Sydney Reviews

It’s The End of the Wharf As We Know It!!!, the last show ever, they're calling it. No longer on the harbour, true, but that was the case last year, for The Wharf Revue.

So The End of the Wharf As We Know It!!!, is the swan song, the final fling, but the show’s not over till the fat lady sings, and a calorie challenged female vocalist was nowhere in sight.

Jonathan Biggins, Phillip Scott, Drew Forsythe, Mandy Bishop and David Whitney are the current quintet and it is the brilliant Biggins who opens the show as Paul Keating, in an indelible impression that leaves an indelible impression. Bishop’s take on Jacqui Lambie and Drew Forsythe’s Pauline Hanson are certified highlights.

The team time travels back to 1984 where a young Julia, Anthony and Kevin wander into a nightclub and share their political aspirations and a prophetic meeting with Bob Hawke, while breaking into the famous refrain of Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face again by The Angels.

The hunger for British celebrities to front travel shows in Australia is examined when Miriam Margolyes meets King Charles, Joanna Lumley and Martin Clunes in the outback, to the accompaniment of Mad Dykes and Englishmen.

No sign of Trump, the clown of no laughing matter. Instead a haunting slide show illustrating the backslide of the United States backed by a version of Simon & Garfunkel's America. Poignant, pungent, powerful.

Opening night’s standing ovation was well deserved, not just for the hundred minutes of slick skit satire and cabaret, but for the quarter century of quality The Wharf Revue has delivered consistently with dash, splash and elan.

With the steely scalpel of satire, the witty Wharfies encircle the prickly pear of politics poking in the shadows formed between the idea, the ideal and the reality, between the motion and the act.

If this is indeed the end of the wharf as we know it, then The End of the Wharf As We Know It!!! has certainly gone out with a bang, not a whimper.