Briefs
Live Review

Rummage inside these Briefs and there’s some pleasant surprises… but also a few things you’d probably rather not encounter.

This six-man cabaret of gay burlesque, carnie and drag performers from Brisbane has some mightily impressive acts, but the show is nowhere as well-defined as its cast’s torsos, with too many misfiring moments between the set pieces, which dissipates the vital boisterous energy.

Much of this is down to the weak compere, Fez Faanana, a self-described ‘nasty tranny’ who admits his only talent is changing into various frocks with a defiant resolve not to follow convention and look feminine. All fine, but fatally, his banter was ill-focussed, meandering waffle that deflated the show. Each of his appearances marked the evaporation of another bit of joy. Lest we think he doesn’t have a skill, he closed the show with the most uninventive of comic tricks – changing the lyrics of a song to make it rude. He doesn’t sing it mind, he lip-synchs to a backing track.

Luckily, the acts he introduces do have skills, with some impressive circus skills and acrobatics, performed with flair.

The best are convict character Victor Connector doing a pole dance on what looks like prison bars, award-winning ‘boylesque’ act Mark Winmill with aerial acrobatics on a suspended rope,  a ‘bogan’ character striking gymnastic poses in his wifebeater and shorts, and possibly most impressive of all, Natano Faanana doing an artful act on the silk ropes.

Mind you, this, too was introduced with a video showing him undergoing an agonising if traditional 37-hour tattoo session, which may have been a fascinating glimpse at his Samoan culture, but was again another interruption in the entertainment. As is a pointless five-minute interval in which everyone’s attention ebbs away for no good reason. If they need to cover a set-up, there must be a better way of doing it.

Weirder contributions include Nadja Cumminatchya, a convetional hula act – or as conventional as an act performed by a bearded man in lime-green lame bikini, pretending to be a female bodybuilder can be. The plate spin is a rather odd talent to have too, but Davy Sampford gets a dozen whizzing around… but again after a strangely uneventful couple of minutes when he slowly and deliberately eats muscle supplement out of a tub, wasting stage time.

He’s got other talents, though, including a scary-looking knife balancing act, and the less successful Meat Raffle – which takes an unnecessary amount of admin to further slow the pace, all for the sake of getting another 50 pence out of some audience members – ends up being a strange pseudo-erotic dance, some of it out of the eyeline of all but the front rows.

There’s certainly a lot going on here, including a couple of well-choreographed ensemble dances to raise the spirits – but still it requires some tightening up, and probably a host with a little more spark, if it’s to join the premier league of burlesque/variety showcases.