The night before, when announcing that Kitty Flanagan’s weekly segment on The 7PM Project was coming up after the break, presenter Andrew Rochford introduced her as Klitty.
The night before, when announcing that Kitty Flanagan’s weekly segment on The 7PM Project was coming up after the break, presenter Andrew Rochford introduced her as Klitty.
“You know, it’s funny how many times people call me Klitty and it’s always men,” she laughs the following afternoon from her home office in Sydney. “I was doing that on the way home – ‘Is my name hard? Kitty Flanagan, Kitty Flanagan…’” she says, testing her own name’s level of difficulty to pronounce. “I guess it’s an easy one to get mixed up but it is a little Freudian that men call me Klitty. See, when Carrie mixed up my name once she didn’t call me Klitty, she called me Kidney.”
This time last year, Flanagan didn’t think too many people knew her name, be it Klitty, Kidney or Kitty. When she brought her show, Charming And Alarming, down for Melbourne International Comedy Festival she wasn’t so sure she’d sell tickets.
Back when they booked her season at the festival, “we didn’t know at that stage that 7PM Project was going to offer me a little spot on the show every week and we didn’t know that I’d get to do Good News Week with some sort of regularity and basically everyone was really nice to me, Spicks And Specks put me on, and all of a sudden my profile started lifting. So we’d booked into do six shows in this tiny room,” she giggles at the memory, “and it was great, I was able to say to everyone, ‘Yep, sold out – sold out my whole run at the festival’ and people were really impressed until I said, ‘Six shows, 90 seat theatre’. Everyone else is doing 400 seats for 28 shows, and I’m going ‘I sold mine out, don’t know what your problem is…’”
So, after her agent did “a bit of ‘I told you so’ work”, they’re both now on the same page. “He talked me into coming back and doing a bigger theatre and letting more people ‘enjoy the magic’ – as I’m told I have to promote it,” says Flanagan, of the return season of Charming and Alarming, which is playing for six nights at the Athenaeum as part of this year’s Melbourne International Comedy Festival.
The show will feature stories, characterisations and some musical shenaniganery when Flanagan is joined on stage by her guitar-playing sister – or ”musical stooge” as she prefers to be called – Penny. Together they perform the show’s finale
“Show The World”, a self proclaimed anthem that implores young women to keep themselves nice, have some self-respect and most importantly, wear underpants at all times.
Kitty Flanagan performs Charming And Alarming at The Athenaeum Theatre from April 5 – April 10. It’s at 7pm Tuesday – Saturday and 6pm on Sundays. Tickets are $25 – $34 and available through Ticketmaster online, 1300 660 013, 9650 1500 and at the door.
