With a festival as large as Fringe World, there’s inevitably going to be a handful of duds. New work that needs more rehearsal, performers who just throw something together to get an artists pass, or worse, the Olive and Concetta model. A show that isn’t really a show – just an idea a couple of friends had over a bottle of cava one Sunday afternoon.

An Evening With Olive and Concetta centres around the duo of women, Olive playing the accordion and Concetta singing, and a collection of classic Italian folk songs. The musicianship is undeniable, but this didn’t really feel like a show. It felt like a bunch of ideas, none of which were ever fully realised. For instance, Concetta makes reference to forthcoming audience participation that never actually occurs.

I think Olive was Concetta’s straight man, but the characters were so inconsistent that I was never really sure. The show began with the offering of complimentary bread and wine (undeniable highlight) to establish a kind of Catholic Church theme, but this was never followed through. At one point, we just watched a close-up video of the inside of an accordion for several minutes.

Fringe World needs these performers, but I think I’d rather just have the cava.

An Evening with Olive an Concetta runs until Sunday the 22nd of February. You can find tickets via the Fringe World guide here.

Perhaps this is just the Cirque de Soleil world we live in, but contemporary circus takes itself very seriously. Just to qualify, a circus act needs to amalgamate circus performance with elements of contemporary dance. Performers only wear black, and definitely never smile. Illuminate from Melbourne’s Madhouse Circus is an example of exactly this kind of circus in earnest.

Illuminate works around the idea of the importance of lighting to a circus act, and drives the point home pretty heavy-handedly through the use of half a Beacon Lighting store. A team of talented and very young circus performers uses an array of traditional and non-traditional props and equipment to create what is admittedly some gasp-worthy moments.

What lets Illuminate down is its need to be so serious. The performance takes place to a soundtrack of heavy dance music, and the performers, for the most part, don’t smile. The show is, understandably, a bit messy – mistakes are made and recovered from. When juggler Rowan Thomas takes several attempts to master his final juggle, well after the accompanying track has finished, the audience in the Big Top hollers and screams their encouragement. This is an audience with a sense of humour, and really not too fussed on technical perfection. Stop taking yourselves so seriously – nobody else does.

Illuminate runs until Sunday the 22nd of February. You can find tickets via the Fringe World Guide here.

School choir was always one of those things I pretended to loathe. Admission to enjoying singing the alto part in ‘Doo Wah Diddy’ would have been tantamount to social death in the mind of a tween girl, and a scowl was prerequisite for every rehearsal. Menagerie, Perth’s resident hipster choir, reclaim that repressed joy in their most recent show Hey Music! I [heart] You – an unabashed tribute to the joy of song.

Hey Music I Heart You features Menagerie’s 85 amateur singers, led by Claire Coleman, sharing the stage with local Perth musos (Odette Mercy is the clear standout) whose stories about why it is they love music form the narrative of the show. Don’t get me wrong – it is daggy. But like most relics of dag, it’s utterly joyous. The charisma and talent of Claire Coleman and the not-at-all-reminiscent-of-Pentatonix arrangements take the edge off, and those earnest choir-nerd moments are peppered with enough humour to feel like we’re all in on the joke. This is all the fun of school choir, with a millenial’s sense of irony.

The unrivalled highlight of the show comes when Coleman turns the baton to the audience, splitting us into parts and cobbling together an arrangement of Boyz II Men’s ‘End of the Road’. Just like in school, my choir date and I still rolled our eyes at each other, thinking we were too cool for this. But just like in school, we kept singing along. I might not have totally recovered from ‘Doo Wah Diddy’, but this is a very enjoyable first step.

Check it out at the Fringe World guide — but he rest of the season is sold out.

For all its benefits, there is an unfortunate side effect to ushering in Fringe World each year. That is, its tendency to herald the return of ‘quirky’: astro turf indoors, salad spinners repurposed as lanterns; general ‘vintage’, whatever that means. Fringe World can oft invite the attention of people whose mothers would describe them as ‘clever, kooky, different’ and shop exclusively at boutiques that boast ‘op-shop chic’. These are the kind of people who would love this show.

Fire Curtain Co brings You Took The Stars to Perth’s Fringe World off the back of a successful run of shows at their hometown fringe in Melbourne. The show, penned by Cat Commander, is the very definition of twee. The dialogue was overly verbose, and the lead actress/manic pixie dream girl wore Gorman. For God’s sake, there’s a man-monkey playing Fly Me To The Moon on acoustic guitar. Thankfully, the ‘quirky’ aesthetic and well-worn and decidedly twee subject matter, the beginning and slow disintegration of a romantic relationship, were bested by genuinely heartwarming moments. The audience is also dropped a few hints of self-awareness, like when the leads dream up a guitar-wielding monkey who “can’t sing… but he’s trying”, just before the actual ‘monkey chorus’ starts to sing.

However, most memorable are the outstanding performances given by James Cook and Claudia Tory. The repartée between their pair gives You Took The Stars its charm and vivacity, and gives the play an intensity that other vintage-astro-turfed-quirky shows lack. Maybe I’ll have to rethink twee; gin in a tea cup, anybody?

You Took The Stars runs until the 29th of January. Tickets are available here.