Creasey nearly ready to shine

The Hurricane

Joel Creasey

Regal Theatre

April 24

Three stars

When Joel Creasey last strutted his stuff in Perth, with his coming-of-age show Drama Captain, he was an obscenely young 22 and playing at a bowling club.

Two years on he’s all — well, more — grown up, has some TV credits to his name and is filling the Regal. Not bad for a kid not all that long out of Wesley College and Garden City Booragoon. If he’s not quite an international comedy star yet, he’s at least a pretty substantial starlet.

His school days, his coming out and his break-up with his first love dominated Drama Captain. He’s moved on now; the aftermath of the break-up only gets one run, and that’s more concerned with the death of a friend’s cat

This time around it’s about life as a comedian and media personality on the make, climbing the celebrity lists from C to B.

Lots and lots of opportunity for great bitchy fun, and Creasey’s a rapid-fire master of it (he’s, famously, a protege of the recently departed Joan Rivers). Everyone — from newsreaders to soapy stars to fellow reality show sort-of-celebrities — is in his sights, although, to his credit, he’s discriminating with his markmanship (confirming, for example, that debut MasterChef winner Julie Goodwin is a bit of a sweetheart and Barry Hall is a seriously formidable human being).

But that’s the problem. While, of course, there are plenty of clever and very funny observations about everything from Hobart to gay bars (and, yes, Melbourne’s Poof Doof has the best name for a dance club ever), too much of the material is conspiratorial gossip about what he did with, or to, his fellow personalities.

He’s a real talent, though, and smart enough to realize he needs more insight into the human comedy, and less snickering about what he’s been up to lately, to fully realize his pretty much unlimited potential.