Stranger than Trump? Penn & Teller provide the best performance art of the day

Rather than prey on human weakness, these magicians use the techniques of charlatanry to expose and make us laugh at it. One eye-popping swindle is performed in their own “gift shop”, and even the few minutes of surreal performance art (as bizarre as anything Trump has ever said or done) all makes sense in a cute finale that compels the audience to rethink and reinterpret what they thought they knew.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

MUSIC
Dionne Warwick | One Last Time ★★★★★
Hamer Hall, January 16

There’s a certain anticipation when you’re about to see music royalty perform live. The crowd applauds Dionne Warwick as she glides on stage in a shimmering suit with the pianist playing the melody to Walk On By.

Greeting the audience with a warm “good evening”, she encourages them to “open up your mouths and let some words roll out” by singing along or “get on up and let it all hang loose” by dancing in their seats. This is a singer who understands her fans.

Warwick is a five-time Grammy winner, and has a Walk of Fame star and B.B. King Lifetime Achievement Award. The 84-year-old American singer is behind only Aretha Franklin as the female vocalist whose songs have spent the most weeks in the charts. This tour celebrates 50 years of hits, most of them written by long-time collaborator and composer Burt Bacharach.

With 69 of Warwick’s singles reaching the Billboard 100 over three decades, you’d be familiar with many of her classics, even if you weren’t aware she was the voice behind them. Accompanied by percussion, drums, bass and piano, she sings all the crowd favourites, including soul ballads I’ll Never Love This Way Again and a cover she recorded of What the World Needs Now Is Love, originally sung by Jackie DeShannon.

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Warwick mixes things up on stage, adjusting songs to build an element of surprise for those familiar with her catalogue. In her rendition of R’n’B track I Say A Little Prayer, a song she says is dear to her heart, she extends the ending with different variations of the chorus, pausing and joking to build suspense until the final note.

Her wit is sharp as a tack. During What the World Needs Now Is Love, she asks the crowd to sing “What the world needs now, is love sweet love” three times, which they stuff up. One audience member bravely takes up the challenge and sings solo out of tune. “We have a soloist out there – the person with the microphone does the talking,” she retorts.

Remaining seated throughout the show, she eventually stands after the finale, receiving a standing ovation from the crowd. She hugs herself as if to receive the warmth of the room and waves regally as she walks offstage.
Reviewed by Vyshnavee Wijekumar

COMEDY | MIDSUMMA
Feeling Afraid as if Something Terrible Is Going to Happen ★★★★
Arts Centre Melbourne, until February 1

Among the cream of our Millennial comedians, gay men are common as mud. Look at Josh Thomas or Joel Creasey or Tom Ballard or Rhys Nicholson. All very gay and creamy, and although they mine their relationships for material all the time (Thomas’ last live show Let’s Tidy Up gave us a comprehensive update on his romantic life, and those with long memories will recall that he and Ballard dated for 2½ years), they do not, as a rule, write shows about killing their boyfriends, however strong the temptation.

In the UK, a darker comedic vein prevails. Feeling Afraid as if Something Terrible Is Going to Happen is about a troubled, 36-year-old stand-up comedian – gay and relationship-averse – who falls in love with an American Mr Right against the odds. It’s undiscovered country for him, not to mention the neurotic shtick he trades on, and he soon becomes obsessed by the prospect of slaying his new partner.

Cue the slasher horror sound effect from Psycho? Or is this yet more fodder for a career built on excavating alienation … and using it to build an impregnable defence against intimacy?

Writer Marcelo Dos Santos has created a sinuous comic monodrama that drapes itself in the world of stand-up, onstage and behind the scenes. He’s written comedy for comedians – the way some novels are written for writers – exploring the architecture and philosophy of comedy through droll social observation, perverse introspection and a character who’s likeably unlikeable and a bit disturbing.

Thinking of the show as a gay male Fleabag is not, in fact, too wide of the mark.

Samuel Barnett’s performance is impish and charismatic – a brilliantly sustained character portrait that writhes with discomfort and melancholy underneath the relentless onslaught of comic striving.

It’s impressive the way Barnett can spin on a dime, shifting through multiple characters with different accents, or ricochet from a camp running gag into an awkward, quietly heartbreaking scene in which the comedian talks to his mother in a distanced and dutiful way on the phone.

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There’s a lot of deft socio-cultural observation: on American versus English worldviews and comedic styles; on the hedonism and humiliation of dating apps; on the shallow assumption, sometimes internalised, that men (and especially gay men) always want sex.

Feeling Afraid does tickle the mind more consistently than the funny bone, yet many of the jokes are tiny revolutions against received ideas, and the queer love story it contains doubles as a perfectly structured set that doesn’t feel remotely hackneyed or stale. Our own gay stand-ups will be taking notes, I’m sure.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

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