A Trashy Evening With the Retrofuturists

Three trashy little glam-spunks from a distant and glitzy future, gate-crashed the Wonderland Festival at the Powerhouse this month and they came to us with a warning about Tony Abbott and man-eating penguins and it’s not the delightful image that is currently bringing a grin to your face.

There was however plenty to smile about as Regan Lynch, Xanthe Jones and James Halloran took to the stage of the Visy Theatre, clad in debris from (possibly their grandparent’s) clubbing closest to give us a healthy dose of delicious glam-rock chaos and A Trashy Evening with the Retrofuturists or, as they like to put it, to:

“give 2015 the pleasure-pumped tongue-lashing it desperately wants, and very much deserves.”

Our queery travellers are refugees from a disparate future, ‘part of the hive of 2035’ they share in the propaganda-style march of social realism and have landed here in 2015 on somewhat of a mix-tape mission that sits somewhere between Ziggy Startdust and the Rocky Horror Picture Show with a dash of interpretive dance thrown in (the dance in question was a definite high-light of the show).

Regan Lynch (recently seen in Sven Svenson’s outstanding Heavenly Bodies and Beautiful Souls) is easily singled out as the instigator of this trip; larger-than-life, high-camp, high fidelity and even higher energy. Primarily a show of live and original music (the tongue lashing was a little light-on but the pleasure was plenty) the wonderful vocals of James Halloran were only out-done by his masterful-manipulation (or titillation as it may have been) of the Theremin (their God), that wonderful sci-fi spook tool that was itself an escapee from a soviet hive. And Xanthe Jones, nicely and literally balanced between the two with her brash vocals and bawdy flair.