fringe: briefs

Tonight was my very first taste of the Adelaide Fringe for 2010... and if I'm being honest, really my first real taste of the Fringe. And it's 2am and I really should be attempting to get some sleep before Saturday Shopping Adventures, but I think I'm too wound up to sleep.

Plus my hands are still overheated and tingling from all the clapping...

But I compromised... I'm actually typing this from bed... bless you laptop!

Because I've never done the Fringe, much less The Garden of Unearthly Delights, I really didn't know what to expect when I went down there tonight... other than expecting the car park situation to be crap... which it kinda was, but I gave up and parked in one of the multistoreys.

But when I got down to TGoUD I didn't really expect people to be queued all the way from the entrance to the road... and I figured since there's no harm in asking, I went to the ticket booth and said that I was going to see one of the shows and was there any way I could jump the queue.

Turns out that's exactly what I could do... woohoo!

Then I realised I had no idea where the hell anything is... there doesn't seem to be a map anywhere, and I had to find a certain tent. Turned out to be a tent very near the entrance, so that was fortunate.

Less fortunate was the fact that the show before the one I was due to see was running late and Briefs was going to be starting some 20 minutes late... so I decided to go for a wander and take a look at the rest of the Garden.

Very cool... freaky, full of bright shiny lights and drunk people, but still very cool. And then I ran into J and Pika... which was a whole world of "of all the gin joints, etc". But nice.

So I hung out with them for a while before wandering back to the tent... bad move on my part really, since all the other people who rocked up seemed to have stuck around and got into the queue... which I was now not at the front of. And I had a couple of braying donkeys (not really, just really loud, drunk women) standing right behind me in the line... I just wanted to slap the crap out of them as they had an increasingly pointless and pretentious conversation.

Eventually the tent opened up and we went on in... and because I'm just one person all on my own I managed to snag a seat right at the end of one of the banquettes (well, somewhere between a bleacher and a banquette really), with a perfect view of everything (including the guy in the audience who had a piercing through or behind his Achilles tendon).

I don't know if it was because this was their first official show, or what, but it wasn't at all slick... the sound was all over the place in spots, they hadn't set up the video projector thing before we went in, nothing major, just little things.

The Samoan drag queen hostess/compare was good, although suffered the most from the sound levels being out of whack... more mic volume, less music please. But she got the crowd all involved in doing some Samoan clapping at one point which was actually kinda cool... I can't remember the words, but it was rubbing hands together going "memememememe", a normal clap, a cupped hand clap and saying "ho" to her "hehe" (I think). Worked very well as audience participation to get us all engaged in the show.

Other than that, we were promised lots of beautiful boys in not very much clothing doing circus tricks and that's very much what we got... rope work strip tease and silks performance and tumbling and balancing on poles and comedy and those cup things on a string and hula hoops and plate spinning (although the plate spinner really wasn't sexy... funny, but not sexy)...

Now I've seen plate spinning before in the movies or on teevee... but I had no idea that seeing it live would be so nerve wracking.... you're just waiting for things to drop, sure that the performer isn't really paying attention... but then suddenly he's there, speeding up the plate.

I was also very proud of myself... before starting, the plate spinner had been eating from a huge "protein powder" container... actually he'd been wandering around since before the show started eating from the container... what the stuff was I have no idea... but before he started the plates he finished off the powder and then kicked the container into the audience... and it sailed overhead, right towards me. Usually this would be a recipe for disaster, but I plucked it effortlessly out of the air and put it on the step next to me.

Oddly though, even with all the barely dressed boys, I think that the cutest guy of the night was fully dressed for most of it, only stripping down to his Bonds trunks for the finale... which probably says a lot about me. Although the blonde tumbler who did a Risky Business number was very hot.

And on the down side I would possibly suggest to them that they really don't need the two video pieces... the one that opens the show would actually be better done as a live piece (although harder to pull off in part), and the tribal tattooing piece before the silks work, although interesting, pretty much alienated the audience, or at least a section of it... I know the girl sitting next to me didn't look at the screen at any point, and I'm sure she's not the only one.

It also stops the show dead... sure, you're better connected with the guy with the tattoos when he comes out to do the silks work, but it just seems to drag on for too long.

But all in all it was fun... a little bit crap in spots, and very, very, very low rent... but fun and sexy and worth seeing.

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