COMEDY @ TRADES 2008
After thrilling over 30,000 people, the fastest growing venue at the 2007 Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Comedy @ Trades is back in 2008 packing more giggles, groans and guffaws than ever!
The Comedy @ Trades team is poised and ready to take over Trades Hall’s columns, halls, ballrooms, basements, bars and everything in between, and have them brimming with belly-laughs with over 40 brand spanking new shows with more than 135 performers.
Like a stately dame flashing some ankle, Trades Hall will reveal even more of its hidden spaces in 2008, when Comedy @ Trades unveils two new basement theatres, transforming Trades Hall into the magnificent multi-roomed, independently produced, creatively programmed venue we know and love. Comedy @ Trades will have audiences kicking up their heels every night of the festival.
Amidst the tumultuous array of twisted cabaret, whimsical storytelling, marvellous musical comedy, stand-out stand-up, indelicate improvisation, show-stopping sideshow, chuckles for kiddies, mystifying magic and tantalising theatre, Comedy @ Trades is proud to announce:
· Rod Quantock shows us a satirical future in 2050 AD The Musical
· The team behind the Golden Gibbo Award winning show The Glass Boat in 2007 are back and being Simply Fancy
· Deborah Frances White’s How To Get Almost Anyone To Sleep With You (UK) will show you how to get almost anyone to sleep with you (you can try it out in the bar afterwards!)
· And then there’s that potty-mouthed poetess of the stage, Yana Alana, who will be gushing forth with her Parahnas in the cabaret / sideshow mayhem of Feeding Frenzy
· Adding to the menagerie, the absurdist antics of Birdmann will take flight at Trades in Episodes of Significant Timing
· Melbourne premieres of two fresh New Zealand cabaret acts; The Boy with Tape on His Face and Penny Ashton’s Hot Pink Bits
· Leading Australian magician Cath Jamison returns with Dolls, Doves and a Diva
· Five shows emerging from 2007 Melbourne Fringe; Fear of A Brown Planet, Anna Joy, Every Film Ever Made, A Record or an OBE and House of Anomalous
· Wilfred is Off The Leash and coming out swinging with his first live show
· Triple R, James Pratt and a cast of many will serve up a plethora of talent for The Trades Radio Variety Hour performed live two nights a week and broadcast on Triple R every Thursday during the Festival
· For the more theatrically inclined there’s Greatness Thrust Upon Them written and directed by Lorin Clarke, Andrea Powell in Gobbeldygook, Celia Pacquola in Hating Alison Bice, with Alison Bice, performance poet Sebastian Flange in Super Flange and Simon Palomares in My Two Boys
· Tripod Idio Clips, Die Roten Punkte, Geraldine Quinn, Anyone for Tennis, Hooray for Everything and 78% Honesty will all be sharing their special musical take on the world
· Sunny Ray and the Magnificent Moon treat children to a magical kids cabaret
· Not to mention a dazzlingly selection of stand-ups; Nelly Thomas, Courteney Hocking, Andrew McClelland, Tommy Dassalo, Bec Hill, Adam Vincent and Fox Klein
Need more? How about these tasty morsels:
Trade Aid returns to put even more good feeling into feel-good with two new Saturday night benefit shows featuring a hand picked selection of Melbourne’s finest. Kate McLennan’s Variety show for the MS Society, and Scott Edgar and Casey Bennetto’s Princely Tribute “Twenty-Three-Positions-In-A-One-Night-Stand”, for the Asylum Seekers’ Resource Centre.
Free @ Trades offers new comical sideshows, films, forums and exhibitions that wont hurt your hip-pocket. Comic Book Funny will have you flat-out laughing at the funnies, Insert Name Here - Thrilogy Trilogy is short on film but not on laughs, plus the return of Triple R’s live broadcast from The Pinch will be taking the chortles to the airwaves. And then there’s 6 nights-a-week of Midnight Trade shenanigans where anything can and does happen, getting to audiences kick up their heels every night of the festival.
Comedy @ Trades – it’s your playground for the wacky, the weird and the wonderful!
“With its working-class feel and its ‘come one, come all’ spirit, Trades Hall embodies the feel of comedy festivals past.” - Shalini Akhil, The Age
“A well–stocked bar, along with sparkling comedy routines and toe-tapping, head bopping, hip shaking music means that if you aren’t having a good night, you simply aren’t trying hard enough” - Ewan Gordon, The Pun
