“I’m just a girl from Brisbane trying to make it in the big smoke,” Alex Hines declares at the start of her set, a manic look cast toward the audience, daring anyone in the packed-out theatre to meet her level of crazy.
But that would be impossible, it soon becomes clear, because Hines is on a totally different celestial plane.
Alex Hines’ show for the Melbourne International Comedy Festival is running every night until the end of the festival on April 21 at The Tower theatre in Southbank’s Malthouse, and it’s the kind of incomparable chaotic extravaganza you certainly won’t be seeing anywhere else around the festival.
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A compilation of sketch, stand-up, musical performance, crowd work, and – of course – fart jokes, Hines’ Putting on a Show takes you to the most unexpected of places, and timelines and characters and bizarre stories involving DC Comics’ supervillain the Riddler intermixed with childhood family trauma and a dash of Gold Coast theme parks.
No pop-cultural meme is safe in this unhinged theatrical performance of controlled chaos. It’s as if Hines’ alter ego performer was a grab-bag of internet references that we’ve all unknowingly consumed from the endless scrolling of the portal of our phones, and she’s reflecting them back to us in a way that makes it all somehow one hundred million times funnier.
Where the absurdity of Alex Hines the performer and Alex Hines the person stops and begins is indistinguishable, and that’s perhaps what makes this show unlike any other that the festival has to offer. Injected with Hines’ personality and sense of humour, Putting on a Show is guaranteed to make your cheeks sore and ribs shake the whole way through this crazy, chaotic, sensational journey Alex Hines takes you on.
Alex Hines is performing nightly until April 21 at The Tower in Southbank’s Malthouse Theatre.
