Busting Out! June 11, 2009 ***1/2

 Busting Out! 

Written by Emma Powell, AG Productions

Athenaeum Theatre, June 11 to July 4, 2009

Reviewer: Kate Herbert

Stars: ***1/2

Boobs are bustin’ out all over in Busting Out! This is the new, improved, lifted and separated show about bazookas, norks, jugs and fun bags. D-Cuppetry, the first incarnation in 2006, was women’s answer to Puppetry of the Penis.

Writer-performer, Emma Powell, with her bosom buddy (sorry), Bev Killick, revamped the show. It now has a glossy design, a bigger sound and a huge video screen to enlarges a double-D cup to something inexplicable. Many original visual gags are still present but seen through the lens of a camera in technicolour and 3D – or 36D (sorry).

The 2006 show was cute, a bit naughty and very daggy and the women have maintained its simple charm for the second half of this show. The start of the evening almost steers it up a very wrong path. It opens with no boobs at all, but with Killick’s bold and crass stand-up routine that would sit better in a late-night, boozy, comedy bar. Her fast patter dragged shrieks from the audience and was peppered with colourful language and more references to genitalia and bodily fluids than a rugby locker room.

After a rather premature interval, the charming, goofy bosom gags come thick and fast. The girls get their girls out and manipulate them like putty into hamburgers, doughnuts, stubby holders, crying babies and even a wide mouth frog. Ah, the versatile mammary. They even have names for each breast.

The singing gives this show pizzazz. Powell has a rich, powerful voice while Killick does a mean Tina Turner.  The show is filled with music featuring various female singers fashioned out of bosoms and blown up on screen.

Powell’s breast appears as Roberta Rack singing Say A Little Prayer For You. Killick’s does afunny rap about mammograms. Two boobs do a parody of Anni-Frid and Agnetha from ABBA singing Mamma Mia –ironic because Powell toured in the musical, Mamma Mia.

They could skip the stand-up and go straight to the boobs if they are not performing in a grog-soaked bar – but then, maybe I’m just a bit prissy these days. The crowd laughed, roared and applauded. They even got on stage and took their bras off. And that was the blokes. Seriously.

By Kate Herbert