Take a walk on the wild side with Bunny Hutch

Take a walk on the wild side with Bunny Hutch

BUNNY Hutch is already up on stage as the audience walks in to the dimly lit upstairs room of The Tuxedo Cat. He’s sitting cross-legged and wearing a leopard-print fur coat, fishnet stockings, and platform wedges. His face is painted white, lipstick hastily and haphazardly applied with red smears on his teeth, blue eye shadow almost reaches the hairline, and eyeliner drips down his cheeks to him a maniacal clown-like appearance.

This is Shoot To Kill at the Melbourne Fringe Festival, a “one-man cabaret manifesto” created and performed by Melbourne-based actor Jack Beeby, who breathes life into his slightly unhinged creation.

Bunny kicks off this cabaret-drag fusion with an avalanche of swearwords and glitter before diving headfirst into a tale of broken hearts, drunken hook ups, and a drug-fuelled spiral of self-destruction. The emotions are raw, the language is vulgar, and it’s clear that Beeby has incorporated his own experience of a love that once blossomed and then wilted into the show’s DNA.

Accompanied by his ukulele, Patrice, and a pocket full of glitter that’s dispersed sporadically, Bunny’s energetic performance immediately draws the audience in and makes them experience the euphoria that accompanies deep love, to the grief that squeezes your heart with its cold cruel hands, and everything in between.

The show is neatly divided into acts that help to provide a narrative structure, and they are characterised by renditions of popular songs like Lana Del Rey’s Born To Die and Lou Reed’s Walk on the Wild Side, as well as a cheeky and confronting number called The Grin Doctor written by Beeby himself.

Shoot To Kill also challenges the audience to rethink their ideas on gender and sexuality, with Bunny’s androgynous appearance and flip-flopping between masculine and feminine mannerisms blurring the lines between male and female genders.

This intimate and, at times, cringe-worthy performance will make you laugh, cry and throw your hands up in the air (literally, at one stage Bunny hurls a barrage of curse words and threats for us to put our hands up in the air while he sings). It’s experimental and unorthodox, but that’s what the Fringe Festival is all about: experiencing something different. And, rest assured, you will walk out of this particular one hungry for more.

SHOOT TO KILL

Where: The Puffer Fish – The Tuxedo Cat

When: Now until Tuesday, November 30 at 9.45pm

INFO + TICKETS: melbournefringe.com.au/fringe-festival/show/shoot-to-kill

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