Comedy Review - Lano & Woodley: Moby Dick
Images courtesy of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival.
Colin Lane and Frank Woodley have been comedic partners for over three decades. Although most marriages by that time grow stale and weary, the duo remain as exuberantly child-like and as bombastically hilarious as ever.
The duo re-appropriate their comedic talents to perform a faux-stage play of Herman Melville’s classic novella Moby Dick. However, if you’ve come to see the eponymous tale, you might be a little disappointed. The show often veers into the absurd and downright silly that left audiences in cackles of laughter.
Their tried-and-true formula boils down to Lano as a frustrated straight man, spurred on by artistic integrity but sheer ignorance, while Woodley incessantly disrupts the show with childish whims.
Eventually we do get a taste of ‘Moby Dick’, or ‘Moby Dickheads’ as they call themselves, with both performers svelte in period costuming and dishevelled haircuts. Large cloth rags spread across the back of the stage function as screens, with animated videos of the book’s characters and settings illuminating the stage. Lano attempts to earnestly tell the story, reciting its famous first line “Call me Ishmael”. Woodley on queue interrupts asking what his last name is, and suggests it could mean someone asking Ishmael to call them on the phone, before imitating a pigeon courier.
Their chaotic energy beautifully blurs the line of written and improvised material. Lano frequently tries to remove Woodley from the stage, insisting he “wait in the wings”, and Woodley returns wearing a cardboard cut-out of angel wings. Not only this, the structure of Lano and Woodley’s ‘Moby Dick’ itself is cleverly enmeshed with the story of the book, as Lano seems to ask for the stage manager’s help when the pair appear disorganised, only for that gag to actually be a pivotal plot point in the show’s climax.
In a similar vein to their previous show Fly about the Wright Brothers, inventors of the airplane, Lano and Woodley insert themselves into a classic story and inject it with pure silliness. Their tangents frequently derail into contemporary topics and audience interaction laced with wordplay, limericks, props and songs, and return seamlessly back to its subject matter without missing a beat.
Moby Dick is showing at the 2022 Melbourne International Comedy Festival between the 30th of March and the 24th of April. For tickets and more info, click here.