Comedy: Perth Comedy Festival Gala

Perth Comedy Festival Gala
Joel Creasey, Cam Knight, Tien Tran, Gen Fricker, Mike Goldstein, Paul Foot, Stephen K Amos, Craig Hill, Nick Cody, Rhys Nicholson, Angelo Tsarouchas and Tony Woods
Regal Theatre, Subiaco
Wednesday April 29

Crawl over broken glass to see this bloke (pic: Tobias Venus)

The Perth Comedy Festival has defied demographic gravity this year and moved west. It’s now spread everywhere from the UWA campus to the Mt Lawley Bowling Club, the only venue to survive from the festival’s previous iteration.
The great benefit of a Gala is that you generally get the best of each act’s full show. It’s interesting to see how fashions change in comedy, sometimes quite rapidly. There seemed, happily, to be less fixation with sex than a couple of years ago, and far more on various forms of bigotry; admittedly, with four gay men, an Asian Australian and African American comedians on the bill, that might be expected.
As always, Galas are the best of times and the worst of times; you love the variety, but miss the journey a fine comedian takes you on.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Perth International Comedy Festival 2013

Wrap
This year's festival consolidated the runaway success of 2012, without adding anything particularly new to the mix (not that it matters overmuch). Once again it was gamely curated by Jo Marsh, and its management and marketing were outstanding. The festival could really use a 3/400 capacity room to fill the gap between the main hall at the Astor and its next biggest venue, at the Mt Lawley Bowling Club, but that might be a hard ask unless they can get their hands on, say, one of Artrage’s spiegeltents, or go further afield from the Beaufort and Walcott precinct,and that would be a great shame.

For me Paul Foot's extraordinary performance at the opening gala and the legendary Bob Downe's glorious Mother's Day show were the great highlights of the festival, and Lawrence Mooney, Jim Jefferies, Jimmy McGhie, Joel Creasey and the festival’s surprise packet, Josie Long, who took out the Best of the Fest award, were acts you’d go a long way to see. It’s great that we now don’t need to.

I've mentioned before the impressive roster of Asian/Australian performers at the festival, and should also recognise the roster of local acts that more than held their own with their imported colleagues. Congratulations to Sami Shah (who is in both categories), a well-deserved winner of the Best Local Act award.