Melbourne International Comedy Festival review

In her first Australian solo venture away from her high-octane musical double act Two Hearts, Laura Daniel promises an hour with no bells and whistles. Literally that’s true – but there are still air horns and explosion effects aplenty.

For the snappily-named Can You Smell That? Must Be A Queen Going Off! is just as much over-the-top camp fun as her act with hubby Joseph Moore, with Daniel bringing stadium-level energy to her powerhouse songs and anecdotal stand-up.

Narcissistically googling herself one day, she found that her net worth was allegedly $5million – so now she’s on a quest to figure out quite how anyone could have arrived at that figure. She might have been on Taskmaster, Dancing With The Stars and The Masked Singer – but only in her native New Zealand, where even TV  pay is modest.

Don’t get too hung up this maguffin, however, as it’s only sparingly used to link routines that can cover anything from oversized Stanley water cups to the genre of ‘new adult’ books with their weird sexualisation of fantasy creatures

Primarily, though, this is a performance about performance, including  Daniel’s origin story, getting a taste for the stage via a role in the cheesy musical Nunsense as a wisecracking, street-smart nun (with a cringeworthy Brookyln accent) who makes it on the stage through the sheer power of graft. 

It seems that the character is Daniel’s role model, given her full-on commitment – although with her lascivious, flirtatious style, no one’s going to confuse this comedian with an celibate bride of Christ. And that unrivalled dynamism does help carry moments when the writing isn’t the tightest. 

It comes as no surprise that the musical numbers are the stand-out moments, stone-cold bangers each one.  And while the tone is relentlessly fun and upbeat, Daniel  doesn’t shy away from some of the more problematic aspects of a stage career. Prime among them is toxic advice she received about her body, both at stage school and on set of Dancing With The Stars.

Daniel’s concluding story revolves around a terrible stripper, out of place at her otherwise relatively sedate birthday party. Even here, for all her mockery, she identifies a fellow performer with whom she can only empathise.

At day one of drama school, Daniel was told: ‘If you think you can be happy doing any other job than performing, you should do it.’ Given she’s committed to such a full-on performance, even in an intimate hotel basement, it’s impossible to imagine her doing anything else but this.

Review date: 13 Apr 2025
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Melbourne International Comedy Festival