You Say Potato, I Say Die! - The Nice Guys - Rafferty's Theatre, Riverside Theatre - 06/04/06

Ethan Switch - Saturday, 8 April 2006 - Print Version

Make with the cold late nights. The chill is in the pants and rubbing up hard next to the person in the other seat is not what "it" is all about. There are other things, such as finding more free postcards for intent to mail. And never breaking out the door to do so. Plus, word is that battery leakages are great for burns.

Quite the crowd for a late night Thursday in Parramatta. Dress, jeans and demeanour suggesting that fresh snake oil of university fiends about. Fresh and with the product of ages yet to descend like the mad marketing dictates the workers in collars and suits behold.

Seats of Rafferty's Theatre are loose set and all connected. Numbers small on buttons at the rear base of the chairs enough to pass over quick. Cosy is finding large metal objects digging into the thighs of people on the left. Their quite over the dull throbbing blunt part of the charm.

Opening the night of sketch comedy with a maitre d' suffering a psychosis or dementia of sorts sets the tone of the show. Quite the tone too. One that pays no heed to the low brow audience of moths flocking toward grins bearing teeth the size of Juicy Fruit pellets.

Crowd wise, there's a feeling of knowing too much. As in the ringers in the audience whispering to each other as the sketches prepare in the light darkness. Laughter before even the words hit spitting tipsy on a few in the seats, their chintziness dipping a bit too long in the barley and hops.

Fantastic delivery of lines and the presentation. Raw and fast, The Nice Guys are intense and are damn professional in set and wrap up of sketches and skits. Not without the occasional slapstick moment, the majority of the humour is cerebral. Case in point being the refusing world weary traveller hell bent on keeping his vocabularly all proper English despite the world.

Clearly from the material, it's the kind of sketch comedy long not seen for a desert stretch. Some may claim the recent brain dead works of Comedy, Inc. and Let Loose Live as worthy examples. These people are the reason labotomies exist and why geniuses such as Shaun Micallef are put aside for challenging minds too much.

Ethan Switch