Shows in this article include:
- Melbourne Fringe Festival – Tash York’s Chaos Cabaret
- Quelched! The Musical – Chapel Off Chapel
- A Beginner’s Guide to Gay Cruising
- Knows, No’s Nose
- Horse Girls
- Dead Mum
- Changeling
- Cake – The Last Bite
Tash York’s Chaos Cabaret
Presented by Big Hair Productions & Matthew Liersch, created by Tash York.
Tickets: https://www.melbournefringe.com.au/whats-on/events/tash-yorks-chaos-cabaret
3 – 5 October
Festival Hub: Trades Hall – ETU Ballroom
5 STARS
An irresistibly fun and chaotic evening that throws unscripted challenges mid-performance at world-class cabaret performers
The ticketholder line for Tash York’s Chaos Cabaret decorates the full length of the staircase beside the ballroom and ends up flirting with Lygon Street. Once in, the air is thick with excitement. If it were tension, you’d probably say you could cut it with a butter knife. Tash York, the undisputed queen of Australian drag cabaret, has a good hour of surprises in store for us.
Chaos Cabaret is a variety roster showcasing the best of the best in fringe cabaret and drag- we’re talking staggering degrees of talent. On this night alone we are treated to “The Party Prince of Perth” Flynn V, heavily decorated cabaret royalty Geraldine Quinn, and Yummy-famous drag artist Valerie Hex. As each icon takes to the stage to perform their prepared number, they do so with the knowledge that the sound of an air horn could, at any moment, herald York throwing a spanner in the works of their act. Will she speed the music up? Change the track entirely? Will she release a horde of people in inflatable penis costumes?
Either way, York is irresistible as host, and she peppers the evening with her own riotously funny improvised songs born of wild suggestions from the audience. Chaos Cabaret is a democratic setup, and we in the audience vote from our phones on everything from who takes York’s mischief in their stride the best to whether the next round’s song should be a Charli xcx or Dua Lipa themed improvisation. It’s neck and neck, but Geraldine Quinn ultimately reigns supreme (I voted for you, Geraldine!). And that’s no spoiler, as this show is naturally completely different every night!
It’s all infectiously delightful. The laughter and cheers come thick and fast, sometimes even before you notice you’re letting them out. If you feel you’re in need of loosening up without even standing up out of your chair, this show is the one for you.
Quelched! The Musical
Presented by UMMTA (University of Melbourne Music Theatre Association)
Tickets: Melbourne Fringe Festival – Quelched! The Musical
2 – 4 October
Chapel Off Chapel
3 STARS
An original and lyrical Broadway style musical about the high school dating scene that felt a little undercooked but has great potential
The concept of this show is fantastically ridiculous and feels very original; Phil is a young man who, dissatisfied with his life, decides to take a chance on sending a dick pic to his high school crush over a new dating app called Quelch. When the recipient notices that that particular part of Phil bears an uncanny resemblance to actor Christian Bale, a chain of events is set off that catapults Phil into fame and other dangers far faster than he can prepare for it.
The audience are very much along for the ride. The lyrics are clever and often hysterical, and we are startled into laughter many times- not least because of the horribly slurpy noise triggered by notifications from the Quelch app. For the most part, the cast is full of energy and work well together as an ensemble. I notice quite early on that the entire show is scored a little too high; if it were only one or two performers struggling to get up there, you’d put that down to miscasting. If the entire cast is having difficulty in the supposedly beltier parts, you know the music needs looking at. It feels unfair to these performers, who are giving their all in these moments despite the music simply not sitting within their range.
The melodies themselves are fun if not particularly memorable, but once the surprises are mostly over and the predictable shape of the narrative settles into place before us, the pace does start to drag a little; predictability in and of itself is completely fine in musical theatre so long as each some advances the plot and there’s no doubling up on the function that they serve. This show also suffers from the peculiar ailment affecting too much fringe theatre at the moment; use of American accents for no apparent reason. There is not one reference to place or exclusively American brands or concepts in the script. In the context of the genre I understand that directors may think references to tropes within the Broadway-style musical itself will go unappreciated if they’re not signposted in this way, but this is an outdated line of thinking. It pays to give your audience a bit more credit.
All in all, a fun time despite the problems, all of which seem quite solvable. There is obvious potential in Quelched! to live a long and colourful life with a little polishing.
A Beginner’s Guide to Gay Cruising
Created and performed by AJ Lamarque
Tickets: https://www.melbournefringe.com.au/whats-on/events/a-beginners-guide-to-gay-cruising
29 Sept – 5 October
Grouse Melbourne – Room 7
4.5 STARS
A sincere, self-aware and thoroughly entertaining hour of comedy and storytelling about boarding an explicitly queer-friendly cruise ship
AJ Lamarque greets every audience member with a sincerely warm welcome and a choice between a Mars Bar, a Milky Way, and a Dairy Milk. This is the type of bait I am always going to take, but he really needn’t have worried; this was decidedly one of the most enjoyable hours I have spent at Fringe ‘25 so far.
Occupying an intimate, cosily lit room in the back of Grouse, A Beginner’s Guide to Gay Cruising is an hour of stand-up comedy themed around the Sydney-based comic’s first time on an explicitly queer-friendly cruise ship- though he hastens to add that Fitzroy Gardens is just around the corner if anyone had been hoping for the other kind of gay cruising. The storytelling is playful and thoroughly engaging and, even within a style that can faithfully be described as “storytelling”, the jokes are plentiful. It’s the kind of comedy-hour that makes you wish the 60 minutes would last longer.
Lamarque makes a point of the fact that this show is not just for gay men. It is in fact carefully written to balance accessibility of the material through thoughtful and amusing descriptions of certain concepts (it is, after all, a beginner’s guide) against a fair assumption of our prior knowledge (why the hell did that cruise line take 1,000 gay men to visit Burnie??) Lamarque approaches every topic with a very likable brand of polite curiosity. He is conscious of the intersecting privileges that allow him to zero in on the topic of a gay cruise ship and addresses these with great humour repeatedly throughout the set.
I was held from beginning to end, and I’ll admit I did not expect Guide to be as genuinely informative as it was good for a generous amount of belly laughs. Lamarque’s style makes you feel like you’ve been both thoroughly entertained and educated in a gentle, low stakes kind of way. It’s a really refreshing feeling and he’s definitely one to watch.
Knows, No’s Nose
Written and performed by Alice Ridgway, performed by Molly Simpson & directed by India Firth.
Tickets: https://www.melbournefringe.com.au/whats-on/events/knows-nos-nose
29 Sept – 5 October
The Motley Bauhaus – Theatrette
4 STARS
A plucky and endearing two-hander that playfully ponders the question: What’s a clown if they’re not a clown?
It turns out share houses inhabited by clowns are plagued with existentialism. Fans of Caryl Churchill will adore this plucky and endearing two-hander performed by Molly Simpson and writer Alice Ridgway that playfully ponders the question: What’s a clown if they’re not a clown? Whilst Simpson’s clown has been in the game since time out of mind and takes the responsibilities of clownhood deathly seriously, Ridgway’s clown is having a crisis of faith- or, if you will, a crisis of funny. She feels moved to explore ways of being beyond the strictures of the red nose, thereby setting off a chain of events that tests the clown-to-clown relationship.
These two performers are very tightly tuned to each other- a technical proficiency appropriate for the symbiotic relationship of their characters, who have never before looked into a mirror, preferring instead to look into each other’s faces every morning. Clowns, am I right? The tag-teaming dialogue cascades beautifully, showcasing immaculate comedic timing and an energising understanding of pace. The physical comedy is present but less of an angle in this interpretation of clowndom, making the space an appropriate choice for the piece.
Beneath the particular pressures of desperately needing to make people laugh, this feels very much to be a sympathetic and sweet little story about two best friends. Characters don’t need names or a lot of given circumstances for it to be apparent that they have shared memories, anxious love for each other, and the closely guarded secret keys that good friends hold to making each other corpse. With the existential-theatre-lover part of me well and truly satisfied, I also left feeling warmed from the inside out.
Horse Girls
Presented by Burned Dinner Theatre
Tickets: https://www.melbournefringe.com.au/whats-on/events/horse-girls
30 Sept – 4 October | 1 hour
TheatreWorks – Explosives Factory
3.5 STARS
A fun and relatable, pink-ponytailed portrait of friendship amongst group of tween horse girls
A regular afternoon meeting of the Lady Jean Ladies, the “most exclusive horse club”, is in session. A colourful band of characters is in attendance; on the cusp of their teens, they range from painfully awkward to impressively overconfident, yet they are fiercely united by an unmatched enthusiasm for all things equine. You know these girls. Maybe you were these girls? Before long, the order that club rules demand is upended by the news that the local stables are to be sold and the girls’ horses shot.
Horse Girls is a fun and relatable pink, ponytailed portrait of the intensity of tween friendship group dynamics, adolescent jealousy and joy, and how impossibly huge and urgent everything in one’s own small world seems at age 11-13. It manages to find a sweet spot between sending up the horse girl trope and empathising with it. The convention of obvious adults assuming the personas of young girls works very well here given how intrinsically and terribly camp horse girl lore is. The ultimate descent into gory darkness only deepens the inherent situational gift of the piece.
Whilst there is a trend in Australian fringe theatre of performers adopting American accents for no apparent reason, this production does suffer from a somewhat inverse lack of clarity surrounding place. The original script by American playwright Jenny Rachel Weiner sets the play in South Florida, but whilst the performers here use their natural Australian accents and aspects of the story have been altered to reflect an Australian interpretation, the transformation is not 100% there. In particular, the idea that young Australian girls would be idolising Ann Romney as the “number one horse girl” is difficult to wrap one’s head around.
Overall, an enjoyable and upbeat romp (canter?) with plenty of laughs, some delightful character acting, and surprisingly touching moments.
Dead Mum
Written and Performed by Jack Francis West, Directed by Isabella Martin and Produced by Kasey Woolley
Tickets: Melbourne Fringe Festival – DEAD MUM
30 Sept – 4 October | 1 hour
TheatreWorks – Explosives Factory
5 STARS
In an hour of comedy and song, Jack Francis West delivers an incredibly raw, powerfully moving and downright hilarious performance backed by an in-house, four-piece band.
Content Warning: The work contains content around Self Harm or Suicide, Sexual Assault or Abuse, Emotional Abuse, Drug References, Sexual References, Death, Mental Health.
The brilliance of a cabaret being titled Dead Mum is that it has likely preemptively weeded out any audience member lacking appetite for the humour of Jack Francis West. The house is full to the brim with the exact people intended to bear witness. Pretence and censorship are notable only by their glorious absence- a feature signature to the voice of an artist knocked irreversibly off-centre by the loss of a parent, but also obviously inherent to Francis West themselves.
Before Francis West and their band enter the stage, we are very clearly set for a funeral. The work begins as the eulogy is being delivered, before swiftly springboarding into a nonlinear journey through memory and time that shakes hands with the chaotic ever-presence of grief itself. The fantastic band (Riley Richardson, Teige Cordiner, Eve Pilkington, and Lucy Cleminson) pairs seamlessly with the ease of Francis West’s twinkly-eyed stage presence and provide astute and consistent support throughout. Punctuated mostly by musical theatre numbers both heartfelt and utterly ridiculous (and always skilfully sung), this fast-paced hour is a beautiful thing that cannot be reduced to being described as a tribute alone; it is also a collection of notes on what it is to live through, beyond, and alongside death, and how impossible it is to ignore the flimsiness of the veil after one’s first major brush. “Time does not heal all wounds; it turns them into scars.”
Through the work, Francis West is honouring their much-loved mum and the loss of her in the best way they can; storytelling with their idiosyncratic style of uncompromising absurdity, whimsy, and irreverent warmth. Relentlessly charming and entirely themselves, they wield their expert control of tone to guide us along reflective paths that join one belly laugh to another. They are so startlingly funny that the band are regularly laughing along with the audience in moments that are clearly not improvised. This is testament to Francis West’s obvious ability to remain present within themes that would seduce many a performer towards falling back on a technical run. If there is any temptation to mentally retreat and protect themself, Francis West never seems to give in to it; they have successfully straddled the line between creating an autobiographical piece that is unsparingly honest and something that is sustainable to perform.
On one occasion, Francis West pauses the music to ponder aloud a current thought they’re having about the show. They are plainly conscious of the piece as something that is living and breathing as much as they pay respect to their mum as a person who was, for a lifetime, very much alive herself. They warn that when we turn deceased loved ones into ghosts, we scrub the colour and dimension from their legacy. Moreover, they illustrate gorgeously that when we memorialise someone only through the lens of our own experiences of that person, we are discarding the hundreds of other people they were in their lifetime.
Simply, strangely, wonderfully, Dead Mum is surely some of the best fun you can have at this year’s Fringe.
Changeling
Written by Charlie Simmons, directed by Monique Wing-Yun & produced by Jessica Fanwong.
Tickets Melbourne Fringe Festival – Changeling
30 September – 5 October | 90 minutes
The MC Showroom – The Showroom
3 STARS
An inventive and heartfelt ensemble work focussed on faerie child folklore traditions
In numerous European folklore traditions, a “changeling” refers to a faerie child left in place of a human infant, whilst that human child is stolen away to live in the faerie realm. As is typical of folklore, there are many retold variations on this idea, and therefore vastly varying modern narratives depicting changelings. In Changeling, the fae child takes centre-stage. This play is the tale of an eight-year-old changeling who, placed in the medieval household of an otherwise childless couple, yearns to belong somewhere (anywhere), and holds no inherent desire whatsoever to visit harm on the human realm, regardless of how their body/fae instincts may betray them.
The story is inventive and heartfelt and at no point felt predictable, even if at times it did feel a little ponderous for a high stakes fantasy tale. The dialogue is otherwise thoughtfully written, and movement and props are both used in a resourceful and interesting way. Given the theory that changeling lore originally came about as a means of explaining away genetic differences or disability in children, the themes of belonging and acceptance as applied to the changeling themself is a poignant choice. Furthermore, the changeling is considered genderless and referred to only by neutral pronouns- a feature which is never too overtly referenced by the other characters and is all the more effective for it.
There is a convention in place that the actors portraying human characters wear full-face masks for essentially the duration of the piece, whilst the fae are bare-faced. I cannot help but feel that so much of what the actors were offering was lost to us- and perhaps each other- beneath these masks, both vocally and in facial expressions. Whenever the masks were removed I was taken aback by how much more striking and engaging the performances suddenly seemed. I consider this an easily fixable aspect; perhaps the use of small masquerade-style masks instead would be more complimentary to the performances.
I give particular commendation to the performers who have been required to step into additional roles at the last minute due to cast misadventure- though on-book and having to read said book through the eyeholes of their masks, they bring exceptional characterisation and earn a handsome share of audience laughs.
CAKE – Last Bite
Presented by Memphis Mae & Leopold Pentland
Tickets: https://www.melbournefringe.com.au/whats-on/events/cake-late-bite
30 Sept – 4 October | 1 hour
Meat Market – Cobblestone Pavillion
4.5 STARS
Mixing together Burlesque, drag, comedy and circus and Fringe icon Memphis Mae – CAKE is the recipe for a very sexy, sensational and scrumptious night of queer cabaret
Contains Haze, Some Infrequent/Low Pressure Audience Interaction, Sustained Loud Noises, Contains strobe lighting, Full frontal nudity, Strong coarse language.
You want sexy? It lives here. You want queer? Also here. You want the inexplicably joy-giving juxtaposition of death-defying feats being performed with ultimate camp silliness?
To me, nothing delivers the true spirit of fringe like a high-energy variety show, and boy do the good people of CAKE have some variety to share with you. Bringing together burlesque, drag, and circus, and hosted by the illustrious Memphis Mae, it’s the perfect late evening confection to top off whatever other events you’re coming from. You’ll see everything from balancing acts to death drops, and from hair aerialism to giant inflatable mannequins cuddling over the inimitable voice of Jennifer Coolidge.
This sweet treat never presumes upon our patience, rotating acts with a pace that keeps us energised, and reliably delivering one surprise after another. The show isn’t just riotously queer, it’s deliciously LOUD about it- and that’s both in the telling and in the showing. The body types proudly on display are as wide-ranging as the talents; the beautiful Cobblestone Pavilion is simply made to feel such a thoroughly warm, welcoming, fun space for the hour that CAKE is being served.
My face hurt from smiling so much, and I did for a minute wonder at the fact that these stunning technicians of physical (and other) magic must be used to glancing down at crowds of faces with their jaws on the floor. The mould was broken over and over when these performers were made, and when great artists join forces, great fringe is birthed.
*Come back throughout the Melbourne Fringe Festival to see Caitlin’s updated reviews as they come in
