Melbourne International Comedy Festival review

What this? It’s just the age-old story of a baby stolen by dingos and raised by blind moles in tunnels beneath the Outback before making her way along the dingo fence, seeing off predators with a Taser, until finally making it to The Golden City where she becomes a stripper, finds a sugar daddy, encounters bikie gangs and becomes implicated in a real-life bullion heist from the safe of billionaire Kerry Packer.

Billed as an ‘Australiana tropicana psychological shitstorm’, there’s a lot going on in Coober Pedy's Last Showgirl. Way too much, actually, and it becomes a chaotic noise of 1990s-set oddness that’s hard to connect with. 

Jokes often make no sense in what seems like a first-draft stream-of-consciousness/fever dream narrative. One key character is called Citrus ‘because they put the C in Itrus’, which could be oddly quirky were it not floating in a sea of similar non-sequiturs in which nothing matters. 

I bet Ruby Teys has a great ten-minute cabaret set as Cherry Vinyl. She’s got sass, a fearlessly intense performing style, and a love of innuendo. In isolation, a prawn-based burlesque act is probably a surreal delight. But in the context of an hour of nonsense, weirdness is nothing special and the umpteenth line about a ‘tight little hole’ no longer a double entendre, but a pretty direct reference.

There are jokes, funny ones, too but they’re old, delivered as a cheesy vaudevillian act Vinyl developed for the club.

Senses are further assaulted by low-rent animations, intrusive music and supporting characters are played in on tape. That Teys was fighting a temperamental on-off head mic throughout didn’t help, but it’s hardly the only problem.

This loose, high-energy, in-your-face performance was not without its fans, but you really have to be fully on board with the messily amateur insanity from the start, because Teys certainly is.

Review date: 17 Apr 2025
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Melbourne International Comedy Festival