frontrow@inpress.com.au
BY THE LEFT, QUICK MARCH
BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY CASSANDRA FUMI TALKS TO TOMMY BRADSON, WINNER OF THE BEST CABARET AWARD AT THE RECENT MELBOURNE FRINGE FESTIVAL.
CONSTANTLY MENTIONED IN THE SAME BREATH AS BILL HICKS AND GEORGE CARLIN, RANTY COMIC JAMIE KILSTEIN TALKS TO BAZ MCALISTER ABOUT BALANCING A BLOSSOMING COMEDY CAREER WITH POLITICAL ACTIVISM. When rising New York comedy star Jamie Kilstein hits Australia this month, it’s the definition of ‘whirlwind’. The whip-smart prince of the piss-funny polemic is here for just three shows in three days – Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane – then it’s back to NYC, the nerve centre of the universe. “I like packing all of the fans into the one show, blowing it out, then bailing,” Kilstein laughs, but then confesses the real reason he can’t afford to stay long is that he’s not keen to be apart from his wife too long. Not just for all the sappy reasons, though. The 29-year-old is married to journalist, blogger, and political commentator Allison Kilkenny, his cohost on their “little stupid podcast”, Citizen Radio. Kilstein can’t afford to be away too long because he’s afraid of missing a big story they could rip to shreds together on the political comedy show they call “like CNN, but with more swearing”. At the time of our chat, Kilstein is doing a couple of gigs in Toronto but even an hour’s flight away from NYC is too far when there’s shit going down. “My wife is down on occupied Wall Street right now,” he says, “doing a bunch of interviews and talking to all the kids who are camped out there protesting.” He’s champing at the bit to be at her side in the thick of the action – but the stage is calling, and since he smashed it on Conan O’Brien’s show earlier in the year, the phone’s not stopped ringing. He’s just put out a new album, Libel, Slander & Sedition, which he’s really proud of. “I’ve never said something good about what I do, except for Citizen Radio – in fact I would tell you not to buy my other CD, [2009’s] Zombie Jesus, for as much as I love the name I’m sick of the material and I was a different comic then,” he says honestly. “But I’m really fucking proud of the new one.” Not only that, but he’s still reeling from getting the nod to tape an hour-long TV special. “It’s nuts,” he says. “When I got that, I had a life-flashed-before-your-eyes moment of dropping out of high school to do comedy, living out of my car to do comedy, and I was like, ‘I’m not crazy!’” When Kilstein takes to the stage, it’s a 90-minute, all-out, high-energy assault, laying down the law to homophobes, bigots, warmongers and idiots. And
recently, as his profile has raised, he’s finally been able to abandon doing the American comedy club circuit and concentrating on theatre shows where a more discerning audience can really get behind his material. “Comedy clubs in the States are the worst, you literally have waitresses in the front row taking drink orders while you’re talking – I could be telling a story about finally reconciling with my father after 25 years and all you’ll hear is ‘Mozzarella sticks?’,” he says. “The most depressing shit ever. So I just stopped doing comedy clubs, I fired my old agent and manager.” His beef with comedy clubs is coincidentally much the same as his beef with news bulletins – they pander to the drunks and bigots in the audience, because god forbid one should complain. “People go on about ‘the extreme left and the extreme right’ – they’re not equal,” he says. What does ‘the extreme right’ stand for? These things got applause breaks at Republican debates: when [Texas governor] Rick Perry mentioned his more-than-200 executions in Texas, some of whom may have been innocent men; [Republican presidential candidate] Ron Paul saying if a 30-year-old man doesn’t have insurance and is going to die, we should let him die. Then a gay soldier who served in the war that these assholes started gets booed. What do the extreme Democrats stand for? Healthcare, a woman’s right to do whatever she wants with her body, education – that’s not ‘extreme’, it’s basic kindness. So when you have a comedy club owner saying, ‘Well I can’t book you because I don’t want to piss anybody off’ – what am I saying to piss people off? ‘You shouldn’t be mean to gay people?’ He’s saying he’d rather appease the bigots than have me alienate any of his audience.” Now, his favourite places to play include tiny little rooms in the back of hole-in-thewall New York bars, plying his material on 20 hipsters on the Lower East Side. His spiritual home, however, is NYC’s Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, a tumbledown 150-seat theatre underneath a grocery store. “It’s the one place that always let me do a full hour and that’s where most people discovered me,” he says. “They also let
us do Citizen Radio live from there once a month and we’d have really cool panels of guests – comedians, musicians, activists. One show was Ally and I, with Moby and Billy Connolly. Another one was Sarah Silverman, and [journalist] Matt Taibbi, who broke all the Goldman Sachs stories, and Regina Spektor sang. We’ve had Bad Religion, we’ve had Noam Chomsky, just these really fucking cool people.” Kilstein says improvising Citizen Radio has sharpened him up for the stage immeasurably, and he’s enjoying stand-up all the more because he’s “not doing it every day like a fucking robot”. When he talks about the show and the grassroots groundswell of support it’s garnered in its relatively short lifespan, he glows. “Citizen Radio never had any advertisements. Up until this year, Allison
and I were never on TV. We had no credentials. It spread through word of mouth. The whole show is geared towards young kids who don’t have a voice, who were apathetic but now want to get involved. Our guests get so excited to do it because they can speak freely. And our audience is so cool because Allison and I are so alienating! Anyone who sticks with us, we’re going to get along with. I feel like anyone who can sit through us quoting five minutes of The Simpsons, then calling [Israeli PM] Benjamin Netanyahu a war criminal, is going to be on our team, you know?” WHO: Jamie Kilstein WHAT: Libel, Slander & Sedition available on iTunes; Citizen Radio at wearecitizenradio.com WHEN & WHERE: Thursday, Trades Hall
GIVEAWAY WIN AN IPAD WITH X-MEN: FIRST CLASS Before they were superheroes, the fate of humanity depended on an extraordinary group of youngsters who went on to become X-Men: First Class. Based on the international bestselling Marvel Comics franchise, X-Men: First Class bursts onto Blu-ray and DVD on Wednesday 19 October. Before Charles Xavier (James McAvoy, Atonement) and Erik Lensherr (Michael Fassbender, Inglourious Basterds) took the names Professor X and Magneto, they were two young men discovering their powers for the first time, working together to stop the greatest threat the world has ever known. The film features a star-studded supporting cast, including Academy Awardnominee Jennifer Lawrence (Winter’s Bone), January Jones (Mad Men), Rose
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Byrne (28 Weeks Later), Zoë Kravitz (Californication), Nicholas Hoult (A Single Man), Lucas Till (Walk The Line), and Emmy Award-nominee Oliver Platt (The West Wing). The X-Men: First Class Blu-ray is pretty much the ultimate experience
for X-Men fans and is one of the most compelling Blu-rays Fox has ever released, packed with more than two hours of exclusive content including eight behind-the-scenes features, extended and deleted scenes and picture-inpicture interactivity.
Thanks to the crew at Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, we’ve a particularly epic prize to giveaway. Just in time for the release of iOS 5 we’ve an iPad 2 – a device we’d imagine being pretty popular in the X-Mansion (and a great way to read your X-Men comics) – along with X-Men: The Ultimate Collection Blu-ray box set, which includes the complete saga thus far (X-Men, X-Men 2, X-Men: The Last Stand, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and X-Men: First Class), and X-Men: First Class Collector’s Book, a behind-thescenes book made exclusively for its DVD release and not available to purchase. We’ve also got 20 runners-up prizes of a copy of X-Men: First Class on Blu-ray. For your chance to win this prize pack, head to facebook.com/inpressmag to enter.
The luscious world of cabaret is grander than our own, and despite ourselves, we crave it. It allows audiences to witness a spectacle of amplified emotion and perhaps that’s why Melbourne’s cabaret scene has exploded in the last few years. This world was realised for Fringe-goers in Tommy Bradson’s Pirate Rhapsody, Mermaid Requiem, which won best Cabaret at the 2011 Melbourne Fringe Festival. Bradson is an eccentric who seems to live his life like an oh-so-seductive cabaret, celebrating the win with “a couple of mates from Sydney and of course Thorny, at Melbourne’s Gin Palace, with toasted sandwiches and vodka martinis”. “Thorny” is Bradson’s co-conspirator and accompanist, John Thorn. They met only two years ago and Bradson was charmed: “We hit it off straight away like, old mates.” Together, they wrote Pirate Rhapsody, Mermaid Requiem in a house “over Boxing Day and New Year’s, writing the show together, drinking whisky, and having a great time.” Since then Bradson has been “festivalling around” with this compelling show – a show that leaves you heartbroken, yet wanting to kiss his foul mouth for its boldness and honesty. Pirate Rhapsody, Mermaid Requiem was inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, which Bradson’s nanna read to him. “She used to read a lot to me, in particular the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen – all cautionary stuff,” he says. Bradson rediscovered this literary classic at university describing it as “an incredible love story about someone who gives their whole self to somebody else and gets nothing in return. “She is still so believing in this love that she will die for it and I think that is just really wonderful.” Whether the little mermaid is Ariel or
not, this story is one that still resonates with audiences. However, it’s not just the story that made this show an award winner, it is the delivery. The audiences who were transported to a grimy, seaside tavern where dirty talk and slurring your Rs was not only accepted but encouraged, and the raw truth of these “poor, unfortunate souls”; a drunken pirate and a washed-up mermaid were exposed in this cabaret. Bradson’s banter in performance was slick, unpredictable and dirtier than I am sure many anticipated. “I am told there is a lot of filth in the work, but it’s just how I see the world,” he says. “Maybe I do have a warped perception compared to the norm.” The show will appear at the Perth Fringe, completing an entire Australian festival circuit – “Then it’s time for something new,” says Bradson, who is in the process of creating a new cabaret that will be premiering at Adelaide Fringe 2012, titled, The Birthday Party Massacre. “It’s an old school rock’n’roll show about a sweet 16th. [It’s] a cover show; I will sing tunes [from groups] such as The Coasters.” Melbourne Fringe traditionally honours the most outstanding work for the year with an array of awards that are presented at the closing night party at the North Melbourne Town Hall fringe hub. Pirate Rhapsody, Mermaid Requiem won the award for Best Cabaret, in the esteemed categorysector of the awards, which includes categories such as Best Circus, Best Comedy and Best Performance. “[It] meant a great deal,” says Bradson, “as to go to a new city and have people really come to you and enjoy themselves, I mean, that’s why I am here.” WHO: Tommy Bradson WHERE: tommybradson.com