Aunty Donna will bring their Drem world tour to a close with seven shows at the Palais Theatre.
Aunty Donna launched their Drem tour in Hobart at the end of August. The Melbourne-born-and-bred surrealist comedy group then took their all-new live show to theatres in Sydney, Brisbane and New Zealand, before spending two months travelling across the UK, Ireland and North America.
The group, who’re responsible for the Netflix sketch show Aunty Donna’s Big Ol’ House of Fun and the ABC sitcom Aunty Donna’s Coffee Café, returned to Australia in early December for shows in Adelaide and Perth.
Aunty Donna: Drem
- Palais Theatre
- 12-20 December
- Tickets here
Stay up to date with what’s happening in and around Melbourne here.
They’re now back on home turf for a seven-show stint at the Palais Theatre, which is where the Drem tour will end.
“It’s been kind of incredible,” says Broden Kelly, one-third of Aunty Donna’s performing personnel. “This is, I can say as I sit here, the best show we’ve ever made.”
Aunty Donna is a six-person operation. Kelly performs onstage alongside Zachary Ruane and Mark Bonanno. The trio are joined behind the scenes by writer and stage director Sam Lingham, video director Max Miller, and composer Thomas Zahariou.
Over the last dozen years, Aunty Donna have become one of the country’s most beloved comedy acts. Their fans – who call each other “frems” – are seriously devoted. For the uninitiated, a quick scroll through the Aunty Donna subreddit will be totally perplexing; all inside jokes and surrealist lingo.
But onstage, Aunty Donna are anything but inaccessible. In a review of the group’s show at London’s 3500-seat Eventim Apollo in September, Mark Grassick wrote, “there simply isn’t anything else out there that’s even close to being this joyously funny.”
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At the start of the Drem tour, however, Kelly wasn’t feeling quite so confident.
“I remember sitting back in Hobart the night before we started this tour, really having no idea whether it was any good or not, legitimately not knowing whether people would like it,” he says. “This show is the most ambitious thing we’ve ever done audiovisually and production-wise. So many elements were just really question marks.”
Aunty Donna have been performing internationally for over a decade. Their YouTube channel has more than half a million subscribers, and an additional 120k subscribe to their Grouse House production company. But despite the global spread of their following, Drem was created with Melbourne in mind.
“The jokes and the characters and the themes are very about Melbourne,” Kelly says.
It’s for this reason that they decided to end the tour in Melbourne. “Melbourne is our favourite place,” Kelly says. “It’s where we’re all from. We wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for forming in Melbourne. It’s just that the atmosphere of Melbourne is so core to why we exist.”
He continues, “We wanted to make sure that the show was fantastic by the time we got to Melbourne, and sometimes the show takes a while to get good. So you need some canaries down the coal mine, people who don’t matter – like people from Tasmania, Sydney and Brisbane. People who are irrelevant.”
Jokes aside – something you’ll never hear a member of Aunty Donna say – the show’s Melbourne-centrism hasn’t prevented it from landing with audiences across the planet.
“I think every night of this tour, maybe bar one or two, we’ve ended in a standing ovation from the crowd, which for a sketch comedy group is not a common thing for us,” Kelly says.
“What it’s been fun to do with this show is to push things much further than we would have done in the early days,” Kelly continues. “I think people have been through so much in the last five years that they’re looking for something that really captivates them and surprises them and isn’t something that fits into a one-minute reel.”
Aunty Donna are planning to reinvest the tour proceeds into their production company, Grouse House, which they conceived as a platform for emerging Australian comedians.
“We just wanted to be a place where, if people have really cool ideas, we can platform them,” Kelly says.
“Our hope is to be a self-sustaining place so that a Sam Campbell or an Aunty Donna or whoever doesn’t have to move overseas to do it. They can make something here, or it can be a stepping stone to the next big thing.”
With no further tour plans on the horizon, Drem is Melbourne frems’ last chance to see Aunty Donna for the foreseeable future.
Get your tickets for Aunty Donna’s Dream here.
This article was made in partnership with Century.
