Melbourne Reviews

The best blasphemous fun you’ll see in a while is offered up by The Wau Wau Sisters’ Last Supper. Performed by New Yorkers Adrienne Truscott and Tanya Gagne, this show will gladden the hearts of lapsed catholics everywhere with its naughty first act including uniformed school girls, glittering stigmata, a mock crucifixion and mass audience consumption of communion wafers (which may or may not turn out to be spiked). Adopting southern country diva personas they get audience members to dress up and do things they might not have imagined agreeing to at any other show. The Last Supper is very rude, daft and there should be much, much more of this sort of thing.

Fancy some acrobatic guitar playing? Hippy trippy cosmic consciousness, 70’s style? The Wau Wau Sister’s Last Supper never once takes itself seriously; these girls are having the best fun with innuendo and ridiculousness and they include everybody they can in their silliness and frivolities. If you love circus you will get a thrill out of the Icarian Games (body balancing acts) when this couple of strong women hoist dudes twice their size in the air. The (unharnessed) aerial work towards the end of the show is impressive and powerful.

The Wau Wau Sisters are the cabaret god-daughters of performers like 90’s trail blazer artist Penny Arcade; members of a strong line of very female-camp, sexually empowered showgirls and burlesque artists going any which way all over town. The Wau Wau’s act packs a punch because of its lustiness, girls-behaving-badly joyousness without ever once taking itself too seriously; the artistes' delight in what they’re doing is downright contagious plus they are circus performers par excellence. The show is unpretentious, nonsensical, light, bawdy and funny – you may come away changed but you will definitely come away smiling. Anything that can get us to lighten up, revmove our clothes and forget our worries for an hour or more has got to be a good thing. This isn’t the slickest show in the Fringe but it may be the most decadently delightful. If you think of the subversive doings of Chicks on Speed combined with elements of The Burlesque Hour you’ll get a sense of what this show is like.

If The Mayan calendar predictions are right and we've got less than a year left then I want to spend it like this!


2011 Melbourne Fringe Festival
The Wau Wau Sisters' Last Supper

Venue: GH Hotel | 1 Brighton Rd, St Kilda, Victoria
Dates: 28 Sept - 2 Oct and 4 - 9 Oct, 2011
Tickets: $30.00 – $25.00
Bookings: melbournefringe.com.au | (03) 9660 9666