Love or a Slab of Fudge
Forum
Hotel, Ladies’ Lounge, until April 21, 2013
Melbourne Comedy Festival 2013
Star rating:**
Reviewer: Kate Herbert
“Warm, personal storytelling with potential”
Geraldine Hickey has a
warm, friendly presence and some raw, comic energy, but there is more comic
potential in her material, despite the show having a few good laughs about love.
In the tiny, cell-like
venue of the Ladies’ Lounge, she chats amiably and intimately with her audience
as if we were friends sitting over a beer in her lounge room as she spins a
yarn.
Before she gets to her
love story, she starts with favourite animals (hers is a crocodile – that’s
really living on the edge), overeating, getting fit and generally getting her
life together and behaving like an adult.
Storytelling can be a
great vehicle for comedy but, to work as stand-up, it needs careful structuring
with gags and tags peppering the narrative.
Hickey could mine the
comic possibilities of relationships, broken hearts, meeting new lovers,
realizing she was a lesbian two years ago, and her struggle with food and
fitness.
She strolls affably through
her story about her six-week fling, how she and her lover agreed on a mutually
acceptable end date for the relationship, and how much she learned about love.
However, there is too much
rambling, conversational, often repetitive or unprepared chat as we wait for
the story to evolve and gags to erupt.
It’s great that Hickey is
not doing standard stand-up but, if she figures out what is funny, edits the
meandering, repetition and unnecessary fillers and hits the jokes more
frequently, she could have a more successful show.
By Kate Herbert
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