Thea and Arvy are best friends having a sleepover at Thea’s house. Thea is texting with her boyfriend. Arvy is manic, restless and annoyed that Thea is distracted from their alone time. These sleepovers are a regular thing but tonight they are going to open up more than they ever have in their fifteen-year-old lives. Years later, Thea and Arvy meet in a bar. They have lost contact but their ..read more

In 2020, The People – an artists collective headed by Morgan Rose and Katrina Cornwell – started to write a show about bigotry and discrimination. They made a list of all the things they hated, which included racism, misogyny and Zoom. Bu they’d be stuck on Zoom for a while, because lockdowns in Melbourne lasted for a long time. At some point (the group was rigorous with documenting their ..read more

My review of Things I Know to be True - currently playing at Theatre Works - has been published at Australian Arts Review. Read it here!- Keith Gow, Theatre FirstPhoto: Andrew Bott ..read more

An office cubicle, floating in inky black darkness. Two chairs. A computer. Phone. Stacks of paperwork. Pamphlets that hope to explain the process of getting a mortgage through a broker. Ryan - a recently divorced father of one - sits across the desk from Keith – the mortgage broker, who we’ll soon learn is foster father to a young girl. Ryan doesn’t understand the process of applying for a loan ..read more

Exposing flaws and foibles has been a theme this festival. Other stand-up comics need to dig deep and craft a show around observations of political, social or moral issues. Some go with high-concept premises that allow them to spin-off in any direction.Jessi Ryan is telling audiences about their year after emergency surgery, when they had to live with an unexpected guest star - a colostomy bag. A ..read more

After the international success of Nanette, Hannah Gadsby’s world changed. This isn’t Hannah’s first show since then, but it is the first one where they are having an existential crisis about possibly disappearing up their own arsehole. Hannah’s shows can sometimes feel a bit scattergun, even though there is a solid supporting structure underneath. They are not leaping from topic to topic ..read more

I love discovering new comedians at MICF. Admittedly, I wanted to see Headliners because of Joel Kim Booster – his film Fire Island is hilarious and has layers of insight while being very sexy, and his Netflix special Psychosexual is a sharp look at race and gender and sexuality through Joel’s life as an Asian kid adopted by white parents. Paired with Joel, though, is Zainab Johnson, whose work ..read more

Zoë has achieved some amazing things in the past year – including hosting Queerstralia on the ABC and being diagnosed with ADHD. Yeah, she’s not surprised if you didn’t recognise it in a woman who talks at a million miles an hour and has decided to divide her life up into seven-year increments as a way to catalogue her jokes and battle depression. Oh, wait. I’ve seen two great “list shows” this ..read more

Lou Wall’s 2023 was great for their professional life and disastrous for their personal life. And after all the work Lou did coming out as a lesbian, they’ve found themselves swimming at the shallow end of the pool – sleeping with straight dudes. Even more distressingly, Lou became a chuckle fucker. Lou’s brand of opening up a vein of trauma and delivering it like a mutated powerpoint ..read more

In astrology, the “Saturn Return” is when Saturn returns to the same place in the sky as when you were born. While the planet Saturn has an orbit that lasts closer to thirty years, astrologists consider the power of Saturn’s Return to kick in around the age of 27. Performer Jaxson Garni faced a lot at age twenty-seven and his show reckons with everything that changed – and whether or not it’s ..read more