Midland on the money
There is something quite apt about Fringe World spreading its footprint this year to include a mini-hub in Midland. The town is a thriving commercial centre for the eastern suburbs, Swan Valley and nearby country areas but is often seen as on the fringe of the metropolitan area, in terms of its desirability as a place to live and its cultural offerings.
Under the banner of Midlandia, producers JumpClimb have set out to reinvent Midland in the eyes of Perth people and perhaps in the eyes of those who live there as well.
The fringe bunting has been strung around the Midland Junction Arts Centre on Great Eastern Highway and Cale Street, a fine old building with great performance and exhibition spaces that was once a school but is now a sadly underused City of Swan property.
For Fringe World, Midlandia becomes an appealing courtyard space with an outdoor bar and areas to relax, including some old aircraft seats, and all lit and decorated with a funky op-shop, verge pick-up aesthetic.
Opening night at the weekend included a diverse program of events in the arts centre as well as music in the nearby Locale venue, a vacant block opposite Midland Gate shopping centre.
Comedy from local stand-up Janelle Koenig and veteran favourite Steady Eddy in one room, and comedy from Neel Kolhatkar and the drag queen bingo show Bingay in the other, morphed into a Late Night Gala with highlights from the festival across the city, including burlesque, pole dancing, poetry, music and hula hoops.
The program, put together by Perth's finest cabaret showman Tomas Ford, is a compact and engaging collection of shows. Perhaps it tends towards safer, mainstream sort of offerings as compared to the edgy events you might find in Northbridge but as an introduction to Fringe for the eastern suburbs fringe-dwellers it is on the money.
We took in Koenig's Mummy-fied, in which the stand-up performer recounts her five-year journey from the freedom of single life in a flat in Melbourne's St Kilda to married life as mother to two young kids in Thornlie.
It's a story Koenig tells with wry humour, focusing chiefly on the life-changing curves of pregnancy and new motherhood. It's a new show and she needs more time to bring it to fruition based on some of the hiccups and forgotten lines but it's an engaging ramble through some of the joys and horrors of parenthood, with plenty of sharp observations and witty one-liners that sparked murmurs of recognition among parents of all ages in the near full house.
Steady Eddy is an old hand at the stand-up game and he hasn't lost any of the punch since the days he was a household name in Australian comedy in the 1980s and 90s. He is an old-school comic who relies on a good rant for laughs. In this case it was a lament about the old days and how he doesn't understand the world anymore.
Eddy still plays his cerebral palsy for laughs, in particular a very funny tale about his problems at airports because airlines have a limited number of wheelchair-accessible seats per flight - a policy he dubs the "spaz quota".
Have I gone too far yet, he asked a couple of times. No, just teetering on the edge but funny enough that he gets away with it, just as he did 25 years ago.
