Comedy: Frank Woodley and Bob Downe

Perth International Comedy Festival
Astor Theatre, Mt Lawley
Saturday May 10

Doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun!
For a combined 50 years, Frank Woodley and Bob Downe have been part of our furniture, and it’s a familiarity that hasn’t bred contempt.
In a double-headed Saturday night at the Astor, in front of two big Comedy Festival audiences, the two veteran comedians showed why.

Music: Amanda Palmer and Grand Theft Orchestra

Astor Theatre
September 8 2013

I was unforgivably late to American punk cabaret diva Amanda Palmer’s Astor show, and caught only the last song by the support act, Die Roten Punkte.
By then, Palmer and her Grand Theft Orchestra, Jherek Bischoff (bass) Chad Raines (guitar) and Michael McQuiken (drums) were on stage themselves, enthusiastically backing up the Aussie comedy-rock duo’s rambunctious magnum opus, Ich Bin Nicht Ein Roboter (I Am a Lion).
Bischoff remained on stage for two solo numbers, and blew the evening away.
His first, Kule Kule, by the Congolese band, Konono No1, was an irresistible attack of solo bass rhythm. It was followed by the most beautiful ukulele playing I’ve ever heard, on A Semiperfect Number, which he wrote for the Kronos Quartet’s 40th birthday.
Like fellow Amanda Palmer alumna, the cellist Zoe Keating, Bischoff used live electronic sampling to create dense sound patterns underneath the uke, which he played like a classical guitarist. Simply amazing.
Palmer will never be an anti-climax, though.

Comedy: Stephen Merchant

Hello Ladies

Astor Theatre

December 6, 2012

It’s a fair assumption that most of the audience at Stephen Merchant’s three sold-out Astor shows were hard-core fans of the vertically unchallenged British comedian and his collaborator Ricky Gervais.

Gervais has had comedy superstar status for years – I remember seeing him gigantically reproduced on a whole-side-of-building billboard on Sunset Boulevard ­as far back as 2008. Merchant may be Larry David to Gervais’s Jerry Seinfeld, but he’s steadily emerging in his own right.

On the strength of this poised, neatly calibrated, and very, very funny solo show, it’s easy to see why.

Music: Camille O'Sullivan

 Astor Theatre

June 22, 2012

She’s a darlin’ girl, Camille O’Sullivan, but I wouldn’t share a house with her. The lounge room floor littered with discarded clothes, booze stashed everywhere, tables covered in knick-knacks, those meows and shrieks she comes out with, and that unsettling way of hers, part Nigella Lawson part Jane Horrocks.

She’d have a crackin’ record collection, mind.

Both sides of O’Sullivan, the nightmare housemate and the brilliant musical auteur, were on display at the Astor Theatre last Thursday during a flying visit to Perth after a stint at the Adlelaide Cabaret Festival.

The somewhat ramshackle first half suffered from a misplaced sound mix and O’Sullivan’s mannered eccentricities. They fit her mixed-up, shook-up Irish-French persona, but they do little for the songs she interprets. And, really, the eight numbers before interval didn’t need zany embellishment. A couple of less-travelled Nick Caves (Oh My Lord and The One I’ve Been Waiting For), Tom Waits’s The Briar and the Rose, and a brace of carnal women’s songs (Bessie Smith’s Sugar in My Bowl and Kirsty MacColl’s In These Shoes) were mighty. Best of all was her unaccompanied howl of Jacques Brel’s The Port of Amsterdam, stripped of its Gauloises-and-accordionated charm and dumped, semen-stained and bloody, in an alley behind the docks.

Comedy: Perth International Comedy Festival #2

The Pajama Men, Des Bishop, Tripod
Astor Theatre, Mt Lawley

PICF runs until May 20

The Astor was under siege. People cramming in and out of the old girl, milling on the sidewalks, clambering down fire escapes and queuing for a hundred metres up Beaufort Street. It was like thousands of really hip looking orcs had descended on some fortress in Gondor looking for man-flesh.

Well they weren’t really orcs (what was I thinking). They were Perth, and what had created this frenzy was the trove of comedy gold that had been hoarded inside the building.

In February, PIAF and the Perth Fringe showed that there’s an enormous hunger in this town for contemporary, quality, accessible entertainment, especially if it’s gathered in precincts where you can hop from show to show. PICF is about to prove the point.