Review: DeAnne Smith
Enmore Theatre, Yalumba Wine Bar
Thu 17 April
By Andrew P Street
You know what I hate? That one stupid, inconsiderate jerk whose phone goes off in the middle of a comedy gig, thereby interrupting the flow of the performance and getting deservedly castigated by the performer. It’s rude, it’s thoughtless, and it’s downright inexcusable. I hate that guy.
Which makes it very hard to accept that last night that guy was me.
In my defence, it had been a stressful day: I was running late, I had family coming up from Adelaide and there had been a mix-up at the box office, so I wasn’t thinking as clearly as perhaps I’d have liked. Still, I’d like to take this opportunity to apologise to a) DeAnne Smith, who’d come all the way from North America to entertain a small but vocal crowd on the first proper night of Cracker, and b) my sister Sarah, who was ringing to let me know when she was getting in the following morning. I don’t, however, need to apologise to the crowd since they got a fine piece of comedy performance out of it: Montreal-resident Smith’s as deft on her feet as she is with her prepared material, whether it’s yelling at children, being mistaken for Harry Potter, trying to rock herself a bank loan or mocking some dickhead who can’t even remember to press a goddamned button to switch his phone to silent. The crowd was doubtless smaller than she’d have liked, and it’s fair to say that the proudly gay Smith’s audience skewed perhaps more toward the similarly proudly gay than to lovers of erudite comedy (a table at the back of the room occasionally seemed to have their own little show going), but her piece about her mime artist girlfriend (“I really love her – but sometimes I feel like there’s a wall between us…”) played perfectly to both demographics.
Oh, and DeAnne: the “disco” ringtone? It was Gary Numan’s ‘Cars’. Sorry again.