The 2025 Melbourne Fringe Festival features some 500 performances, exhibitions and shows by artists from near and far. Covering them all is impossible. Here then, is a personal dérive through the Fringe program by ArtsHub’s Performing Arts Editor Richard Watts; a series of rapid responses, ponderings and sometimes micro-reviews exploring some aspects of this year’s festival.
Melbourne Fringe 2025: quick links
Melbourne Fringe 2025: George Glass’ Scientology the Musical: 3 stars
This gleefully gory, chaotic and shambolic production from South Australian collective George Glass gets away with a lot – including calling itself a musical. Really, it’s a loose, extended sketch constructed around the Australian High Court’s 1983 ruling that the Church of Scientology is indeed a bona fide religion, and thus deserving of pay-roll tax exemption. Yes, there a couple of roughly executed, poorly-mic’ed songs punctuating proceedings (of which ‘It’s So Hard Being Right All the Time’ is arguably the catchiest, as well as being executed with the most gusto), but a musical – in any traditional sense of the word – it’s most definitely not.
What George Glass’ Scientology the Musical is, however, is good dumb fun. Three men dressed in naval uniforms (a reference to Scientology’s highest status members) are our main characters; a fourth plays the ill-fated government lawyer challenging their case in court; said characters are two dimensional but energetically performed.
An entertaining prologue features a dramatic exorcism and the memorable line, ‘The power of celebrity compels you!’; there’s a series of faux advertisements for the nightclub Gavels, Gavels & Gavels which the High Court apparently morphs into after hours; and the films of one of Scientology’s highest-profile adherents are referenced throughout – and marked with the ringing of a counter bell on each and every occasion – though the actor in question is not named: one of several steps apparently taken by George Glass’s members in order to avoid legal threats by the litigation-loving Church in question.
George Glass’ Scientology the Musical is a mess, dramaturgically, musically and comedically, but is delivered with such passion and good will that it’s hard to be curmudgeonly about it. Come for the promise of the production’s name; stay for the blood and the screaming.
Fringe Hub: Trades Hall – Music Room until 5 October
Read: Melburnians urged to become action heroes at the 2025 Melbourne Fringe
Melbourne Fringe 2025: A Beginner’s Guide to Gay Cruising: 3 stars
Sydney comedian AJ Lamarque’s uneven hour of stand-up details his experiences aboard an ocean-going liner populated by 5000 same-sex attracted men and cruising around the Caribbean. Structure is key to great stand-up shows, and while Lamarque is personable, confident and assured, he hasn’t yet learned how to successfully balance his wry, sometimes deliciously rude witticisms with the more poignant parts of this show.
Laughs become less frequent in the final quarter of A Beginners Guide to Gay Cruising, as Lamarque leans into imparting a psychologically deeper meaning than he is perhaps equipped for at this stage of his career; the intention and ambition is laudable, but the routine ultimately fails to land. Conversely, the joke-packed first half of the show feels more like an assemblance of five-minute spots rather than a cohesive festival show. That said, a compact history lesson about lesbian versus bisexual identity is cleverly and concisely done, and a high point of the show.
Lamarque also needs to learn when to kill his darlings – if a punchline has to be explained afterwards, the joke’s not working, clever as it maybe, and should be jettisoned. He also needs to recognise that punching down – specifically, in a routine about encountering homophobia in a largely working class Tasmanian town – can’t be justified by adroitly referencing his own working class origins earlier in the show. That said, a short, sharp quip after his origin story is deftly delivered and very funny indeed.
You certainly won’t begrudge spending an hour in AJ Lamarque’s company, but he’s not delivering award-winning comedy – yet.
At Grouse Melbourne, Fitzroy until 5 October
Read: work.txt and Instructions review: fourth wall building and breaking at Melbourne Fringe
