Original Review:

So it is that Adam McKenzie set himself the task of tracking down the 25 classmates from his prep year at St Joseph’s Primary School in Melbourne, hoping to find 25 fascinating life stories to share with his audience.

The first obstacle he has to overcome, though, isn’t directly linked to the endeavour. It’s how to make an audience care about people they don’t know. There can surely be nothing more dull than reading Friends Reunited entries for complete strangers.

Luckily, McKenzie, though only a relatively inexperienced stand-up, is a strong performer with an enthusiasm and amiability that’s infectious. It’s not long before some people are ‘oohing’ and ‘aahing’ in sympathy with his story - and the pictures of cute kids.

His set-up for the quest might not seem all that compelling – he just wants to find out what happened to that classroom full of potential – but it doesn’t really matter. Did any of them become astronauts, he wonders, sparking a bit of material about that possibility. In fact, it takes him a bit of a while to get through this sort of idle speculation and on to the job in hand.

He is, it turns out, rather a poor researcher. You wouldn’t have thought that it would have taken more than a few days with school records and electoral rolls to have found the majority of his targets – but he instead tried to do it using adverts, publicity, pounding the streets and even hiring a private detective. This circuitous approach might have been a deliberate attempt to eke more material out of the challenge, but it actually seems like a genuine oversight.

The upshot of it was, that as the festival started he only traced a handful of those once-eager four-year-olds. He has found many more in the last couple of weeks, who he mentions briefly - but he hasn’t yet managed to fill in all the details of their lives. As such, the show feels distinctly unfinished, with no resolution to the challenge or any conclusions he might want to draw about how these infants ended up.
But the McKenzie knows how to make the best of what he’s got. He’s cleverly set up subplots about the substitute teacher in the class photograph, evoked a bit of intrigue about potentially nutty email correspondence and skilfully gets us to care about how he is progressing.

His friendly approach, strong storytelling ability and approachable on-stage charisma make for a jolly yarn regardless of the outcome. But this show will be even better when it’s finished.

Reviewed by Steve Bennett
Melbourne, May 2006