Melbourne International Comedy Festival review by Steve Bennett

With its stars in vintage corsets and period-glamour hairstyles, Titty Bar Ha Ha looks for all the world like a burlesque show. But if you think the genre at its laziest can be a pretentious front for stripping, don’t worry – so do Nai Bowen and Boo Dwyer, as they make clear in their opening number, with lines telling a fictional dancer it’s ‘no work of art / you’re a failed drama student who couldn’t get a part’.

A theatrical hybrid, this is essentially a narrative sketch show, with bags of audience participation, set in a wartime subterranean club during the London Blitz. Our well-to-do hostesses Hope and Gloria (geddit?) are here to distract the audience from the possibility of death from above – and themselves from their own dark past.

The plot MacGuffin is a pretty weak linking device, but just about holds the elements together, however loosely. Many of the set pieces involve silly party games with audience volunteers – and the duo are not women you easily say no to, as they deploy a mix of flirtatious feminine wiles and steely powers of persuasion to recruit their contestants.

Meanwhile there are plenty of filthy double entendres, often pretty cheap but delivered in cut-glass British accents that add class to the lasciviousness. In fact the whole show sashays between highbrow and low; an atmospheric torch song followed by a man being dry-humped with a dick-shaped balloon on his head.

They can certainly sing, these two, and the songs, both sultry and raunchy, are clear highlights, with adult-themed tracks like I’m Just A Little Bit Psycho and Ex Sex deserving a wider audience. The euphemism-laden song about pleasuring yourself is more obvious, and more cheap, as if the delighted audience could care. But however good their voices, when they ditch them for kazoos in an upbeat pop hits mashup, the result is hilarious.

Titty Bar Ha Ha could certainly do with a strong director to fix the big inconsistencies in tone and structure – especially with the wartime theme and alleged storyline often forgotten. But the high spirits and strong stage presence of Bowen and Dwyer (wife of comedian Micky D, incidentally) hold it all together, proving themselves the most welcoming of good-time girls.

Review date: 14 Apr 2014
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett