One of the funniest films of the year, Hail, Caesar, has one of the funniest sequences, the coaching of a line by the director to an actor, “Would that it were so simple”Frank Woodley's show for the Sydney Comedy Festival is called Extra Ordinary. It's a funny play on words, as he plies and piles the extra onto ordinary, which in and of itself, the plying and the piling, makes it an extraordinarily hilarious show.
In a three sixty degree Frank Woodley mind weave, a play on the words of the Cohen Brothers could have given the show another title – Woodley That It Were So Simple.
Quite simply, the show is a scream.
It begins so simply, with Frank dispensing his nervousness by mispronouncing his sartorial splendour of showbiz suit and bowtie.
“Looking spiffy” becomes “licking spoofy”, a malapropism that invites inappropriatism to shut the door.
Malaprop comes from a Sheridan play, but it's not Sheridan that Woodley wants to honour in his show, it's Shakespeare! So fitting too, because it is the four hundredth anniversary of the Bard's shuffling off his mortal coil.
Some may nay say; a comedian trying to do Shakespeare is way to dusty death, but in the gifted, meandering, manic mechanics of this presentation, it moves like a maverick mystery tour, always surprising, never really knowing where it might snake to.
Constantly sidetracked into tributaries of absurdity that are luminously lucid in their lunacy, the branching off never appears to lose its flow and never ebbs.
Engineered from etymology, Woodley effortlessly segues into a riff on entomology triggered by an upstaging moth named Byron. The difference between moths and butterflies is examined together with the extraordinary naming of the earwig – a litany of alternatives an anatomical almanac of the ridiculous – as well as the extraordinary ocular propensity of the six legged. The eyes have it!
Woodley, the entity monologist and silly sololiquist waxes lyrical on wigs, toupees, and his love of dressing up.
Which brings the show back to Shakespeare. In a deliciously ludicrous show and tell, he shows and tells us the trials and tribulations endured to create the costume and look of the Bard, what extraordinary lengths he went to make the baldy front bit wig that would transform him into the mock Tudor.
Clever comic clowning, a hugely hilarious hour, Frank Woodley Extra Ordinary is, “as it twer so simple”, simply unmissable.
Sydney Comedy Festival
Extra Ordinary
Frank Woodley
Venue: Giant Dwarf Theatre, 199 Cleveland St, Redfern, Sydney
Dates: 22 – 24 April, 2016
Tickets: $32 – $37
Bookings: www.sydneycomedyfest.com.au
