REVIEW: Vidya Rajan & Mel McGlensey, GREG – Melbourne Comedy Festival


Are you a Greg? Do you know a Greg? You don’t have to be a Greg to enjoy GREG but it helps. I mean, you could cosplay as a Greg, identify as Greg for the night, wear the pants and shirt of a Greg and totally embody Greg energy and maybe approximate the feeling of gregariousness as you enter the “Greg area” but is that really the same as being Greg?

Vidya Rajan and Mel McGlensey have joined forces to create a very strange hour of Greg-related shenanigans that is fully-suffused with audience participation; the whole show depends on us all letting our hair down, letting out our inner-Greg but maybe not exposing our fleshy necks or – heaven forfend – wear pants.

I love a show that is totally unpredictable, wildly jumping from joke to sketch to crowd work and a spontaneous (but actually not) conga line. Vidya and Mel appear so very chaotic, but there’s something inherently clever underneath this hour of unhinged alt-comedy. Some of it is very stupid, but it’s uproariously funny from the beginning of Greg to his very end.

I spent a lot of time thinking about the Gregs in my life after the show and had real trouble thinking of any – except a kid I went to primary school with. But maybe he was Craig? And then we googled famous Gregs – Gregory Peck, Greg Davies, Greg Norman. It’s an old man’s name that might never recover.

Just like I might never recover from laughing so hard at Greg, Greg, Greg, Greg and Greg and the bizarre, eye-opening, jaw-dropping, subversive, next-level, ridiculous comedy stylings of Vidya and Mel. It's Greggselent.

Go see it and tell ‘em your name is Greg.

- Keith Gow, Theatre First

GREG is playing at the Chinese Museum until April 20

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