Their show is titled after their fourth, upcoming album, Eurosmash! Although the most difficult question you can ask of this show is whether any of its real. Brother and sister duo Otto and Astrid Rot, otherwise known as completely-not-related-to-each-other Aussies Clare Bartholomew and Daniel Tobias, sport their awkward, faltering German accents with all the pride and bizarreness of every Eurovision winner we’ve raved about throughout the years. The siblings argue and snark their way through the show, but they are very excited to bring us brand new song selections from their upcoming album. And yes, the album is real.

Otto Rot is the guitarist with a full, golden heart. Astrid Rot is on percussion, and within her lies darkness. They bounce between dry, broken English banter and almost slapstick-like physical comedy before they eventually decide again that they should play some more music. Their sense of comedy is fantastic and the songs they perform can only be described as dance pop catchy.

Although the singing is sometimes less than perfect – even by the standard of awful you might expect from certain branches of Euro pop – their enthusiasm will certainly win you over.

They clearly love the Eurotrash stereotypes they’re grinding themselves up against, and this passion drives their weirdness. In the best possible way. When the two critters tear out onto the stage in their plastic eyeglass spaceships, you’d best get used to what they’re putting down. It’s a light kind of show with a huge energy upheaval from the vibrant duo.

With three albums under their belt, Die Roten Punkte seems more fired up than ever. Eurosmash! is the wildest piece of pie yet, and they seem to only ever be cooking up more and more. You’d best get onto this faux-German slice soon. They are sure to fill your guts with apple strudel laughs and leave a fat sausage smile on your face. Crazy, crazy times.

Click here  for more information and to purchase tickets to the show.

This is how gritty theatre feels. It’s sharp, it’s crazy, it’s positively gooey with feelings and deep thoughts. It’s a need growing within a dry workaday life. Reasons to be Pretty certainly promises a grit-filled evening, but it’s like ordering a triple choc sundae and being served a single strawberry on a neat silver tray.

The audience is in an upstairs loft-like situation above a Fitzroy bar. There are only twenty seats or so. The lights dim, and the play opens with a bang when the wall we’ve been sitting in front of explodes open, and bam! The show is on. The play, penned by who some call American theatre’s reigning misanthrope, is about two couples in trouble and the ridiculous superficiality of man. We open with an argument between the main character and his main squeeze, and the remainder of the play’s action falls away from this scene. Grittiness impending! But…

It is hard to tell what is so dissatisfying about a piece not fully coming together.

The performances were quite lovely across the board in their naturalism and breathlessness, so it certainly was not from some lacking on the actors’ parts. The staging was interesting, as the piece jumps between workplace, home, baseball practice, shopping malls, all with that fantastic sensibility of the audience’s imagination and little else on top. Costumes, props, lighting and music all serve their purposes to make the thing alive, to create ambience. So where was it?

With all of this in mind, you would wonder if the script was missing something. Written by Neil LaBute, the play explores our reliance on physical beauty to sustain ourselves and our relationships. Reasons to be Pretty has been seen under Broadway lights and been revived in London, Australia, Canada, you name it. He, the playwright, is known for a no-holds-barred kind of banal colloquialism in his works. He is writing the people of his reality as close to real as he can manage.

Perhaps that is what ultimately drags this piece down. The language is so normalised, so realistically plotted out, that in the wrong hands these characters are just normal people. And so the power of the show must come from risks. It must come from bending the words on the page so that cruelty and sabotage and harshness reveal themselves. This Mellow Yellow Productions version shows that through almost no fault except by playing it safe it can be all too easy for Reasons to be Pretty, a play about utter ugliness, to lose its ugly. It can also be just a bit bland. There’s nothing wrong with bland, but it’s no triple choc sundae splurge.

Click here for more information and to purchase tickets to the show.

It’s a finicky thing, getting random people to pay money to do things they weren’t entirely aware they would have to do. But, if there is a really great reason for it and nobody ends up suing, the reward is a richly involving personal experience that cannot be matched from the comforts of an arm chair.

My Life in Boxes is one of those shows that get it right.

Circus, dance theatre and good old-fashioned acting warmly embrace each other throughout the show to bring a love story of a dying pathological hoarder to full life. Circus performer Tim Rutty and actor/writer Tarah Carey sway all across the small space and up the very walls, and it is fantastic.

The audience is led to a small industrialised room in the top back corner of a warehouse/factory performance building, and you will be convinced that every inch of the building is part of the show. There are no seats for the audience to relax into. There are only boxes.

There is little time to settle in. Audience members are enlisted into the story itself before they’ve even entered the room. Those who manage to slip past the first audience participation challenge find curtains, windows with sliding panels, a hanging silk sheet, a trapeze and a climbing rope. Oh, and boxes. Cardboard boxes. Crates. A pile of boxes welcomes us in to this moment in the life of our hoarder heroine. On the odd occasion, the audience is able to take a seat on a box, though the action shifts between every corner and every side of the room to the other and we are skilfully involved in all parts of this.

The performances from both were strong throughout, although Rutty’s expression was occasionally over-tense. A little lightness of the eyes may have done wonders. Carey is a skilled performer all around – she embodies her character and the spirit of the show with ease and power. Little wonder that she was also behind the writing of the piece as she shines with a lot of love for it.

The marriage of circus, dance and theatre conventions is by no means contrived. It is as if every element of the show was created with this combination in mind, and it really is a unique and lovely experience as a result. Characters are cleverly able to express themselves beyond the traditional framework of theatre through tightly choreographed and emotive movement.

When audience members are made a part of the show, doubt in the mind of the performers can wring the show to pieces. This is no issue for this pair. They believe in every step they make, and it is clear that they have created something from far within themselves. And with such an emphasis on drawing the audience into that world, into the story and the feelings of the characters, they are inviting us in. We are welcomed to join them on their journey, and we take every step side by side with them.