Last Wednesday, about 17 people crammed into a small den to watch a masterly pianist riff ragtime ditties about the loneliness of foreign politicians and give thanks to deities with dairy products.
It was awesome.
There’s no way to properly describe Hue Blanes and the Moon. It’s a different experience, and you must be receptive to it. If you’re after a light romp through the standard stand-up format, you simply won’t get it. It doesn’t offer deep belly-laughs – indeed, the description for the show itself aptly states that it “isn’t funny, because it is serious”. Hue Blanes and the Moon isn’t so much musical comedy as it is a musical that derails into comedy, where the tunes themselves deliver as many jolts of humour as the lyrics do.
Blanes himself appears as a human-Rube-Goldberg-machine, surrounded by trinkets and religious artifacts that aid him in his streams of consiousness. He fiddles and fusses with his possessions while answering machine messages and internal monologues play between his songs to fill in just enough of whatever it is he’s about. He likes to leave everything a little vague and mysterious, but completely free of pretentiousness. He’s just honest, and you feel safe as he guides you about his world. Above all, Blanes is an indisputably talented musician. You feel each flick and pound of a piano key. His work emits a uniquely gentle kind of darkness, compiled from the thoughts that patter through your mind at 3am on a rainy night while watching the TV on mute. There’s an aura of melancholic whimsy to it; a comforting chuckle you would have to yourself in the face of overwhelming odds
The location is Batty Patty, a cramped little pop-up off Bennetts Lane in the CBD. It’s an odd venue – a dilapidated Lego-esque sculpture of cement, cloth and milk crates – but in a weird way, it’s integral to the experience. When you’re all huddled together in this tiny shed, you feel the connection with Blanes so much more. You’re not an anonymous figure in a faceless crowd; the performance becomes communal, like a talented mate has just jumped on the piano after a big party in your garage. You not only become conscious of your emotional output, but responsible for it too, and you actively focus on the artistic merit of each song in order to decipher Blanes’ mind. He wants your mental involvement. He can afford to concentrate his energy on every person there, and it all feels that little bit more special for it.
For this show, atmosphere is everything. It drenches you. The sum of its parts – the intimacy of the venue, the stoicism of Blanes, the hyper-reality that he staples together to parody our society – all come together into this surreal storm of ideas that draws you in and leaves you questioning what you’ve seen long after you’ve left. Not every risk works entirely the way he may hope it does, and there are no real “jokes” to speak of, but it’s amusing in a grander sense. The performance is human, and earnest. Above all, it’s the effort involved to demonstrate the subjectivity of “comedy” that’s to be applauded. Blanes succeeds in disorienting you, and I think that’s the point. Hue Blanes and the Moon is a cheeky challenge. It’s going to be remembered as a polariser; you will get very different reactions from person to person, but I’m personally very glad that it exists.
BY JACOB COLLIVER
