Our rolling coverage of the 2025 Adelaide Fringe continues with the second set of reviews by our Performing Arts Editor Richard Watts. Look for more reviews from Adelaide Fringe in the coming days.
Garry Starr: Classic Penguins
★★★★★
Gaulier-trained clown Garry Starr (the be-ruffed, malapropism-prone alter ego of Australian actor, writer and director Damien Warren-Smith) returns to Adelaide Fringe with his latest production, Classic Penguins. Hilarious, in-your-face and flawless, Starr performs the fast-paced hour dressed as a literary-loving penguin: flippers on his feet, top hat and tails, and otherwise naked – because penguins don’t wear pants.
This is not a show for the easily shocked or for those who hate audience participation – with the caveat that Garry Starr engenders an atmosphere of complete trust and leans heavily into the concept of enthusiastic consent; this is not a Dame Edna-style comedy show where audience participation leads to participants being mocked and ridiculed.
Garry Starr: Classic Penguins is Warren-Smith’s third full length outing as Garry Starr. Here, the character’s malapropisms are quickly phased out, demonstrating an evolution in Garry Starr’s development and, despite his nudity, one quickly focuses on Starr’s expressive face and committed performance, a testament to the performer’s engaging persona and the cleverly explored premise of this show, in which Starr sets out to save literature, having previously saved Greece’s tourist economy in 2022-2023’s Greece Lightning, and every genre of theatre in his debut solo outing, 2018’s Performs Everything.
Classic Penguins is world-class clowning, in which Starr saves literature by cheekily embodying the titles of Classic Penguins, the cheaply produced, affordable and simply yet strikingly designed series of books which first appeared in 1946 with Emile Victor Rieu’s new translation of The Odyssey. To share every title Starr performs, often (though not always) with the assistance of enthusiastic audience members, would be venturing into spoiler territory, though the titles Starr enacts include The Wind in the Willows, Dracula, Frankenstein and The Handmaid’s Tale.
It’s how Starr recreates such titles – through a series of astutely timed and well-honed jokes and games, the intensity of which rises as the production reaches its conclusion – in which the genius of Classic Penguins resides.
Never repetitive or formulaic, with a focus on manic, brilliant sketches and willingly consensual audience participation, Classic Penguins is that rarest of Fringe shows: flawless and unmissable. Its Adelaide season at The Garden of Unearthly Delights deserves every sparkle of its five stars, after which Classic Penguins transfers to Melbourne International Comedy Festival from 27 March to 20 April, touring nationally and internationally thereafter.
Garry Starr: Classic Penguins
Written and performed by Damien Warren-Smith
The Garden of Unearthly Delights – Le Cascadeur
Tickets: $28.50 to $38.50 (plus booking fee; companion card holders admitted free)
7:15pm, 21 February – 23 March 2025
Thunderstruck: A Night of Classic Rock
★★★½
Contemporary dance performed live in a darkened theatre to a soundtrack of rock classics by AC/DC, Led Zeppelin and Lynyrd Skynyrd, performed live by a classically trained violinist: surely, it doesn’t get more fringe?
One of the reasons a global network of Fringe Festivals exists is to support work that sits on the fringes of the mainstream: work that defies neat art form classifications, work that’s simply too weird, too strange, too avant-garde, too fringe to be programmed in mainstream or mainstage arts festivals and venues. Thunderstruck: A Night of Classic Rock is such a show.
Produced by Blue Violin (aka Chris Vuk, the founder and first violinist of the Boston String Quartet) and Lewis Major Projects (founded in 2015 by Lewis Major, an award-winning choreographer, director and creative entrepreneur with a background in sheep shearing and a foreground in contemporary dance theatre), Thunderstruck pairs contemporary dance with virtuosic violin covers of truly classic hard rock tracks – including one sequence performed to a piece from the classical music canon.
The dance is exquisite, with the performers wearing long black socks to evoke the ‘Dirty Boots’ of rock ’n’ roll, though this does mean it’s hard to see the placement of the dancers’ feet on the fog-shrouded stage lit by a circle of electronic candles at the start of the show and elsewhere throughout the production. Thunderstruck is also visually stunning, with an open invitation offered for audience members to film and photograph (no flash, please!) the proceedings.
The personal touches – such as Vuk describing coming from minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit and snow in Colorado Springs, Colorado to 40 degrees Celsius in Adelaide – are strong and the dance displays a beautiful precision, expression and cleanness of line. Conversely, Vuk occasionally leans a little too heavily into the rock star persona at times, typified by one sequence in which the dancers surround him with candles, like a god in a shrine, resulting in the movement vocabulary feeling extraneous or overlooked in such moments. Consequently, greater directorial balance is required to make Thunderstruck: A Night of Classic Rock truly sing and fully become the sum of its parts – but oh, what beautiful parts they are.
Thunderstruck: A Night of Classic Rock
Presented by Blue Violin and Lewis Major Choreography
Key creatives: Chris Vuk: Violin
Lewis Major: Choreography
Cast: Chris Vuk aka Blue Violin
Dancers: Abbey Harby, Elsi Faulks, Siobhan Lynch and Stefaan Morrow
Adelaide College of the Arts Main Theatre and additional regional venues
Tickets: $25 to $48 plus $4.80 transaction fee
Until 14 March 2025
Additional regional venues from 19 March – 1 April 2025
The writer visited Adelaide as a guest of Adelaide Fringe.
