For once, I can agree with the official blurb for a 2009 Fringe show.

This is indeed a ”wicked black fat-heartedcomedy about love, loss and the mourning after”.

I have discovered a little venue of treasures for the 2009 Adelaide Fringe – The Tuxedo Cat, on the rooftop of 15-19 Synagogue Place in the city.

There is a superb array of shows running up in the clouds and they all espouse pure “fringeness”.

Other People’s Problems is a performance by Sarah Quinn of three short plays: Your Life Starts Tomorrow, Good Authority, and Self Help.

Sarah’s characterisations are well round and her transitions between characters quite fluid.

The three plays are all very simple, comedic and pithy. They examine the cult of the larger-than-life, self help gurus, the vulnerabilities of people enjoying their 15 minutes of fame through online social media channels, and the self-deluding lengths we all have the potential to go to in order to justify our timidity and lack of action.

Good, simple fun and an enjoyable way to spend 50 minutes during the Fringe.

Shakti’s Swan Lake is one of those “to be missed” shows.

Yes, there is precision, yes it is a good idea to explore this classic ballet, but no, this is not the way.

Shakti’s obvious skill is lost in this self-indulgent piece made worse by bad, bad costume choices.

There is a certain age after which nudity should be reserved for partners and naturist colonies, and Shakti has passed that age. Perhaps this is why most of us were distracted from the premise that the “black swan symbolises the material world and the white swan the pure desire within which cries to be released”. 

In this pitiful striptease-cum-dance, Shakti descends beneath dignity in moves and gestures that had four out of five audience members glancing at fellow patrons in disbelief, numerous times through the performance. 

One unexpected tragedy surrounding this show is how it strips credibility from the following reviewers/publications:

London Ballet Review: named it as one of their favourites!  

Rich Hall is an Adelaide Fringe legend. And he keeps getting better with age.

His opening segment as Rich Hall is pure stand up gold. Yes, I am gushing a bit as I write this, but he is just so damned good it is hard to sound neutral.

Rich happily pokes fun at our habits and insular media (read “The Advertiser”) and then pokes fun at his own country, the US of A.

He barks and snarls his lines, wanders off the cuff, and prepares us for his alter ego, Otis Lee Crenshaw.

Otis, appearing courtesy of the Australian/US Prisoner Exchange program, and his band walk us through quirky, faux-chauvanistic, redneck-flavoured ditties in the guise of a country and western band.

We learn how to compare women to musical instruments, the dangers of Bundaberg Rum, and the subtlties of breaking up.

It is raucous, rough and razor sharp. It is Rich Hall. The safest spend of your Fringe budget.

This is pure Fringe brilliance.

A troupe of young actors, I Must Not Theatre, transport us to another world, in fact, into the inner world of a young John Lennon through a play written in 1968.

This play is based on the poetry and writings of John Lennon, and captures the spirit of fantasy and escapism that we are told he resorted to during his droll upbringing in WW2 England.

Don’t expect linear narrative in this show. Expect, instead, a mindscape, beautifully and playfully crafted, full of colour and movement and absurdism and satire and humour.

In part, this show is nuttier than many Goon scripts and more lunatic than many Monty Python scripts. It is like a hybrid of AA Milne and Rudyard Kipling and Oscar Wilde. 

I won’t try to describe the show. I will say, enter with a relaxed, open mind, allow the players to play, and hold on for a disturbingly fun piece of theatre.

James Galea dubs himself Australia’s Number One magician and I can live with that.

He has a warm presence on stage and oozes confidence in what he does.

So what does he do? He does tricks! It really is an impressive display of sleight-of-hand.

James tells us he saw his first magic trick at the old age of 14 and was taken under the wing of a mentor, who turned out to be a real-life card sharp. 

What we are left with, is a show of bravado and wonder, as cards disappear and then manifest themselves on command, and a whole manner of objects are transformed before our very eyes.

If you have $25 to spend, buy a ticket to the show but don’t be tempted to wager it in a card trick with James Galea because you will lose. It is as simple as that!

George Catsi has a great idea buried in this show. His character, Rev Slim, is a “disturbed evangelist, dishing out songs, salvation and spit”.

When his deep, southern, US accent is on full throttle, it is good. When it slips, the energy in the room slips.

Rev Slim charicatures those much maligned evangelical preachers who strut about, holier than thou, playing with emotions to manipulate the audience. Rev Slim gets this at a surface level but sadly stays there. There are a few moments of promise as he whips the “congregation” into a frenzy of amen-shouting lost souls but the pauses and “set ups” (including the script prop) allow the fervour to dissipate.

It also does not help that Rev Slim works without a full backing track. He needs some form of music playing in the background, just like the stereotypical southern baptist preachers had bands playing a continual emotional soundtrack to their tirades. This will capture the energy he creates help him go more deeply into his character, for everyone’s benefit.

There is a sense of “first draft” about this show. It has promise but is a long way from the promised land.

The premise for this show is that Germans are not known for having a sense of humour, at least one that embraces subtlety, irony, and whimsy.

We were all expecting awkwardly delivered jokes and brutal slapstick, all with a nod and a wink to the audience acknowledging how “bad” it all was.

What we did get from Award-winning German Comedy Ambassador Henning Wehn and the Fatherland’s foremost Yodelmeister Otto Kuhnle is a show that contained some comic moments strewn among a background of disjointed banter.

Otto has a great voice and is the “Victor Borge” of opera. He musical/operatic sequences are enchanting and delightful.

Henning delivers his schtick well but seemed to be grappling for material on the night.

As it happens, the Friday night crowd had drunk deeply from the Caos Cafe’s stocks of “bier und wein”, and the night rollicked along.

I would like to see the show made a little tighter with some more solid material in place of the garden gnome sketch which amused briefly and then draffed like a “time filler”. 

It has its moments of fun but I agree with the English couple who sat next to me, it would be good to see the performers do solo shows because the sharing of the stage from one sketch to the next lent a stop/start feeling to the show as we adjusted back and forth to their very different styles.

I am a new parent and I need to get used to children’s shows. So, with great anticipation, our little girl accompanied us to see the monkeys.

A dozen or so children ran to the front of the tent and sat on the floor to be closer to the action and they created great atmosphere.

Then two monkey puppets were revealed, sitting at big bongo drums each, where they remained throughout the show.

They drummed enthusiastically. They sang as you would expect monkey puppets to sing. And the children obliged them with choruses of cheers, as the monkeys worked through the standard children’s theatre devices for milking applause and reaction.

However, the show was let down by a number of things, not least being the paucity of “art” in any of the lyrics. The songs were a collection of a few raw lyrics or phrases that seemed to have been strung together on the fly with little crafting and often without any rhyming – the hallmark of children’s songs.

And the puppeteers “corpsed” a few times, lapsing into their natural voices as they shared with the audience they had fluffed some lines or were having trouble with the props.

These might all be forgivable were it not for some very misleading quotes in the blurb for the show. Whomever it was at The Advertiser who wrote “beating Hi-Five hands down” or at The Territory Times who wrote ”the next Wiggles”, should be relieved of their reviewing duties. This act has potential but clearly needs plenty of work before it is truly ready to be placed in the company of the aforementioned acts. It is raw and unpolished and survives thanks to good old cutesy “furry creature syndrome”.  

Please also note that this reviewer did not hear any “beautiful postive messages”, rather he heard one or two empty, tokenistic slogans like “trees are good”. Wow.

Having said all this, I must note that the children did jump and clap and seemed to enjoy expending energy amid the drumming.

I am seeing this show March 15, although I am not reviewing this show. This one is an indulgence to celebrate Leonard Cohen. Here’s what the official guide says about the program:

A new work by Philip Glass based on the poetry and images of Leonard Cohen, co-commissioned by Adelaide Bank Festival of Arts.

A spectacular union of living legends as composer Philip Glass interprets the poetry of Leonard Cohen.

In 2006, Leonard Cohen concluded two decades of work, publishing his ruminative poetry and sketches in the Book of Longing. The result is a sweeping series of ballads, love poems, retrospectives and unexpectedly comic pieces, as well as some deeply spiritual meditations written during the eight years Cohen spent in a Buddhist monastery.

When Cohen read these works to his friend and mutual admirer, the enthusiastic response from Philip Glass was to suggest a collaboration that celebrated the poems musically. And so in this world premiere commissioned production, the Festival is privileged to welcome Glass as he presents these two remarkable concerts in spoken word, instrumental music and song, with an ensemble of eight musicians (including the composer himself) and four singers under the staging of acclaimed American choreographer Susan Marshall. Cohen also makes guest appearances via recorded spoken word selections of the work, and through his own visual artworks incorporated into the production.

Meditative, playful, erotic and provocative: Cohen’s words find their sonic syntax in Glass’s elegant and hypnotic score.

Festival Guide