Aunty Donna is Mark Samual Bonanno, Broden Kelly and Zachary Ruane on stage supported by sound guy Thomas Armstrong, co-writer and director Sam Lingham and film production guy Max Miller. They have been working together since they met at Ballarat Uni (now Federation Uni).
Their new show doesn’t have a title, which obviously doesn’t tell us anything on the surface. Beat asks Bonanno, one of the founders and performers, about what we might find. “It’s a lot of fun,” he answers. “It’s a brand new show, nothing that is up on YouTube – it’s 100% brand new. We performed in Edinburgh last year and did a ‘best of’ so some of those sketches were three or four years old; it’s exciting to be doing a completely new show.”
Aunty Donna’s reputation as high octane sketch comedy is ballooning fast. They’ve got a strong following on their YouTube channel and participate regularly in the ABC’s i-View Fresh Blood initiative. Performing live and performing for the camera are two different things – how does one affect the other? “You’ve got to approach them differently,” says Bonanno. “We’re trained actors, so we’re at home on stage. The difference is in who we collaborate with. The theatre stuff is a much more physical thing, we form our stage shows on our feet but with film we sit down to talk about it and think quite hard about how we’re going to do it, we start on stage and adapt it to film ; that seems to be the basic difference between them.” So does the material they perform on stage translate well to film? “For example, we did a montage on stage of time passing – a live montage is inherently funny because it’s usually filmic, you see them in film. When you do it on film, it’s just a montage. So we had to sit down and work out how to make it funnier. You think about sketch in different ways, you think about layers of jokes, ideas we didn’t have before.”
Bonanno describes the upcoming show as high-energy and crazy. “It’s a bit different, it’s sketch but with a difference. We want to challenge the form, bring another exciting layer to it,” he says. “Our style is to fit in the most amount of sketches as we can, make quick transitions, add a little looseness to the show. It’s not improv, it’s scripted; it’s a lot of fun. If you’ve only seen us on YouTube it will really surprise you. It’s really different. We’re engaged with the medium of theatre. It’s in your face, we like to grab people and shake them up a bit.” Not literally, we hope.
BY LIZA DEZFOULI
