Melbourne International Comedy Festival review by Steve Bennett

You can’t deny Aunty Donna’s energy. The Melbourne trio bundle on to the stage in a fury of sound, light and exuberance, raucously blasting through their off-kilter sketches to the very vocal delight of an equally up-for-it weekend crowd. They’ve built up a strong hometown fan base, backed by a popular YouTube channel, and the Donnaphiles are certainly out in force tonight.

With Knockabout song-and-dance underpinning most of what they do, they have a choreography that’s both tight and chaotic; lines and movements seem loose but hit their marks. There’s a similarly wobbly plot kind-of underpinning all this… the clash of the Aunty Donna lads with their Bubblebath Boys nemeses which escalates into the ultimate battle between God and Satan. Aunty Donna do not do anything by halves, that’s for sure.

The three idiots – Mark Bonanno, Broden Kelly and Zachary Ruane – charge through a tightly-packed 50 minutes that somehow links unrelated scenes, from retelling of Red Riding Hood to a party on a boat (shades of the Lonely Island?) with nothing more than their exuberance. Full-throttle performances sometimes spill over into the audience, too, to add to the rambunctious feel.

Their rowdy humour can be a little frathouse, but they also spin off in unexpected directions. A Family Feud sketch gets weirdly surreal, the mocking of parents texting has a twist and a series of observational-style vignettes offer a surprisingly wry take on peculiar social behaviours – with no apologies to long-departed English cartoonist H.M. Bateman, who first came up with The Man Who… concept, since this show is more punk than Punch.

There’s a little too much reliance on the same trick of enthusiastically marching into something jaunty only for it to turn sour and dark, while the full-on, shouty performance can be a little wearing – I bet the whole script is written in CAPS LOCK. Eventually the chaos gets the better of them – ironically enough it comes as they try to tie things up neatly, but in fact the pile-up of too many callbacks swamps them. Sometimes, just sometimes, they could maybe calm down a little…

Review date: 12 Apr 2015
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Melbourne International Comedy Festival