Ari on the web

Everyone loves their mum. Some more than others. For many young Greek boys and girls, the love of the mother knows no bounds. This is the central idea behind a sensational series of sketches, It's A Mother! At times bittersweet but always affectionate, It's A Mother! puts Greek mothers on centre stage, paying tribute to the role the have played in bringing up generations of children. The show is put on by the Sidetrack Performance Group, a veteran Sydney group who are performing the show for the first time in the Athens of the south. The cast of three, Alex Blias, Elena Carapetis and Natalie Alexopoulos work tirelessly to create rich, believable characters with depth and subtlety. A team of writers have written the sketches and the ideas are tied together by the sure hand of director Don Mamouney. The sketches present a variety of Greek mothers, all neatly fulfilling the expectations of motherhood. One of the most hilarious 'mothers' is Stavroulis, a well-to-do ...

When he's good, he can very gut-achingly hilarious. When he's off, he's just tough to stomach. On balance, Greg Fleet 's latest stand up effort Word Up is more of the latter than the former. Admittedly, the night I saw him might not be all that representative of what Fleet has to offer: at the start of the show he announced that he had recently split from his girlfriend. Recently, as in within the hour. If true, it's sad to hear, but if played for laughs, then it failed. The premise of Fleet's show is solid: that language is an important part of our lives, yet we continually savage it with our various bastardized versions. Or as the promo material put it more succinctly "Greg Fleet's show takes us on a journey through all things languagey". Throughout Fleet has a series of flash cards that announce the various themes as we progress through the show. Some are straight forward, some are slightly strange, and some are downright bizarre. As i...

Every festival there are a few hidden gems to reward the punter who ventures beyond the big names and the major venues. Dave Wiggins is one of those gems. Tucked away in the cosy student common room at Victoria Uni on Flinders Lane (a room which, incidentally, deserves the award for comfiest couches of the festival), Wiggins spins his stories with deceptive ease. Wiggins is an antipodean American. From Maine initially, Wiggins made the move to New Zealand a few years back after he married a Kiwi girl. Now he's doing a stint in Melbourne with warm up act and buddy, er, mate, Michael Connell. Wiggins' material is based heavily on cross-cultural comparisons between the US, Australia and New Zealand. Having spent a decent amount of time in all three countries, he is well placed to get below the surface and understand the idiosyncrasies of each culture. A lot of the humour comes from the lay back, dare I say very Australian, style of Wiggins. Though playing to a smallish cro...

Take all the angst, tension, violence and hate that there is in the world, scrunch it up into a ball, and nonchelantly toss it over you shoulder. Open yourself up to a world of magic and whimsy, where nothing is as it seems and anything in the world can be achieved if you only wish for it. This is the world of Wolfe Bowart, one half of the Shneedles, who is performing solo in a show that's one of the hits of the Festival: LaLaLuna . LaLaLuna is a sublime piece of performance art. The premise is simple: our scatterbrained lead has seen the light in the moon disappear, and takes it upon himself to correct this astronomical malady. Along the way, our man encounters balls to juggle, suitcases to climb, balloons to enter, whoopee cushions to play, inner-selves to communicate with, chickens and giraffes to impersonate and audiences to thrill. Bowart is the ultimate physical performer. He has a breathtaking self-awareness of his own body, and glides effortlessly across the stage with ...

Sometimes political satire can get a bit tiresome. Depressing as it is, we get so used to seeing the same familiar faces satirized with the same familiar characteristics that we can become immune to it after a while. Take the Prime Miniature, and use this handy political satirist checklist: he’s a liar; he’s socially conservative; he’s a cricket tragic; he sounds like a high school maths teacher. All absolutely true, but after ten years of hearing it, most of us are bored with it. Political satirist Jim Lawson has realized this as well. And so he’s making a start on the next generation of political leaders. As the title suggests, Howard’s deputy gets a going over, and so does Mark Latham, Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd. Most of the satire isn’t outrageously funny, but it’s interesting nonetheless to see what characteristics are most ripe for the picking. Jim Lawson plays Jim Jones, the fumbling stumbling t’riffic member for Kalgoolie, although he lives just outside his electorate....

Corinne Grant will probably play to full houses most of this festival. Which is a shame, really, given the lackadaisical show on offer. It’s a breezy hour of stand-up about, y’know, airlines and shopping centres and B-Grade celebrities and stuff. Whilst most performers will use a Comedy Festival show as a chance to develop a theme, Grant has not. Instead there is a patchwork quilt of bits and pieces with little or nothing to link them together beyond the occasional segue. According to the listing in the program, the theme is Faking It. To give credit to Grant, there are some genuinely funny moments in the show, in the form of a few stories that strike a chord. Her anecdote at the end of the show about Richard Branson is particularly illuminating. Grant has been performing for a while and has a good sense of timing and rhythm and seems to genuinely enjoy her time on stage. As performers become more experienced, there is an expectation that they’ll move on to move difficult terra...

Mark it down now: Damian Callinan ’s show is the best show at the Festival that involves testicles. You know, family jewels. Aggots. Googlies. Clag bags. Or in his case, spaznuts. Callinan may be playing in one of the cosier rooms within the monolith that is the Melbourne Town Hall, but he is also a class act. Callinan is not afraid to get personal and draw us into his own life and experiences, and reveal his own weaknesses. This show is about Callinan’s battle with infertility and the effect that this had on his life. Along the way he had his masculinity challenged, split from his wife and received the sneers of people who confuse the worth of a person with the swimming ability of the contents of their scrotum. Rather than opt for the relative safety of an hour of stand-up, Callinan has taken the road less traveled. The show is a piece of one man theatre complete with all the theatrical devices of an accomplished performer. The storyline takes us through Callinan’s experienc...