It’s ironic that I try not to read the details of reviews for shows that I might consider seeing. Frisky & Mannish came with high recommendations from Edinburgh. I love top musical comedians, so I was keen to check these guys out. I want to start by saying that they are very, very talented singers, and I loved their costumes, I was all ready to love this show. But their first song, was not vaguely funny and some bells started to ring. I couldn’t help but look at my watch the first time I laughed, we were ½ hour in. I only laughed 4 more times.
The theme of this show was that it was a reality show called School of Pop. Frisky was the stern headmistress, Mannish the… piano player (there was no character development between these two at all) and we the audience were apparently auditioning for a role in it. Cue an excuse for a sing along to ‘Twist & Shout’ and getting the audience up on their feet for some hand gestures to go with the singing. Suddenly I felt like I was in a theatre restaurant surrounded by people doing the chicken dance and it still wasn’t funny. Alright it might be a slightly classier theatre restaurant than say, Witches in Britches, but honestly the formula to this show was no different to any theatre restaurant I’ve ever been to. This was not a comedy show. It was pure cabaret with the odd joke that they tended to hammer to death, just when you got interested.
The bulk of this show was made up of what is these days known as mash ups but is actually a cabaret standard as old as cabaret itself. Like singing a string of bits of songs that happen to spell out words, like ‘D.IV.O.R.C.E’ (I’m still wondering how this was funny), or songs that sound like someone might have been stoned when they wrote them (not that funny, because they probably were) and so on ad nauseum. Each mashup was one lame joke done four of five times over. The best of the mash-ups involved pointing out how psychotic the lyrics to ‘Eternal Flame’ are but just as I got into it and laughed they switched songs to something I didn’t know that apparently also has psychotic lyrics and consequently they ruined the original clever joke by hammering it home with several more examples. If only they could have at least stuck with the rule of 3, but as I’ve said these guys are no comedians. They are singers. Their other thing was singing songs in a different style, like doing Wuthering Heights in a Cockney style or a Lily Allen song done in the style of Noel Coward and surprise surprise, cut to a Noel Coward song done in the style of Lily Allen. This show barely had a fresh idea.
So we came to the inevitable dragging of audience members up on stage, the purpose of which was to sort 4 audience members into school houses ala Harry Potter. They had a cute sorting hat, but one of my bugbears has always been, if you are going to put a puppet in a show, have a damn puppetry lesson first. The sorting hat put them into houses, named after some members of a band I’ve never heard of, and then they were quickly sent off stage and they or the houses were never referred to again. They were on stage for all of two minutes and I wondered why Frisky & Mannish bothered at all. The only part of the show that worked for me was their parody of Dancing with the Stars, particularly the time they had a blind contestant on and Frisky did a fairly impressive Australian Accent, but it still felt like an excuse for Mannish to show off his beautiful dancing skills.
According to Chortle, hating this show means I have no soul. But this show had no soul at all. It was mostly a shallow and hollow concert of bits of pop songs. There was no depth to the characterisation of the leads, no funny banter, no warmth, no sense of friendship or even the depths of enmity between dominant Frisky and her foppish sidekick Mannish. If you want to watch some pretty, excellent singers doing bits of songs you may know & like and have a sing along without having to work your brain, this might be the show for you and your mum & dad. If you want to see some really funny and clever cabaret performers whose brilliantly realised characters sing original, ingenious, hilarious songs, we have some of the best here in Melbourne, like Die Rotten Punkte, Karin Muisnieks, Yana Alana, Geraldine Quinn or even The Kransky Sisters. I’m sure there are many more Cabaret shows at this year’s Melbourne International Comedy Festival that are more interesting and amusing than Frisky and Mannish.