Theatre: What’s Love Got to do With It (★★★)

The Cutting Room Floor
Directed by Rachael Woodward
Designed by Olivia Tartaglia
Devised and performed by Tristan Balz, Jacinta Larcombe, Mariah O’Dea, Zoe Hollyoak, Tristan McInnes, Phoebe Sullivan
Blue Room Theatre
Until June 25

The highlight of TILT, the WAAPA Performance Making course’s final showcase last year, was a button-bright boardroom satire about love, heartbreak and how those maladies might be ameliorated, or cured completely, by pharmaceutical means. 
It was a killer idea that, with just the merest tweaking, could go into the Fringe or a Blue Room season with “sold out” written all over it.
In retrospect, “merest tweaking” was a bit optimistic.
Morphing a show from a 20-minute-long skit into a 50-minute-long play isn’t simply a matter of adding more of the same.
It requires wholly new elements; plot and character development, a genuine narrative arc, action and reaction, a twist or two – just about everything that a skit can do without but a play must have.
What’s Love Got To Do With It hasn’t yet completely found its feet (if anything, the storyline was not as clear as it was in the shorter version) but there’s more than enough wiz and bang on show to thrill its audience.
And, maybe, get some “sold out” signs up at the Blue Room. 

Read the complete review in The West Australian. 

Theatre: F*@k Decaf

by Tyler Jacob Jones
The Cutting Room Floor
Directed by Scott Corbett
Designed by Timothy Green
Performed by Amanda Watson, Ann-
Marie Biagioni and Jack Walker.
The Mary Street Bakery
28 May – 14 June 2014

(★ ★ ★ ★ ½)

  
I first saw this snazzy little play in June last year, and was delighted to see it having a Fringe World run. There are a couple of changes: the Fringe season is at the Frisk Bar in Francis St, Northbridge, and the actor playing the barista is now Monty Sallur, but, after a second look, everything I wrote then still applies. F*@k Decaf travels next to Adelaide for their Fringe, at the Nano Café from Feb 25 - Mar 1, and if you are reading this in that fair, distant city, I heartily recommend it to you.

When T.S. Eliot said “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons”, he knew what he was talking about. So does Tyler Jacob Jones.
His F*@k Decaf, which has just finished its run at the Mary Street Bakery in Highgate, is a zuzzed up little triumph of sharp observation and café society comedy, made even more so by piping-hot performances by Amanda Watson and Ann-Marie Biagioni.
Jones is the real deal, I think. Like many others, I heard about Point & Shoot, his Martin Sims Award-winning hit at the Perth Fringe this year, too late, but the terrific F*@k Decaf sees him join talents like Jeffrey Jay Fowler and Will O’Mahoney in the first rank of Perth’s exciting young playwrights.

Link here to the original review in The West Australian