Guy Webster

The beloved Melbourne International Comedy Festival is well and truly in full swing, with more than 680 shows lighting up venues across the city. Phew, our abs are hurting already! With so many comedians to see and not enough time, we have sent out a batch of reviewers to dig deep and suss out the best of the fest this year. Whether it's a weird and wonderful show, a national treasure or a rising star, check out our reviews and see what tickles your fancy.  Want to review the show over a drink? Check out the best late-night bars in Melbourne.  

Hold on to your alibis, dear readers. Hot on the heels of the recent national tour of The Mousetrap, another classic from Agatha Christie’s playbook of murder mystery mayhem lands on the stage at Sydney’s Theatre Royal.  *** Time Out Melbourne reviewed And Then There Were None when it played at the Comedy Theatre in February. Read on for that three-star review:   Somewhere off the coast of Devon is a dreary little island with high cliffs, higher tides and no way to escape. It’s Soldier Island: a lovely place to put your feet up, take a dip, meet nine strangers and watch as you all get slowly picked off one-by-one. This is the wickedly thrilling premise of Agatha Christie’s 1939 classic And Then There Were None. A favourite among Christie fans (and Christie herself), it arrives in a production that once again proves that the master of the whodunnit can still thrill us nearly 100 years on. Yet, this revival from director Robyn Nevin – her second of Christie’s following 2023’s The Mousetrap – rests on the laurels of its author too often, offering a passable but ultimately thin restaging that I think might signal the end of the recent resurgence of British classics in our theatres. It’s 1939. Ten people have been invited to Soldier Island under suspicious pretences. They have little in common apart from the skeletons in their closets. For much of the show’s bloated first act, we’re watching this motley crew of potential victims introduce themselves to each other. Christie is fam

Bernie Dieter and her band of legendary misfits are descending upon Melbourne once again, to deliver a whole month of debaucherous fun and frivolity. Bernie Dieter’s Club Kabarett, starring the legendary queen of Weimar punk described as an "electrifying cross between Lady Gaga, Marlene Dietrich and Frank-N-Futer in sequins", will take over North Melbourne's historic Meat Market from April 3 to May 11. Audiences can expect riotous original songs, immense vocal talent and a jaw-dropping line-up of contortionists, sword swallowers, fire breathers and aerialists. For more info and to secure your tickets, head to the website. Read on for our five-star review of Bernie Dieter’s Club Kabarett from the 2022 Melbourne Fringe Festival. *** It’s easy to see why Dieter’s award-winning show has garnered such esteem since touching down in Australia earlier this year. Less than two minutes in and our M.C., Bernie has thrown off her tartan dress to reveal glittery tights and feather-tipped shoulder pads. Soon after, she’s straddling an audience member and enlisting the help of two others – lovingly named ‘Shaven Haven’ and ‘Silver Fox’ – to carry her back to the stage in the splits. The fourth wall is not so much brought down, as elegantly side-stepped by her sky-high stiletto heel. All the while, Bernie’s quick-wit and dirty mouth find comedic beats in the unlikeliest – or, as it were, the most unwilling – of audience members. "Tonight is about letting loose, letting go, and getting a li

In 1984, director Trevor Nunn was doing press for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Starlight Express when he offered the perfect maxim for a Webber fan: “Here is my money. Hit me with the experience.” Arguably none of Webber’s shows have hit harder than his 1971 rock-opera, Jesus Christ Superstar, which arrives at Melbourne’s Princess Theatre after a much-lauded run in Sydney. First revived at London’s Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in 2016 for the show’s fiftieth anniversary, it’s been restaged in Australia by director Timothy Sheader. Sheader favours a ‘more is more’ approach, leaning into every ‘Webber-ism’ that made the show a success in the first place: rock'n'roll maximalism, near-inhuman vocal lines, emotional spectacle. No crucifix is too glittery or top note too loud. Megawatt vocals and an electric ensemble cast make it a cut above the other Webber revivals we’ve seen in the last couple years. Yet its heavy-handed approach also exposes the limits of spectacle for spectacle’s sake, even when it comes to Webber. It’s a dazzling experience, but ultimately soulless.  The curtain rises on a disassembled rock concert: amps, concert speaker boxes and microphone stands peppered around a set of towering balustrades, exposed steel beams and grating that hide the band. Set and costume Designer Tom Scutt puts us somewhere between Rent’s gritty urbanism and the steampunk simplicity of Hadestown. Meanwhile, lighting designer Lee Curran adds a splash of Mad Max to things by throwing dirty ye

Somewhere off the coast of Devon is a dreary little island with high cliffs, higher tides and no way to escape. It’s Soldier Island: a lovely place to put your feet up, take a dip, meet nine strangers and watch as you all get slowly picked off one by one. This is the wickedly thrilling premise of Agatha Christie’s 1939 classic And Then There Were None. A favourite among Christie fans (and Christie herself), it arrives at the Comedy Theatre in a production that once again proves that the master of the whodunnit can still thrill us nearly 100 years on. Yet this revival from director Robyn Nevin – her second of Christie’s following 2023’s The Mousetrap – rests on the laurels of its author too often, offering a passable but ultimately thin restaging that I think signals the end of the recent resurgence of British classics in our theatres. It’s 1939. Ten people have been invited to Soldier Island under suspicious pretences. They have little in common apart from the skeletons in their closets. For much of the show’s bloated first act we’re watching this motley crew of potential victims introduce themselves to each other. Christie is famous for her ability to construct a complete impression of a person in one short phrase. But here, these characters have a tendency to over explain themselves, and it can get a bit tedious. You can feel Nevin trying to amplify comedic beats or attempt more creative blocking to avoid this exposition-heavy first half from getting too stale. For this, sh

It’s hard to make good political satire on the Left, though it is easy to make fun of us. There’s no lack of good material, or good satirists. But we’re a constantly moving target with an ever-evolving set of terms, concerns and ideas. And we’re also a bit of a sensitive bunch with a tendency toward self-importance. This is the knife Deborah Frances-White gleefully twists in her satirical dramedy Never Have I Ever. In the program notes for this Australian premiere at the Fairfax Studio you’ll read the show described as “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf for the modern age”. But it’s more Edward Albee via the Netflix Original: an entertaining mix of bawdy wit and fine-tuned political takes with splashes of soap opera-style melodrama. Elevated by a high-energy cast and an evocative set, it promises plenty of light-hearted laughs in between clear-eyed insights into the paradoxes of being a modern progressive. The Fairfax Studio has been transformed into Masada, a Turkish restaurant somewhere in London run by Jacq (Katie Robertson), a white bisexual woman who grew up poor and might be one-sixteenth Turkish. These facts are important to the play and the world of identity politics it wades so confidently into. It’s a familiar realm for Frances-White, the Brisbane-born expat whose The Guilty Feminist podcast built a huge following with its brand of wry self-awareness and nuanced encounters with Leftist hypocrisy since it started in 2015. That was ten years ago, when the language of ide

Depending on who you ask, Evan Hansen, the neurotic heart of Benj Pasek and Justin Paul’s 2015 smash-hit musical Dear Evan Hansen, is either a manipulative megalomaniac or a stumbling spokesperson for mental health with the edgy appeal of an anti-hero. Following nine years as the go-to for theatre kids looking for an easy Halloween costume – chuck on a blue-striped polo and an arm cast – the divisive teen arrives at Melbourne’s Arts Centre in a beautiful production of an imperfect show. A stellar cast backed by creative technical design lands every tear-jerking ballad and pop-rock anthem with a skill sure to both thrill long-time fans and convert newcomers. But the elephant in the room is Evan (Beau Woodbridge), or rather it’s the show’s tonal problem that he represents. It’s a macabre story. Evan is that brand of socially anxious and self-deprecating anyone who grew up on Tumblr will immediately recognise. On the first day of his senior year he has an affirming letter he wrote to himself at the direction of his therapist stolen by resident high school loner with an incel vibe, Connor Murphy (Harry Targett). When Connor takes his own life soon after, the letter is found in his pocket, leading his family to believe that Evan was his friend. Cornered by the grief-stricken Murphys and craving connection, Evan leans into the lie. It's all very morally dubious, and the show works best when it leans into the darker, more cynical themes raised by Evan’s deceit. ‘Sincerely, Me’, a sh

This dazzling production of Yentl opens with a command: “Once you say ‘A’, you must say ‘B’”. It’s not said by our eponymous lead (the effervescent Amy Hack as Yentl), but maybe it should be. They are the bookish one, after all. Forbidden to study the Talmud as a woman, they’ve spent years prying the occasional theology lesson out of their father and reading the Torah on the sly. They know the near-divine power of language more than most; the way it obliges us to participate in it to understand and express ourselves, to worship, or to love.  The Yentl we encounter in this mystical adaptation at Sydney Opera House from Kadmiah Yiddish Theatre (presented with Monstrous Theatre and Neil Gooding Productions) seeks out a new language, or rather finds something new in an old language; a way of understanding Jewishness and Jewish womanhood that embraces the liminal, the inexpressible, and the ancient. And they begin by giving themselves a new name, a male name that will allow them to become a scholar of the Talmud: Anshl.  What they’ve accomplished is nothing short of magic – an explicitly queer retelling of a story made famous by a Barbara Streisand-led 1983 film Rather than overstate the novelty of these ideas, co-writers Gary Abrahams, Elise Esther Hearst and Galit Klas show just how deeply rooted they already are in Jewish lore, theology and myth. What they’ve accomplished is nothing short of magic – an explicitly queer retelling of a story made famous by a Barbara Streisand-le

Early on in Martyna Majok’s quietly devastating and Pulitzer Prize-winning Cost Of Living, a character stands on the threshold of a small apartment in New Jersey to offer his ex-wife some unsolicited advice. After his wife Ani (Rachel Edmonds) was paralysed in an accident, Eddie (Aaron Pedersen) quickly left her. But here he is in an open-buttoned flannel to tell her one way she might recover some feeling in her body – by listening to music. Ani, never one to shy away from calling Eddie a prick, tears him a new one, thank god. But eventually she concedes that there is some truth to his advice. “You listen,” she says, tapping her finger on the toggle of her motorised wheelchair like she’s playing piano, “and… your body tries to imitate the… sense for the things it’s missing. The broken things. The shit that’s disconnected. And it tries to bring everything back together.” It’s as good a metaphor as any for Majok’s show, which arrives in Melbourne after much-lauded seasons in Brisbane and Sydney. This is a work about connection: what we do to seek it out and why we might deny it. Brought to the Sumner Theatre by director Anthea Williams, it’s a challenging and life-affirming watch, both expertly acted and beautifully rendered. The play’s two-hour run time is split between two storylines. There’s Eddie and Ani: two exes trying to reconnect while navigating ongoing caregiving and the long-held resentments reserved for the recently separated. And Jess (Mabel Li) and John (Oli Pizze

With Milk and Blood Benjamin Nichol solidifies his place as one of our most pre-eminent playwrights, returning to a question that has been at the heart of his work to date: what does care in the face of violence look like? In 2021’s Kerosene, this question prompted the already accomplished actor to examine domestic violence and the ties that bind long-term friendship. In 2022’s Sirens, he turned to the evangelical church and queerness in regional Victoria to explore the violence of internalised prejudice. With these two acclaimed solo shows, and in just three short years, Nichol has managed something most playwrights spend years trying to accomplish: he’s created a signature style.  Walk into a Nichol play and you expect a 60-minute character-driven monodrama set on an empty stage that follows the material impact of a contemporary issue – queerness, incarceration, domestic violence, class – with deep empathy and wit. There’ll be an acapella song, countless moments of dance-like movement and there’ll definitely be tears. Nichol is the naturalistic counterpoint to local legend Patricia Cornelius, sharing Cornelius’s interest in class politics but trading in her formalist tendencies for a more minimalistic social realism, forgoing her post-dramatics for earnest sentimentality. Milk and Blood signals the halfway point for Nichol’s planned eight-part anthology series of one-person shows. Together, they offer a two-hour showcase of these Nichols-ian tropes honed to a sharp and deva

I remember the first time I saw a Bloomshed show. It was Paradise Lost at Northcote Town Hall back in 2022. John Milton was God in an oversized Pope hat and a robe painted a dazzling green. Adam was a ditzy himbo and Eve a ditsier bimbo in ’80s jazzercise gear.  It was my first glimpse into what has become a famous formula for the acclaimed Melbourne-based troupe: take a canonical text and tear it apart with razor sharp satire and camp spectacle. Since 2012, the company has been reimagining classics with productions as absurdly entertaining as they are thought-provoking. You’re throwing dodgeballs at Blanche DuBois in A Dodgeball Named Desire to rethink the age-old beef between sport and art. You’re watching a pig from George Orwell’s Animal Farm face a senate enquiry. You’re laughing your way to a deeper understanding of art as much as these specific pieces of art.  The Importance of Being Earnest is a surprising misstep from the audacious troupe, but it’s an ambitious one. The lights come up on Oscar Wilde (a suitably droll James Jackson) asleep in a decadent Victorian chambre with an erection threatening to pull the roof off fortyfivedownstairs. It’s typical Bloomshed: deliciously dumb and bawdy satire supported by simple yet magical stagecraft. It’s also a knowing wink to an audience who’d expect nothing less from the bombastic company tackling our most famous hedonist. The show soon takes aim at these very expectations, becoming something like an anti-Bloomshed Bloomshed

Blanche DuBois is the fragile heart of Tennessee Williams’ 1947 masterpiece A Streetcar Named Desire and the easiest character in the Western canon to do an impression of. Chuck on some pearls, a white debutante-like fit and throw back a whiskey before you try your hand at a Southern drawl and you’ve got her, or at least some of her. If a classic, as the Italian writer Italo Calvino once defined, is a text that ‘has never finished saying what it has to say’ then Williams’ DuBois says more eighty years on with a string of pearls and a Mississippi accent than most of our classics ever could.  Such is the enduring power of Williams’ poetic realism, and the reason why this superficial revival from Melbourne Theatre Company feels so frustrating: for all the expectations or stereotypes we might have going in, the best productions and performances of this theatrical classic will rise above them all. A few sterling performances and technically impressive design cannot erase the fact that this production simply doesn’t know what William’s classic isn’t finished telling us.  Nikki Shiels is our Blanche, entering with a cat-like elegance in a long sheer dress and her iconic mop of curls. She truly is one of our best, commanding the stage with an ease and charisma few could replicate. Impressive vocal acrobatics (and an equally impressive Mississippi accent) show her signalling the complex play of insecurity and entitlement that defines Blanche with quick movements between her crystallin

Viral Youtube star and English sketch comedian, Adrian Bliss sprints out onto the Beckett stage at Malthouse Theatre in a giant orange inflatable ball and light-up undies. He is ‘Little Atom’; literally a tiny atom that we’ll be following across time and space as he searches for meaning. So goes the plot of Bliss’s first live show, Inside Everyone. For any one of the millions of followers across Bliss’s Instagram and YouTube accounts, it’ll seem like a pretty typical gambit for the comedian. Bliss has carved out a unique little corner of the internet for himself with a brand of historical and fact-based sketches delivered in the driest deadpan you’ve ever heard. Think of any common idiom or turn of phrase and Bliss has likely made a sketch out of it, thrown it into a specific period of history or made a part of the body sing it. It’s part dad joke, part absurdist sketch comedy, and part history lesson – for that reason it has a certain adorkable charm. Like any good dad joke, there’s an earnestness behind the intelligent wordplay that is incredibly endearing. It was this combination that made Bliss soar to fame during the pandemic, propelled by our collective desire for easy escapism. It’s also why much of his material seems to have aged. Inside Everyone is Bliss’s attempt to transition from online star to onstage comedian. For one hour we follow this ‘Little Atom’ as he stumbles through iconic moments of history; from the extinction of the dinosaurs and Shakespeare’s rise to