Selina Jenkins first introduced her character Beau Heartbreaker, to many of us, during the RAW competition at the 2006 Melbourne Comedy Festival. In many ways, the character has changed little since that time.
In her first full length show, Introducing Beau Heartbreaker Selina leads off with the short, successful spot she performed so well at RAW. This is a good tactic in that it allows the audience to get a good overall understanding of the character and this section is tight, well rehearsed and elicits big and frequent laughs from the audience. In this first section Beau performs the best song of the set and injects some commentary describing his life back on the farm, which really helps to flesh out the character.
Beau continues in a performance which reiterates his affection for ‘the ladies’. This joke, delivered by a drag king, is funny for a while but seeing it repeated for the entire show, in songs that don’t differ much, track to track, either in style or content, makes it a little jaded. The songs themselves are catchy and there is no doubt that Selina is an accomplished musician and a great singer. These are enjoyable songs but they can get a bit tedious to an audience that craves to get a bit more development to this character.
The strongest and most surprising moments are the moments of stand – up which inform the character and elicit the laughs from the audience. And although this is not an audience participation show there are moments where Beau spontaneously interacts with the audience which work well and naturally and produce some real unexpected laughs.
This is an enjoyable, well performed and well constructed show from this young performer. However its flaw is that it screams of a five minute spot turned into a full length show with little consideration for layering or character development that the forty five minute format requires. In fairness this was listed in the Cabaret section of the program so it would be unfair to condemn it for not producing laughs. However the problem doesn’t lie with lack of humour because this is an intrinsically funny, well executed character. Where it falls down is with a lack of any sense of a third dimension to the character, and that’s a failing that applies to all genres.