Sitting in on a taping of the fourth most popular children’s TV show, Miss Maree’s Super Great Awesome Funtime Partyhour!, we were witness to an act in meltdown. Miss Maree (Sharon Booth) with her mute sidekick Fairywinkle (Ally Syn) subjected the audience to songs, dancing, a story and more.
Things kicked off with a short spot by a support act, a soft spoken woman with relationship and anger management issues. Clutching a guitar she could barely play, she subjected the young audience to lots of disturbing background about herself. Played by Sharon this character was an inappropriate element for children’s entertainment which was its main source of amusement. Her impact was lessened by speech that was rambling and too soft to be heard clearly, even with a microphone.
Prior to actual “show” were a series of pre recorded advertisements for bizzare childcare products and services that were wonderfully strange. Complete with a rather demented voice over, these were a apt device to set the mood of the show.
Sharon’s performance as Maree was severely lacking. Maree came across as a wishy washy character who I didn’t particularly care about one way or the other. I assume that Maree was supposed to be inept at performing to some degree but the constant fumbling of words (most worrying was her handling of the shows’ title), a rambling script, the painful strumming of her out of tune ukelele to meaningless lyrics and a lack of vocal projection was much too inept. The most uncomfortable part was a story time segment which rambled on for far too long and didn’t build to a strong payoff. I assume she had the script in her prop book but she opted to recite it from memory and made a complete mess of it. Her lacklustre banter with the audience failed to clarify what our role actually was; were we the children, their parents or merely distant witnesses to the debacle? Sharon failed to sell this character which was clearly demonstrated by her utterly unconvincing breakdown towards the end.
On the other hand Ally’s performance as Fairywinkle was wonderful. Being mute gave her a chance to show off her physical skills and make effective use of expressions and gestures to bring her character to life. Although her appearances on stage were brief, her timing was spot on and she definitely was the character we sided with. She also got bonus marks from my companion for her competent puppetry skills.
Not a lot of effort seemed to have gone into the set dressing. It was terrible, even for the low rent community television it was parodying. They employed some nice sound cues, the timing of which was likely to tighten up over the season.
The performance ran well short of the advertised hour. With only two actors, it was clear that they were struggling to get enough mileage from the concept (all other shows exploring this topic had larger casts of characters to ensure plenty of conflict). This was a disappointing show. They clearly had a few interesting ideas under the surface which were unfortunately under developed and under prepared.
For booking details visit the Comedy Festival website