subtle, witty, and intelligent humour you seek, look elsewhere.

LISA-SKYE IS NOT LIKE OTHER BOYS

PONY BAR,

until April 23, 2011
Melbourne Comedy Festival

Reviewer: Joe Calleri on April 3, 2011
Stars: **
Published in Herald Sun Online

S.O.S Wendy Harmer, Denise Scott, or other experienced comediennes. Goth stand-up, Lisa-Skye, shows great potential but desperately needs mentoring!

Skye is charming with a cheeky smile but suffers badly from nerves. She reminds me of a chef using every ingredient in a soup to make an unpalatable mess.

There are clever audio-visuals, songs to metronomes, bonboniere and her slide show about what makes a woggy house was a ripper.

But she covers too many topics. Many should be amputated from the routine, including peculiar discussions of snakes eating burlesque performers and how to handle tarantulas.

Lisa-Skye has a diamond mine of potential show material, yet we only received the cubic zirconium version.

She could go further with the Greek father who only uses cash; the manly brother who shoots innocent animals in the face; her fear of marriage and children; to her years working at a phone dating line. More of that, please!

Madeleine Tucker's Unfashionable Windcheater Factory

Melbourne Comedy Festival

John Curtin Hotel

By Joe Calleri

Published in Herald Sun Online

April 15, 2011 4:42PM

RODNEY the Goblin, Zoran the Zucchini and Richard the Refrigerator walk into a photography exhibition featuring pictures of ears.

It’s not the opening line of a bad joke, but the opening scene of this execrable sketch show - that has no connection to the title of the show - focusing on the shambolic, embarrassing misadventures of the trio, and a Sleazy Couch, lemon-obsessed Cheese Grater, Optometrist, and Surgeon.

The performers screen three lengthy filler videos. A music clip features photos of ears and objects that sound like “ear” (beer, idea). The second shows optometrists throwing a discus during a lunch break.

The third is a purported news story on the Toy Dinosaur Paralympics. I’m not kidding!

These young performers would be well advised to spend more time on writing and editing their material rather than producing silly movies.

I can’t imagine a target audience for this infantile drivel. Adult audiences will cringe. Discerning toddlers and their parents will demand more for their entertainment dollar.

One star for the colourful costumes and brevity.

Star rating: *

CATHERINE DEVENY – GOD IS BULLSHIT, April 2011

TRADES HALL, until April 24, 2011
Melbourne Comedy Festival

Reviewer: Joe Calleri on April 2, 2011
Stars: *

Published in Herald Sun Online, April 2011

If you are a card-carrying atheist, detest organised religion (especially Catholicism), believe the Bible is a weapon of mass indoctrination, and think Cardinal Pell is a buffoon, then catch Catherine Deveny’s “God is Bullshit” lecture/vitriolic diatribe.

An unfunny, 5-minute rant about Deveny’s reversion from Catholicism to atheism at 38, stretches to an agonising hour. I didn’t laugh once during this turgid show and nor did the audience around me.

Skilled comics can be hilarious about religion, but Deveny lacks charm, subtlety, any real connection with her audience and labours under delusions that she is funny.

Her anti-religion rants are no more meaningful and insightful than those of the religious zealots she loathes.

The only highlight was Deveny’s screening of excerpts from an actual Q&A episode featuring famous atheist, Richard Dawkins (Catherine’s idol), butting heads with Fundamentalist Christian, Senator Steven Fielding.

Deveny’s de-baptising routine is plain offensive. She exhorts the audience – who follow like sheep - to recite lines to de-baptise themselves.

Catherine, if there is a Comedy Hell, your accommodation awaits. But, since you don’t believe in Hell, it’s off to limbo with you!