Shane Adamczak is searching for The One in a show that is funny, a little bitter, a little sad and a little wise.
Reviews/Cabaret/Fringe World Festival
Music to find girls by
20 January 2020
- Reading time • 4 minutesCabaret
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Review: Weeping Spoon Productions, Zack Adams: Love Songs for Future Girl ·
The Briefing Room at Girls’ School, 19 January 2020 ·
Review by David Zampatti ·
I’m an unabashed fan of Shane Adamczak, the actor/comedian/puppeteer/you name it who’s enjoyed success here and in Canada. Back in 2014, Adamczak seemed to be everywhere with brilliant show after brilliant show, and he hasn’t missed a beat since.
If Zack Adams: Love Songs for Future Girl doesn’t seem quite up there with his best, that’s probably only because it’s a bit less ambitious than some of his other work, like the dreamy romcom, Trampoline, or his incendiary performance as Johnny Rotten in Vicious Circles, the sad story of Sid and Nancy’s last days.
It also didn’t help that I was one of only six in the Girls’ School Briefing Room for the show (a shout out to another audience member, Rajan Sharma, who’d just arrived from the UK to perform his The Mariner’s Song at Paper Mountain next week – sounds worth checking out).
Love Songs for Future Girl is something of an audition tape addressed to “The One”, the perfect girl Zack has unsuccessfully searched for since boyhood. The closest he got was a girl to whom he was preparing to deliver the Four Big Words: Will. You. Marry. Me – only for her to reply with four of her own: We. Need. To. Talk.
His stories about each of the girls who weren’t the one (all called Lara to protect the innocent) are garnished with songs. Some, like Achy Breaky Heart by Miley Cyrus’s dad, Third Eye Blind’s hideous Semi-Charmed Life and Fleetwood Mac’s I Wanna Be With You Everywhere are stock FM radio jingles. But the best are Adamczak’s own: Young, Dumb and Greasy, How to Fuck Good, I Hate Your Stupid Boyfriend (and I Hate His Face) and No Refund, which sounds so like Flight of the Conchords I had to check that my ears weren’t deceiving me.
There’s a point to all this. Adamczak is talking about growing up, becoming mature and learning from your mistakes, and it’s funny, a little bitter, a little sad and a little wise.
It’s also squarely in the territory famously occupied by Bret and Jemaine, and by Adamczak’s fellow WA ginger, Tim Minchin, and maybe that’s what bugged me about it.
It’s not that Love Songs for Future Girl isn’t clever or funny, or original, or wise. It is. It’s just somehow not entirely his own.
Zack Adams: Love Songs for Future Girl runs until 31 January 2020 at Girls’ School.
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