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.
Table of Contents
Tattoo Show: 4 stars
The latest Rawcus production, featuring a tattoo inked live on stage on the flesh of a randomly selected audience member, grapples with the ephemeral nature of memory versus the permanence of physicality. It’s a show about choice which acknowledges how hard it can be to say “no”, especially when a room full of people is willing you to say “yes”; it’s an attempt to make a moment in time endure, a communal act of remembrance, of striving to hold on to significant but all too often sadly transient memories.
Performed by a cast of four Rawcus company members with and without disability (Clem Baade, Nilgun Guven, Mike McEvoy and Louise Riisik), in collaboration with tattoo artist Xani Kennedy, Tattoo Show is a creative dance between past and future; a gentle reminder that transformation doesn’t mean forgetting past experiences – it just means learning to live with them.
Just as art makes the unknown known, this production enables the sharing of memories through the sharing of stories, and does so in part by ensuring the artists’ and audiences’ access needs are built into the show’s very foundations. Such access responses include live captioning of lines both rehearsed and unrehearsed; the slippage between what is said live in the moment on stage, or from the audience, and what is then written or summarised onscreen, deftly illustrates one of the production’s core thematic concerns – the difference between living an event and remembering or reflecting upon it afterwards.
There’s a raw beauty to Tattoo Show, a sense of it being simultaneously polished and unpolished – another example of creative slippage being embraced and embodied. That beauty encapsulates the essence of live performance: every show will be different every night of its strictly limited season due to the vagaries of intonation, emotional delivery, fresh or unexpected responses from the audience (for like numerous productions in this year’s Melbourne Fringe, Tattoo Show emphasises the liveness of performance and directly involves the audience through non-threatening audience participation), and especially through the new, original tattoo created every night on stage.
Like Tattoo Show itself, that tattoo is created collaboratively, woven before our eyes out of memory, reflection, response and live performance and then inked live in an aspect of the performance that is playfully half-concealed from the audience by a scrim which becomes a screen – a creative reminder that we are witnessing something unfold that we cannot fully see and so won’t be able to completely and fully remember… but can we ever?
Fringe Hub: Trades Hall – Solidarity Hall until 19 October
Fiasco: A Burke & Wills Musical: 3 ½ stars
From its opening song through to the numerous reprises featured in its final number, comedian and former ABC radio presenter Sammy J’s compact musical comedy about ill-fated Victorian explorers Burke and Wills is a mordant excoriation of white male exceptionalism and hubris.
The concept is a simple one: Burke, Wills and their two surviving companions have misread the carving on the ‘Dig’ tree as ‘Gig’; consequently they believe that by forming a band – The Starving Whitefellas – their music will attract their departed companions back to the campsite and save them from starving to death. Spoiler: it doesn’t.
With lyrics like “Victorian men in a Victorian age – we’re basically gods”; another song extolling the virtues of taking only what one needs on an overland expedition (which in the case of Burke and Wills included a 400lbs (181kg) cast iron bath and a full-sized hardwood writing desk); and another about going “Up the guts!” of the country, the tongue-in-cheek tone of Fiasco certainly generates some solid laughs, aided by strong performances, especially that of James Pender as the arrogant Irish-born Robert O’Hara Burke. Similarly, the inclusion of an Indigenous perspective – embodied by Ngiyampaa singer-songwriter Pirritu (Brett Lee) as local man Jack (as a result of consultation with traditional owners, references to mob involved in the story of Burke and Wills have deliberately been generalised) – gives the story a fresh contemporary perspective.
The production overall is both entertaining and funny, though less successful when considered as a musical theatre production – songs sometimes fail to significantly advance the plot or shed light on characters’ interior lives in ways mere words cannot. A case in point: a song about Burke’s lust for a 16-year-old opera singer (making him a creep by modern standards, though such sentiments would not have been inappropriate in his time), feels narratively awkward in both context and its place in the production, especially when another significant event – Burke’s decision to beat an already starving expedition member half to death for stealing rations late in the piece – is mentioned, but not sung about; a song about the latter event could have simultaneously advanced the plot while also shedding light on Burke’s abrasive personality. Too, Fiasco lacks the sort of song one is still humming hours after the metaphorical curtain has fallen, or a proper heartstring tugger.
The book also feels truncated or restricted (perhaps the result of having to create a one-hour production to fit the standard timeslots at the Fringe’s Trades Hall Hub). Consequently, further development will be necessary if Fiasco is to have a life beyond this lean but engaging Melbourne Fringe production.
Fringe Hub: Trades Hall – ETU Ballroom until 19 October.
Sincere Apologies: 4 stars
The concept and presentation of Alternative Facts’ Sincere Apologies is deceptively simple: the audience, seated in two concentric circles of chairs, share out and then read in numerical order a series of 50 short personal or public apologies – for transgressions ranging from minor to grievous. A judiciously engineered soundtrack keeps pace with and helps sets the tone for successive apologies as they move from past to present and into an imagined – and increasingly grim – future. The genius of Sincere Apologies is hidden beneath this simple description of the production. Like an iceberg, its emotive and intellectual mass floats unseen but not unfelt beneath the surface. Through a communal act of collective theatre-making – as in Subject Object’s WORK.TXT, the audience are the experience – our participation makes the magic happen. Sincere Apologies is playfully philosophical and subtly sincere; a compelling reflection on why the simple word ‘sorry’ is so easy yet so hard to say – especially when you really mean it.
Fringe Hub: Trades Hall – The Square until 19 October
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
This article was originally published on Friday 3 October. It has been updated after publication, most recently on 17 October at 12:59pm, to include additional reviews. Additionally, Watts’ review of Fiasco: A Burke & Wills Musical was reedited on Friday 17 October to better articulate a perceived weakness in the production’s songs; its star rating remains unchanged.
