Trixie & Monkey – Flipping & Stripping at The Feast Festival in Adelaide

A Tuesday night at 10:30 isn’t the best time for an opening night (especially when there’s only going to be another 3 performances) and it showed last night in The Ballroom at the Feast Hub. The audience was smaller than it should have been but what they lacked in numbers they certainly made up for with enthusiasm. They had good reason too, well two good reasons – Keri Burneston and Adam Krandle as Trixie Little and The Evil Hate Monkey.

Burneston and Krandle are partners on stage and off. They’ve been performing and honing their burlesque show for the past 10 years.

The show is highly physical and the performers often intertwine into positions only a happy couple could possibly be comfortable with. They’re big on audience participation though and one highlight of the night is when an aud

ience member is brought up on stage to have his sexual future read by Trixie as, at one point, he looks into Monkey’s “crystal balls”.

Bananas also feature prominently, both as props – Monkey eats a few at various times during the show and in turn feeds some to the audience by various means; and as costumes – Monkey’s and most particularly Trixie’s clothes ingeniously metamorphose into banana peeling-strip tease outfits.

Sex and sexuality permeates the show and Trixie comments “I’m not presently gay but I was in college” going on to say she’s into bestiality now and loves it but isn’t quite clear whether she’s making a reference to Corey Bernardi or Monkey.

Monkey is frequently channelling Harpo Marx and aspects of their act certainly wouldn’t be out-of-place in any Marx Brothers movie. While red-haired Trixie’s facial expressions are reminiscent of Lucille Ball at her comic best.

Their trapeze routine is a remarkable exposition on how to make a difficult and demanding activity appear easy and entertaining.

That’s the crux – Burneston and Krandle are hard-working entertainers, sustaining a loud and fully engaged audience throughout the show. The only criticism could be that at 55 minutes it just didn’t go on for long enough.