Point and Shoot: A New Musical
The Main House
Warren
Brighton Fringe
This was a sophisticated and highly planned bit of musical mischief making and the highly planned and ruthlessly choreographed changing of instruments and tune was occasionally buried under some of the action unfolding on stage. I assumed this was intentional. With funny acting and high octane singing this troupe connected with the damp audience immediately and whisked us along on this deeply daft journey into the dark heart of movie making.
The plot is stuffed full of as many cliches, denouements and double, triple twists as the cast could (un)feasibly squeeze, shoehorn and crowbar into the plot, which leaves the last 20 minutes of the musical one frantic and frenetic constantly increasing staccato pace of unfolding dizzyingly confusing action, jumping around like a bus full of Red-legged Pademelons on poppers; which is precisely what the cast intended.
The premise, of a near Po-Mo future world where culture has become infused with integrity and art is educational, leaving us in a vaguely Norman Rockwell world of irritatingly well-adjusted smug pseudo-intellectual people who have supressed huge blockbuster film makers works fairly well, although once the plot got moving it got more and more superfluous to the action. The plot centres around some renegade film makers who want to bring a 1960’s ‘I love Lucy’ type sitcom to the big blockbuster screen. Cultural Verboten in this world.
Check out the show’s website here:
The cast are seriously well drilled, I suspect that’s one nazi of a director or they came all the way over from Perth, Australia (yes, that’s how they sweetly introduce themselves) on a slow boat and practiced and rehearsed for each long nautical mile, never being allowed to sleep until they got the scene right -or – they are just brilliant, of course, but they are from Perth…. So let’s assume they have been drilled to death. There was some seriously impressive musical, thematic and instrument swapping which begins quite subtly and then builds up into an all you can eat in your face blurt of musical talent. It’s difficult to pull that kind of endless physical joking off without distracting from the music, but it’s the uber in-joke with a small cast playing all the characters and all the instruments too, and a meta-uber-in-joke is just what the fringe ordered this early on.
There are some back up projections of the film and faked up footage of the 1960’s show which are fun and spot on, although could have done with being MUCH bigger for the back of the audience to properly enjoy.
See the trailer here:
Great fun, planned, executed and rehearsed to within a wallaby’s whisker of its life, the rhymes tight, clipped and shaved closer than Pauline Pantsdowns moustache and not a foot wrong this was a phenomenally stylish and fast paced opening for this new musical and I was impressed. These four troopers playing 52 characters and 16 instruments enunciated faster than an epileptic emu and were dirtier than a dingo’s den. There is some deliciously tight writing in this musical, perhaps a bit too much crammed in, and I strained to catch some of the machine-gunned lyrics on occasion. They were let badly down by the venue though, with over loud music from an (empty) bar clashing with the opening ten minutes and also having to compete with torrential rain drumming on the roof, but once the cacophony from the bar had been dealt with things improved a lot.
The test of a new musical is whether you can sing (or even remember) any songs from it next day, I heard the boyfriend singing ‘Smart Movies for Smart people’ in the shower this morning, so that’s a good sign for them.
Catch this perky Perth performing troupe while you can, they are at the Main House at the Warren with Point and Shoot on May 14, 16 and 31.
For more information or to book tickets, click here:
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