Review: This must be...Frisky and Mannish
Tuesday, March 2, 2010 at 4:31AM
Frisky and Mannish: School of Pop
The Studio, Sydney Opera House, until the 7th of March.
This must be….Frisky and Mannish
Laura Corcoran and Matthew Jones, aka Frisky and Mannish, are a couple of Oxford graduates who perform with perfect Received Pronunciation - but neither needs to prove to you just how much they know.
School of Pop announces its agenda with the opening number, the guiltiest of guilty pleasures: N*Sync’s Pop. As imperious dominatrix and acerbic twink, Frisky and Mannish alternately compete and collaborate in the ‘lessons’ which follow. ’We’re not parodying songs, we’re re-arranging them.’ says Corcoran. In one such re-arrangement, we find that TLC’s No Scrubs started out as a diss to the tune of Greensleeves in the Court of Queen Elizabeth I.
Their brand of musical comedy is, of course, nothing new. Bill Bailey plays the Hokey Pokey by way of Kraftwerk to packed houses most nights in the week. That’s not cabaret, though, and I’ve never seen cabaret so unashamedly accessible as this; School of Pop owes as much to tradition as it does to the mash-ups of Girl Talk - and even more to the enormous talents of its performers.
‘Things can get tied up in being too clever, pushing intellectual buttons and making people feel out of the club’, says Corcoran/Frisky. ‘We always wanted to be inclusive. We need people to have danced to these songs at every wedding they’ve ever been to so they have that emotional investment in them.’
Make no mistake, they’re clever - brilliant, in fact. But the magic of Frisky and Mannish is this refusal to get tied up in it. In choosing to subvert those wedding hits we simultaneously love and loathe, these two plug into the closest thing we have to a cultural memory or collective unconscious (just the kind of pretentious reference they’re not likely to make). These consummate performers - who can dance, play, act and crack jokes better than most - might just yank cabaret from the intimacy of its natural habitat into the light and larger audiences of the mainstream theatre stage.
By Alayna Walsh
Until 7th March.
7.00pm
Venue: The Studio, Sydney Opera House
Book at the Sydey Opera House on 02 9250 7777 or click here.
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Reader Comments (2)
Thanks for the great review, Alayna! Certainly sounds like cabaret for Gen Y, although to be perfectly suited for that crowd, the show couldn't be longer than 26 minutes or they'd lose the audience's attention. Do you know anything about the pair's background. Have they been collaborating since they met at Oxford. I'm interested to know where else they would play this sort of show. What was the audience like in terms of numbers and demographic at The Studio?
Look forward to hearing more from you!
Hi Matt,
It really is - but even so, most of the audience was middle-aged. Although I think they have that potential (to take cabaret, paradoxically, into a big venue, like the State Theatre) I guess they haven't found that audience yet (at least in Sydney). I could really see them performing at the Melbourne Comedy Festival Gala, something big and televised.
As for their background: as far as I could find they met at Oxford, but didn't discover their schtick until a friend asked them to perform a couple of songs at a party back in 2008. The friend expected neat covers but they decided to mess with them instead (an operatic Papa Don't Preach and a blugrass Eye of the Tiger). Immediately they were offered a bar gig and it developed from there.
I'm sure you'll hear from me soon :)
Alayna