On this next bout of the Melbourne International Comedy Fest, the general populace was drawn into the depths of the Melbourne Town Hall for a show so bizarre that you’d be forgiven for trying to recall the moment when some cheeky shit slipped acid into your drink. Trying to explain it doesn’t do it justice – for this particular performance you’re effectively sitting in a room while a girl in a rainbow tortoise costume threw clothes, ping pong balls and her voice at you for roughly around an hour. Sure, it makes for a pretty good answer to when Phil from accounts asks, ‘What did you do last night?’ – it might even shut him up too. Yet like any acid trip, there’s a fine line between fun and too much. Brasier danced and sung across that line often.
Brasier’s voice is fantastic. She clearly pumps out power ballads with both ease and grace, using her commanding voice to snare gratuitous amounts of attention like a puppy at a pre-school. She couldn’t be faulted on her choices of songs, her renditions of Celine Dion, 5ive, Savage Garden and many more familiar ‘90s tracks were breathtaking and mixed with great dashes of humour mid-song, but the set was a little too reliant on material that wasn’t hers. Overall there was a saturation of renditions that at the end of the day she didn’t write, and regardless of how good she is of a singer, that’s still time spent delivering unoriginal content. In many ways, this drew too strong of a comparison to Idol, although the lack of washed-up has-been judges was a nice touch.
Outside of the musical content, Brasier’s comedy was very reliant on her high energy and personality, again flirting with fine lines by either coming across as quirky and unique or more in the vein of ‘child who drank too much cordial’. The difficult part to this is whether her high energy was an act of comic genius or not, as the delivery of her story was clearly reflected in her chaotic persona. To elaborate, she made clear there was an overarching story, yet she was so frantically trying to piece together music, mini-sketches and crowd participation into it that the plot seemed like a constraint rather than a guide. It was so rarely followed that it could have been scrapped altogether. She definitely wins points for her unique delivery and the energy involved, but Brasier’s performance needs more focus to see her reach her potential, and more original tracks would definitely help her shine.
BY BRANDON HILLS
