A Review of a Review of Parisian Frank's Plastic Rose Cabaret
This review runs for three lines and awards the performer one star. It claims the performer is not part of the extraordinary talent pool of the festival and suggests that readers of the widely circulated newspaper The Herald Sun “don’t bother with this one”. By way of analysis of the performer’s work, the reviewer imitates the performer (“Parweeee-sian Fwank”) and jokes about the unlikely possibility that “wedging Ws into as many words as possible is the new funny”.
And that’s the end of the review. We don’t know what the show aimed to do. We don’t know what it was supposed to be about. We know the reviewer didn’t like it and we know it annoyed her sufficiently to elicit schoolyard sarcasm and mimicry and to tell people not to bother turning up on the basis of these remarks alone. This demonstrates a great deal of disrespect for the performer and to comedy performance generally – imagine if a Melbourne International Arts Festival show was mocked and dismissed out of hand in three lines without analysis – but the greatest disservice here is perhaps to the reader. We read reviews in order to get a sense of a show, whether we would enjoy it, and whether it was successful in what it was attempting to do. This review gives another sense entirely: that lazy reviews written on the back of napkins are the new clever. No stars.
