Geraldine Hickey has an infectious charm that was on full display at her latest festival show, 'Listen Out For The Castanets', on Friday night (20 March).
With a decade-plus stand-up career, including eight seasons at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Hickey displays the chops of a seasoned professional. Performing in the intimate atmosphere of the Graffiti Room at the Brisbane Powerhouse, although the crowd was small, the laughs were big.
Hickey comes out showing her sillier side, performing a less than graceful dance routine set to classical music (no mean feat on an incredibly hot and humid Brisbane night). After taking a few moments to catch her breath, she launches into her show.
Hickey is a natural and gifted story-teller. The show is essentially about a unique and somewhat terrifying experience she had at a bottle shop in Melbourne. The show is fleshed out with hilarious tangents about theme parks, her preferences for ice-cream effigies of faces (don't get her started on Gary Gumball) and her adventures as a seasoned traveller (but she doesn't want to go on about that, as she mentions no less than three times throughout the night).
It's obvious that Hickey has put a lot of thought and effort into the structuring of the show as she seamlessly weaves these jokes and stories into one, cohesive narrative. Undeterred by interruptions of audience members coming in late or chatty members of the crowd, Hickey can create humour at the spur of the moment with ease.
Although the expected protocol of hour-long festival shows is to end on a sombre note, imparting some clichéd wisdom to the audience, Hickey refrains from that tired, old trope. Instead, in dealing with what could be some incredibly heavy subject matter, she handles it with a precise and light-hearted touch that at no point borders on being frivolous.
Genuine, heart-warming, hilarious and brilliant, Geraldine Hickey is one of Australia's most criminally-underrated comedians and an absolute pleasure to see live.
