With the name Metrosketchuals, I expected a straight up sketch show from Joshua and Beau, but in fact this show has a bit of a narrative running through it and the sketches were mostly related to it, with the odd sidestep. I didn’t mind, I’m a big fan of narrative, though this was a little more like a ‘Lost’ sort of narrative so it was a bit strange at times. Luckily I know enough about the ‘Saw’ movies from reviews and hearsay to work out that they were doing a bit of a spoof of that. Their opening routine was a particularly cute spin on something so innately vile but then Joshua and Beau are quite cute and fairly inoffensive. My impression of their show was of sitting in a ‘family room’ on a rainy day watching two 10 year old kids playing creatively with their toys which included, toy guns, a magic bunny, a plant, silly wigs, tape recorders, various bits of junk and a copious amount of boxes. I wondered if most of the boxes were used to carry in the other stuff and just left on the floor, ... er stage.
What made the performance space even more like a room in a busy house was its position as pathway between the bar, the loo, the courtyard and the kitchen. One of my funniest moments was when a waiter walked through a scene with two meals it really added a surreal feel to the show. I feel sorry for all of the performers at Violet Tears during this festival, it’s a gorgeous space and the food is yummy (try the chocolate spring rolls with icecream), but as well as passing staff and patrons there is also quite a bit of noise coming from the front bar, not only talking but house music, turned down rather than off. I’ve experienced this in bar venues before. If venue owners want to bring in comedy punters as customers, they should at least respect the performers enough to turn off the damn house music when the show is on! Especially as there is no door or even curtain here to help dampen the sound, which also leads to the potential problem of local St Kilda ‘characters’ dropping in to interrupt proceedings.
Josh and Beau have come up with a creative festival show based around being held captive in a room and trying to find a way out, while police hunt their kidnappers, but this of course was just an excuse for some silly faffing about and showing off. Being modern, tech savvy, youngsters we were also treated to some filmed sketches, my fave of these was about hieroglyphs (I don’t know why, I think it was the mummy), my least was about dancing in the street, the sort of thing replicated all over Youtube that just seemed to be a bit of a lame audition piece for The Chaser. Look at me! I’m not scared of dancing in front of strangers! OK, good on you, but it’s not particularly funny dancing, it’s a bit long and there is no tag. One sketch about a jungle war that did have a great tag, sadly did not really fit into the rest of the production, ah well. Sketch shows do tend to be, well, sketchy. Even Monty Python admits that their TV shows were hit and miss. I enjoyed some of the sketches here for various reasons, but I felt that the boys sometimes got a little overwhelmed by all the props. A huge armchair seemed to be there for only one sketch about a singing Madonna & Child that I found strange, barely amusing and unnecessary, except to show how two imaginative kids might play with the armchair. My favourite sketches included a naughty bunny puppet and trip through the radio to a race caller that reminded me a little of the way the Young Ones moved into side sketches. I think they missed a great opportunity to go out on a big production number high, when ordered to do so by their mystery kidnapper, (Ala the Rocky Horror Picture Show) but this petered out a bit and the eventual ending was a bit inexplicable.
Well it was opening night, in an annoying venue and nerves and a tiny audience did not help I’m sure, I generally enjoyed spending time with Josh & Beau and got some enjoyable laughs from their antics, but I feel overall, it’s still not quite there. What may help this production, I think, is a bit more work on their stage characters and on the dialogue between them in the narrative part. We learned a little about their personalities in the pleasingly madcap Atheism vs Religion sketch, which I think could become part of their stage personas and lead to on-going comic dialogue. Since their show is based in narrative, we need to learn something about Josh and Beau and their relationship with each other and the world they are trying to get back to, rather than them just running about saying ‘what should we do now?’ in between their sketches. Maybe they should check out Lano & Woodley’s ‘The Island’ or the episodes of the Goodies where they are locked in their office, for ideas about how the different characters deal with being trapped with each other. I’m a teapot!
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