7:00 pm 28th March 2015 - Third Preview Show
Tommy Dassalo’s show “Cutie Pie” was in the Imperial Hotel, possibly my most disliked of all venues used for the comedy festival. I saw a few shows there last and previous years I think. I dislike it as it seems to be a venue of choice for sports fans.
It’s always busy to the point of almost chaos in there. I don’t know how any of the food manages to find its way to the patrons who’ve ordered it.
According to Parmadaze.com it has one of the better chicken parmas in Melbourne. I’ve been there on a day which wasn’t as busy as it usually is and tried it. It was large. But I found it somewhat lacking.
But this isn’t about the Imperial Hotel (aka “the Impy”) or its chicken parma.
Tommy Dassalo’s show is about mistakes, and who is to blame for them. Sort of. It’s about acceptance of mistakes, that they’re all your own fault.
That’s kinda what Dassalo says at the start of his show.
Dassalo admits his age at the start of the show and that somewhat sets the tone and informs some of the revelations and stories that are told throughout the hour of stand up he performs.
At the start he introduces himself and does the music, saying he’s still working it all out and didn’t want to pay for a tech. It doesn’t detract from his performance, if anything it makes his comedy seem more honest.
There is some degree of audience interaction in the show, so anyone who’d not into that probably best not to sit within the two rows of the show. Or you can sit there just don’t interact with Dassalo.
I usually sit in the front or second row because I don’t really mind about interacting with the person who’s on stage, also I can easily ignore any attempts to engage. Or lie.
Most of the questions Dassalo asks the audience are fairly tame.
Early on in his show Dassalo seems to advocate for a police surveillance state. I wasn’t really sure if he was jokingly making this statement or not. Simply because of the tone and how he phrased what he was talking about as in ‘security cameras have such shit quality but iPhones have such good quality’ and the mis-match between these two technologies we have in our lives.
Just the way in which he made this observation was somewhat at odds with what is conventionally made fun of regarding these sorts of things.
There were other tales of experiences and some sexual awakenings. Some of these stories were better placed in context because of his admittance of his age at the start of the show as he mentions places like ‘video shops’ and ‘Video Games Heaven’. A lot of these tales I recognised and somewhat identified with as I’m around the same age as Dassalo.
The final segment of his show was something I think would have worked well in a video or DVD or something. As this was the third preview show I think it’s something that will be ironed out through the performance of the show at the festival.
I just found it lasted a little too long, Dassalo has some text on the screen while he’s performing. Both he and the text are funny, but you can only really focus on one thing and the temptation is to read the text and just listen to him read the text at the same time. It all just felt a little too...scripted.