FRÜÜT Review by Rosana Bouzas

A mock-epic announcement ushers creator, director and producer Exxtra Velvet onstage encased in an enormous banana costume. Co-creator Giselle joins her in a banana skirt that nods to Josephine Baker, and the pair launch into a gleefully fruity double burlesque, introducing the suggestive possibilities of fruit and its endless capacity for sexual innuendo. Here, fruit becomes prop, costume, punchline, and spectacle. The result is a campy cabaret that is often very funny, even if it doesn’t always find fresh variations on its central theme.

Much of FRÜÜT’s charm comes from the performers throwing themselves wholeheartedly into the silliness. For all the striptease, camp exaggeration and overt sexuality, there is something refreshing about the women they present.

Knott the Juggler impresses with an increasingly improbable fruit salad juggling act and a dash of cheek. Later, Giselle’s sensuous Mauritian dance number incorporates the suggestively shaped coco de mer seed, while Exxtra Velvet gets intimate with a paw paw. Female desire is allowed to be goofy, messy, curious, and uninhibited – part of everyday female experience rather than something precious or scandalous. It is this sense of sexuality as lived experience that elevates the sexual humour beyond mere titillation.

The seven-piece live band gives the production much of its energy. Moving between jazz, pop and a curated line-up of fruit-themed songs, the musicians increasingly become part of the entertainment rather than simply its accompaniment. “I Heard It Through the Grapevine”, “Tutti Frutti” and “Strawberry Fields Forever” keep the gag running, while vocalist Mendy Atencio cuts a striking figure in extravagant headgear á la Carmen Miranda and a slinky velvet jumpsuit dripping with Marlene Dietrich cool.

It is Viva Vivacious, however, who finds the richest possibilities in the show’s central idea. Appearing as a fed-up grocery store worker at the end of her shift, she is released into a private erotic fantasy by Sade’s “The Sweetest Taboo”. The act is sexy, grotesque and joyfully undignified, and gives the fruit motif something the other numbers don’t quite achieve: a character, a situation, and a compelling mini dramatic-arc. This also reveals where FRÜÜT could go further. Once fruit-as-sexual-innuendo is firmly established, the later acts don’t always find fresh variations on the joke.

Exxtra Velvet and Giselle close the evening in matching strawberry costumes with a cute, unabashedly sapphic routine. FRÜÜT is a funny, generous hour of cabaret with an infectious sense of mischief. A little more nuance in what its fruit motif could suggest might make its pleasures even juicier.

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Rosana Bouzas attended FRÜÜT’ at Eternity Playhouse on Thursday 10 September.