You want to feel welcomed and at home when you take your seat for a show. You want a good seat that’s close enough to have a good view of the action but not so close you feel uncomfortably singled out. You want neighbours who are small and quiet. With ah yes, the Music, you get all three, only not in the way you expect.
You feel welcomed and at home because the show is at someone’s actual home and the home owner is there to personally welcome you. You get a good seat because in the small lounge there is nothing but prime location and the neighbours? Well let’s just say they’re fans. It’s a wonderfully weird setting for a wonderfully weird show.
After meeting each of the living room’s other occupants, Joseph Green loped out of the room a little awkwardly, re-entered with the air of authority, and proceeded to make as laugh solidly for the next hour.
Green’s a gifted story teller. From the naiveties of childhood to being co-opted into the world of male escorts, he spins a yarn of a life most of us simultaneously wish we had the balls to live but are very glad we didn’t. Instead we get to live vicariously through Green’s from the safety of his armchair. This yoga teaching, suite selling, actor comedian wasn’t afraid to break character to share a side laugh with his mates in attendance who had their own two cents to add. It made for a night of unexpected intimacy and laughter directed as much at Green’s stories as it was as the tangents he was taken on by people who had clearly heard the stories before (including artfully omitted details).
At its heart, ah yes, the music has something we can all relate to: a comedy of errors in search of love and a path through life that doesn’t feel like a complete mistake. In the end though the thing that really matters for stand-up is whether it makes you laugh and ah yes, the music, did that and then some. His love poems may have left him empty handed but his jokes made him a lounge full of new fans.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Joseph Green – ah yes, the music
Tree House, Elwood
17 September – 3 October
Melbourne Fringe Festival
www.melbournefringe.com.au
16 September – 4 October
