Matt Storer A Cult For You @ The Laugh Resort
Sunday, February 2, 2020
Up-and-coming comedian Matt Storer has delivered his seventh FRINGE WORLD show in Perth after many of his previous ones earned him award nominations.
The Laugh Resort at The Shoe Bar & Cafe is perhaps one of the best hidden gems venue-wise of the season. The bar is gorgeous, and the comedy room upstairs mimics that of a New York comedy club, with a small corner of a stage and a stool sitting in the middle. The front row was basically on stage, which worked well for the content of this show.
A Cult For You centres around Father Hooroo, who is “Just a man” but a man with an agenda. He claims he has been given the gift of life’s secrets by a magpie overlord who tried to steal his fish fillet. Storer uses various props to assist his performance, including the God Phone, which is definitely not just the outer shell of a rockmelon.
A portrait of Channel Seven news reader Rick Ardon sits on the stage, as he is revealed to be Father Hooroo’s boss, the one under God of course, with Storer cleverly intertwining clips of Ardon talking on the news as part of the act like they’re conversing.
There is a large amount of audience participation in the show, which opens up a lot of room for improv, keeping Storer on his toes, which he handles like a true professional. The entire audience works together to come up with a list of ‘cult rules’, one of the night being ‘have beer for breakfast’, which garnered a lot of audience support.
It’s alarming how a young man dressed as a long-bearded, bedraggled figure can be so convincing, with an audience member joking, “Yeah I’d probably join this cult, to be fair.”
There were a lot of belly-laughs as well as a lot of jaws hitting the floor throughout the performance, a borderline reference to Jonestown received a mixed response as Father Hooroo handed out shot glasses full of purple liquid that were “Definitely not poison.” Being a comedy show, pushing the limits is to be expected, and for every gasp there was a number of laughs.
Storer was not afraid of a challenge, fearlessly encouraging and taking on hecklers as Father Hooroo. There is a good, satisfying full-circle ending to the show which you’ll have to get along to find out about. A Cult For You is a fun night out and would be best enjoyed with a G & T and a group of friends or conservative coworkers that you wanna see squirm for 55 minutes.
SAMANTHA FERGUSON
