Big Nose Big Dreams, aptly named for its target audience, was a debut one-man show, an engaging fusion of comedy and ‘real talk’ in which Daniel Mehareb delivered a promising hour of content – albeit not without some hiccups along the way. His unquestionable self-love and all things Middle Eastern, however, led the show to laughs and success.
The Bankstown Poetry slam performer opened his time on stage with uncertainty, which, funnily enough, was assuring to those sitting in the audience. “I’ll be honest… I don’t know what it’s about,” he claimed, using various shared aspects of life – his own, his Coptic Egyptian community, Middle Easterners and those hailing from Western Sydney – to create an interesting patchwork of reflections.
Growing up in incredibly ethnic surroundings despite living in a white-majority Australia accurately captured the intention behind Mehareb’s piece. There is immense uncertainty when navigating two worlds, but when the majority of your audience belongs to the minority, a new majority emerges, united and visible.
While the topics he spoke on riffed on the titular theme of Big Nose Big Dreams, each was unique to certain experiences and avoided generalised categories often pushed onto minority groups. “Do we have to be perfect to be human?” he asked earnestly, while discussing racial profiling and the dehumanisation of Arab people. Moments earlier, a favourite line of the audience was dropped: “The only way to get white people to have empathy is to give them shrooms.” This versatility was one of Mehareb’s greatest strengths, bringing academic flavouring to his performance while also grounding it in the humour of the everyday.
To much surprise, Mehareb borrowed from the whataboutisms of political arguments and put them to good use rather than deferring from the problem. Speaking of activists missing key context clues – “Rich white c***s who want to piss off their parents” – Mehareb claimed and reclaimed a lot of public opinion that has been used as leverage against Middle Eastern and Western Sydney communities. “Even in death we’re questioned before we’re mourned,” he noted poetically, while critiquing the impossible standards to which different communities are held.
The only and greatest critique of Mehareb’s performance was in the very way in which he delivered his ‘hot takes’. While the performance was not strictly a comedy routine, many of Mehareb’s musings wandered from their original intention and lost the audience when avoiding full circle moments. I can understand the need to play with form and experiment with the hybridity of a comedy/talk show performance, but, unfortunately, distracting asides and incomplete reflections became a hindrance to his storytelling.
Read: Exhibition review: Khaled Sabsabi, The Lock Up
This critique is not to discredit Mehareb in any way, given his background in performance and in particular slam poetry, which requires intense concentration and the ability to be rhythmic when dramatising a point of view. Rather, it is to say that Mehareb should be congratulated on his first-time efforts in this debut performance and that he holds promise for future renditions of Big Nose Big Dreams. With time and a greater investment in comedy and storytelling skills, there is no doubt that he can take on larger crowds and longer performances in the not-too-distant future.
Daniel Mehareb’s Big Nose Big Dreams was performed for one night at Riverside Theatres on 22 September 2022 as part of Sydney Fringe Festival.
This review was made possible by Diversity Arts Australia’s StoryCasters program in partnership with Multicultural NSW and supported by Sweatshop.
