Foggy Morning in Melbourne Town

As the streets of Melbourne resemble a location shot for The Mist - I start to ponder on recent events.

Our Adelaide adventure seems like a century ago but the upshot was a mixed bag of highs and lows:

Dave, Amanda and I mounted a sketch show with only two weekends of rehearsal with the rest being virtual discussion and aborted Skype conferences (stupid computers). We ironed out the kinks during the run and ended up with a slick, funny show that suffered from lack of audience exposure.

While the TuxCat maybe a funky venue with an "all hands on deck" attitude they were battling to get the venue ready by the opening of the Festival - frustrating when you have black outs in your show but these are rendered useless by the sunlight streaming in through the windows onto your rickety MDF/milk crate stage. Being on the third floor of a dusty, condemned heritage building (don't step there - you could go through the floor) with no lift surely cut out that all important 60+ demographic that we were aiming for. Oh well - live and learn.

The Festival itself was grand - Some great acts and wonderful performers - highlights included the new Dead Cat Bounce show, Patrick Monahan and the return of Ross Daniels's show The Transposed man.

Gluttony had a great atmosphere and Amanda and I enjoyed lounging around in bean bags under lantern lit trees, sipping G & Ts and eavesdropping on punter's reviews of the acts.

It was joyful to throw our hat in the ring and to finally be a part of something that I had long earmarked down as a "To Do". Thanks again to Dave Bloustien for suggesting the idea in the first place.

Merrily we rolled back into town and started to prepare for the Melbourne Comedy Festival. All the while getting Amanda used to a new home, State and finding room for all her stuff in amongst all my accumulated junk (I come from a long line of hoarders - when my Granadma died we were astonished to find thousands of ice cream lids in her garage...) At this point it would be remiss of me not to mention that AB was pregnant and we were trying to cram in as much as we possibly could before the baby came.

This year I directed and performed in Late Night Impro and put together a formidable cast and a ridiculous schedule - 11pm shows Thurs, Fri & Sat three weeks in a row. Not so bad you might think? But I cast Jason Geary, Rik Brown and myself as the main hosts and with all the other shit we were doing in our lives it nearly killed us. Ugh. Still we had some great guests (Brent Hill from Rock of Ages, Jimmy James Eaton, Amanda and Susie Youssef) Unfortunately we just missed out on having the improv legend Greg Proops join us onstage (although I did get to pose a question to him during his Proopcast on the last night of the Fest).

Here are some of the posters I designed for the Comedy Fest:







Also over in WA - Spontaneous Insanity returned to the Big Apple and asked me to update the old poster:


and Impro Melbourne kicked off their Impro Cave season in a NEW space.


Recently I completed a fantastic collaboration with the incredibly talented Anton Emdin which led to this project: Shrinks!

I've got a whole bunch of things coming up (new posters for Fringe, a trip to Sydney to see Robert Crumb, another season of Pia Zadora, more spots on Neighbours etc) but the biggest thing that's happily taking up my time at the moment is the birth of our son Dashiell - nearly three weeks old now and just a wonderful little bundle.




Happy days to you all.
Cheers
L