I first saw Lisa-Skye doing the better half of a Fringe Festival show in 2008 called The G in Goth, which was a jovial jaunt through her experiences as a Greek Australian Goth, with the cute gimmick of all of her topics beginning with the letter G. She was very nervous, but I was very impressed and was excited about seeing her again doing a full performance by herself. She has certainly gained in confidence and though there was still a hint of nerves, she had obviously put in a lot of preparation and was an enthusiastic and charming hostess.
There was a white board on stage that presumably existed to amuse punters as they were being seated, because it was never referred to during her subsequent performance, which I didn’t mind as it was a nice a quirky touch. On the Whiteboard was ‘A List of Band Names my Boyfriend and I Came up with While in a Bus’, they were mostly silly puns, and interesting words thrown together, my favourite of which was Digital Grape. She commenced ‘Lisa-Skye is Not Like Other Boys’ by telling us that she and her boyfriend are engaged to be married and how much she hated the bridal industry and all it’s white, frilly girliness. We were then entertained with a PowerPoint show about herself made up of hand drawn cartoons. The cartoons were amusing, but I found her image of herself as a bearded lady slightly distracting and considering the title of her show, I thought it was never quite fully explained. She certainly did go some way to discussing her bisexuality, but there were so many other topics she was covering; I never really got a handle on it.
I got a sense that this show suffered a little from being less focussed that it might have been. The myriad of subjects she touched on included her dysfunctional but loving parents, she and her fiancé having to live with her Greek grandma, or yia yia, living in a wog house, the nature of being a Goth and the Goths’ natural enemies (surprisingly not emos or bogans), pets and her fear of spiders, teen angst, her sexuality, her beloved metronome and her job managing a ‘relationship’ phone line or as she liked to think of herself, ‘Sex Policewoman’. Some topics were explored more thoroughly, some worked better than others, but she always had another amusing idea waiting around the corner to keep the audience laughing.
As well as an abundance of subject matter Lisa-Skye had also crammed in several animations, slides, interesting props, some delightful audience participation “Is it Creepy or is it Fine?” and perhaps the strongest part of the show, funky beat poetry. Using her favourite toy, her metronome, as back up, as well as some amusing slides she radiated comedic confidence and the audience responded enthusiastically. It occurred to me that if she could work on incorporating those rhythm skills into her stand up it would help her find her comedic voice and she would soon be a comedy force to be reckoned with. I’m not sure if she sees herself as a Stand Up comedian, because although she’s done some spoken word events I haven’t noticed her getting about doing stand up spots (that might help too) but she’s definitely got some great material and the ability to entertain an audience for an hour.
Lisa-Skye put a lot of effort and energy into making sure the audience got their money’s worth, including asking if the audience wanted to hear anymore of the transcripts from her call centre job ‘Yes Please!’ and had a great ending for the show which included an animated summing up of all the topics she covered and some yummy amusing gifts for the audience. All in all it was a fun fringe experience and I look forward to seeing more from her in the future.
Visit the Fringe Website for booking details.