What a hoot!

Razzle Dazzle Riot is a feast of sequins and songs, fun and frivolity from start to finish.

Led by the soul-lifting voice of Franky Smart (aka Claire Walters) and her jazz band, their first show for Brisbane Festival 2021 had us clapping, laughing, whooping and singing along.

Audience participation also provided an unexpected highlight and left the crowd in stitches.

It took a little while for the jokes to warm up initially but that could have been due to the lengthy delay in the show’s start time.

In any case, it was worth the wait.

A poor start to the evening with an unfortunate half-an-hour delay to doors and maybe almost an hour for the start of the show making a start time past 10pm which is very late. I am sure this was much tougher on the performers than it was on the audience and certainly gave them a hill to climb.

The show started strong with probably the best Welcome to Country of this type that I have ever seen and immediately continued well with a high energy opening number which definitely set the tone for the evening. Great vocals throughout the night backed by even better musicians were marred only by less than perfect audio production with the levels of the vocals being a little all over the place.  The night was a mix of song, dance, comedy and circus, the latter of which could potentially have been more polished.

The highlight for me was the roller skating section that occurred within the audience, talented, sexy and unusual. This is sure to keep people coming back for more. On the flipside the ‘game’ seemed clunky and even unnecessary but this could just have proved the rule that you shouldn’t work with children, animals or in this case, audience volunteers.

The biggest disappointment for me from the very start to the very end was poor lighting design, at best it added nothing to the show and at worst it was confusing and distracting. There was no intermission in the one-hour long performance but when the house lights seemed to come up for the aforementioned roller skating it certainly felt like there was going to be. Surely a track spot would have been a simple solution to fix this.

In general, the performers were strong, funny, talented and full of entertaining energy and I certainly enjoyed my 60 minutes with them. What let them down was lighting, sound and the late start.