“You are never sure where this show will take you next, and that’s the best part – it’s exciting, it’s fresh and it’s very Australian … Word of mouth will make this season sell out soon.”
Julia Newbould
4.5 Stars
Classic Penguins
Grand Electric
Until 12 October
Short, not quite sweet is Garry Starr’s journey through some classic Penguins in his quest to save literature from extinction. You see it’s the books, the affordable paperbacks, not our flippered friends of the Antarctic, that inspire this manic comedy.
Seeing Starr dressed in tails, flippers, top hat, and an Elizabethan ruff, is already funny.
The show begins with a full shelf of popular Penguin books. Starr pulls them out one at a time, and with each title he performs some sort of cleverly contrived tribute.
There’s Moby Dick – think Moby; think dick. Spoiler alert: there’s a lot of dick in the performance.
He takes us from Frankenstein to Dracula to The Handmaid’s Tale in a neat linear journey with some clowning and physical comedy.
Breakfast at Tiffany’s features a balletic interpretation to Moon River…with an emphasis on mooning.
From his first flippered footsteps on the stage, Starr makes the audience laugh. And the laughs grow as the performance progresses.
Classic Penguins is a 70-minute whirlwind escapade through his Penguins – some with predictable interpretations and others not quite. At one point he starts singing Bohemian Rhapsody, and then we all join in.
It’s a show which is enriched with audience participation – some gentle, some not so much. At one point he asks for someone from the audience with very low personal hygiene standards – amazingly, someone volunteers. For another volunteer he produces a latex glove – again, the volunteer sticks around to perform his task.
At first there were some awkward faces in the audience. We don’t know what is likely to happen next, and the book titles don’t always provide the most obvious hints. But as the show progresses, everyone has settled in for the ride.
Starr’s arc moves seamlessly from one title to the next: some with song, some with actions, some with volunteers, and all sans pants. This is a tightly scripted clever comedy.
There’s a scene where an audience member is called upon to interpret the Grapes of Wrath – did you guess grapes would feature? Did you guess there would be a grape fight? After pelting each other and the stage with bags of grapes (and a few oranges) there is War and Peace but it then descends into War of the Worlds.
Other Penguin titles to look forward to are Perfume: the story of a murderer; Gulliver’s Travels; The Great Escape; The Wave; The Wind in the Willows, and The Little Prince.
This is not a show for everyone. There is nudity, there are scenes that made me cringe in my seat, but Garry Starr is likeable. Despite his genitals being swung about distractingly you are still mesmerized by his clownish face, and in a performance space such as the Grand Electric, most of us are sitting close enough to clearly see his facial expressions.
You are never sure where this show will take you next, and that’s the best part – it’s exciting, it’s fresh and it’s very Australian.
It’s already been a success in Edinburgh and Melbourne. The Sydney audience also loved Classic Penguins, and they loved Garry Starr. Word of mouth will make this season sell out soon.
Four and a half chipolatas
Julia Newbould, Theatre Now
