A long montage of audio excerpts from the movie Napoleon Dynamite kicked off Andy Lonsdale’s show Vote For Pedro: My Life in T-Shirts, perversely pushing the point that this was really a show about T-Shirts not the film. Anyone not familiar with the cult classic would have been confused by the out of context snippets but Andy was well aware that his title would bring in those expecting some Dynamite whimsy, as his disclaimer pointed out.
The show was essentially the telling of amusing tales about his life through the T-Shirts that he owned. Andy resorted to plenty of self deprecation in his material that while endearing at first, soon got tedious as he came across as a rather sad character. The inclusion of some base humour amongst the personal tales tried to get the additional laughs going were a little hit and miss. The material that did contain genuine humour often petered out as he sailed straight past the punchline. His slightly juvenile curse word/James Bond movie substitution routine went so well the first time he decided to repeat it in full, resulting in a only a dribble of giggles.
Andy’s delivery of the material was a little lacking at times. He sped through the words at an often break neck pace and the occasional mumble made it easy to miss some things. I initially thought it was a case of nerves, but when the same thing happened with his prerecorded pieces, I realised that this wasn’t the case. His displaying of the shirts was a little brief at times and some of them didn’t actually lead to any material, only indications of recognition from the audience. Sometimes you barely saw the shirt at all and they were the show’s gimmick after all. It made you wonder why he would he would have a shirt in the pile if he wasn’t going to discuss it or show it.
He did a reasonable job of playing with performance conventions with comments about the physical script he had on hand. This provided some endearment for his stage persona of a slightly insecure performer but it soon became apparent that this was no act. He regularly fell into the habit of providing self criticism mid show which began as witty deconstruction and soon bordered on annoying.
It was an interesting and rather ambitious concept for a show, particularly for a first effort. With some fine tuning, focus and work on presentation, it could be better.
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