Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Brilliantly Bizarre

It was raining, so I popped open my social umbrella and attended the opening night of Sarah Harpur’s first solo act, “Life. Death. Pets.” at the Fringe Bar in Wellington.

If you live in Wellington, or are rich and within flying distance, I strongly encourage you to see the show as it only runs for a few days.

To be honest, I didn’t know much about Sarah beforehand. She has a popular blog, Harpur’s Bizarre, which Google thinks was ripped off, corrupted and used as the name of a magazine somewhere.

Sarah is quite amazing. Who else could simultaneously convey a sense of nervousness and confidence? All while delivering some fantastic material about her life, her insights into death and quite a lot about how, when growing up, she viewed her pets as her children. Her cute, delicious children. Who ate each other (extreme sibling rivalry) and taught her graphic lessons about procreation.

How many people could get the joint rocking to a song about her dad’s death? Yes, Sarah, I want to join the Dead Dad’s Club too. My own old man went in a way not totally dissimilar to yours. I really related.

To demonstrate her inherent weirdness Sarah interrupted the show with an audio-visual presentation from her youth, where she presented her own hilarious interpretation of the Bain Family slayings in Dunedin. Complete with action figures with Bain faces pasted on. See it here (but later because I haven't worked out how to do one of those "open in a new window" link thingies).

It was opening night, so most of the front row was Sarah's family and friends. Which, mixed with the cosy venue, meant it felt like we were all in Sarah’s living room, being treated to an hour of an intelligently unhinged person's brilliant stream-of-consciousness rant.

I sat at the back and recalled attending the Just for Laughs comedy festival in Montreal in 1996. And wished many of the acts there could have been half as good as Sarah.

6 comments:

  1. Sounds awesome, gotta love a good old comedy act that's actually funny. Speaking of comedy have you seen the blue collar comedy club? So funny...and crass.

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  2. going tomorrow night- I'm a big fan of Sarah and she's a GREAT writer. Someone should give her a regular column. Lindsay.

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  3. we're making an online comedy series together, does that count? ;)

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  4. Fifi, if I could give Sarah a regular column, I so would. Sadly, I'm too far down the food chain at the newspaper. Enjoy the show. :-)

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  5. Hi Amy, I hadn't heard of the blue collar comedy club. I quickly googled it and there's a blue collar comedy tour in the US, is that the one? Or is there an actual club?

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