Toby Schmitz Live review: Crazy rough diamond sees Schmitz shine
Toby Schmitz Live
Old Fitz Theatre, June 26
★★★★
A night in the anarchic company of Toby Schmitz is an evening well spent.
The actor, writer and director is a one-man band. This is Schmitz as raconteur, in a solo show in which he mines his life and art for material.
He is on home turf at the venue where he cut his teeth as an actor and with which he has maintained a long association on and off stage.
He has an ease and intimacy in the space where, with just a wine barrel, a drinks table and a sticky carpet, he riffs over a drink to create a heady cocktail (at one point literally) of a night.
Having briefly done stand-up before training as an actor, Schmitz retains the fearlessness needed for such an exposing medium.
A strength is his eye for detailed, quirky observation, whether he's reflecting on Arts Minister Mitch Fifield's designer stubble, air travellers wearing neck pillows or his mother's yellow dress.
He lays bare his foibles, from his arachnophobia to his squandering of a work trip to LA that culminated in an accommodation disaster – all his own fault – related in such vivid detail you squirm with every excruciating twist.
It is a high-energy delivery, maintained as he shifts from grey baggy tracksuit and t-shirt to tailored blue suit. It slows only when he reads from a notebook a story of his private school days.
Otherwise, he nimbly shifts tone throughout, injecting moments of absurdity and humour in some more challenging material.
For this is not simply played for laughs, although there are plenty. He ventures into darker terrain later in the piece as he raises the suicide of his friend, actor Mark Priestley. And as he narrates how his parents missed by a whisker being killed in the Port Arthur massacre, the atmosphere is electrifying.
In a two-hour show otherwise about Schmitz's own life, a section in which he becomes Robert Kennedy communicating with an Apollo space mission feels out of place, like the kernel of a different piece.
There's a seat-of-the-pants feel about the piece as if it could careen out of control at any moment. That mercurial, unpredictable quality is part of what makes Schmitz so compelling to watch.
This four-night run, the first of a series of improvised and burlesque shows, is off to a ripping start. This is a crazy, rough diamond of a show in which Toby Schmitz shines.