Melbourne International Comedy Festival review

‘Sincerity is everything,’ goes the old showbusiness maxim. ‘If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.’

And the delight in the Isaac Haigh Variety ​Hour is reminding us just how badly so many mainstream entertainers of the 1970s were with that deceit, with their cheesy semi-American accents, off-kilter intonations and wooden, over-scripted banter.

The show is set up as if it is a genuine TV recording, with hefty cameras, a producer’s preamble to get us practising our applause and even ad breaks played out on the studio monitors. Note-perfect parodies of their type, these are among the show’s highlights, including the stilted vox pops advertising Dippys Roadhouse restaurants, the fragrance ad far from the pretentious arty commercials of today and the anti-drugs PSA warning against the dangers of smoking ‘Lucifer’s Lettuce’.

The whole piece is high on period detail in all its awfulness, such as the fire-risk synthetic suits, collars the size of yacht sails and corny choreography. Haigh and his co-creators, including director Caitlin Soennichsen and co-writer Isabelle Carney, must have poured over hours of retro footage to create this authentic world.

Musical guests (who all look surprisingly similar) include ‘Gelong’s hottest teen heartthrob’, a creepy religious family group inspired by The Osmonds, and a cheeky-chappy style-geezer in the Adam Faith mould. All of whom dance even daggier than they sing.

There’s also a guest slot, tonight going to Josh Glanc, with his own daft number pitching the conflicting forces of imagination and practicality against each other in a daft dialogue song about trucking. 

All this before we get to the puppets - mailman Twinkle Toes delivering viewer’s messages and characters from The Wibbly Wobbly Wood, where there appears to be trouble afoot – which add to the sense of ambition on a shoestring 

Don’t worry if bygone names mean nothing to you – although there’s an extra nostalgia hit if they do – for the joy is in the absurdity of this fake, plastic world of mainstream entertainment, so comprehensively recreated.

Yes, there’s a risk that the Isaac Haigh Variety ​Hour could be a one-joke affair about how the past was so unsophisticated, and that’s not entirely avoided, even when it pivots to slapstick with the chaos that ensues when the show inevitably comes off the rails.

Yet Haigh – whose debut with Aiden Willcox won the best newcomer gong last year – sustains the core gag pretty well thanks to surreal moments, but primarily the affection he’s heaped into his super-realistic parodies of hit parades past.

 • The Isaac Haigh Variety​ Hour's Melbourne run is now over.

Review date: 8 Apr 2024
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Melbourne International Comedy Festival