by Laura Kressly

Lucy McCormick, performance artist extraordinaire and queen of the grotesque, starts off this show dressed in a felted tree costume. It calls to mind an out-of-place, awkward child in a school play unsure about what to do, but still enthusiastic. This is an appropriate start to the show’s premise: McCormick wants to put on a cabaret but doesn’t have any friends who could work on her show, so she drafts the audience in to help.

As established by her previous work, the initially-superficial premise and modest costume fall away once the show properly starts. Drawing on and subverting conventions from a range of sources, from drama games to strip tease, McCormick constructs a DIY, interactive cabaret that alternates sedate puns and power ballads with her trademark mess, sex and nudity. Though she employs an aesthetic of literal filth, her work is immensely precise and critiques socio-political norms with immense sophistication. She toys with performer-audience power dynamics first by delegating basic effects to individual audience members during the show. More powerfully, she interrogates the audience’s powers of gaze and judgment by casting some other spectators as people in her life whose relationships with her are dictated by these phenomena. As much as the brazen bodily acts may shock some folks watching – especially if this is the first time encountering her work – being positioned as an exploitative antagonist that she desperately needs is far more uncomfortable to mull over.

Though McCormick’s previous productions include other performers, she deftly holds her own here, alone on the stage. Her fantastic voice shines in numbers like “Fever” and “Hello”, and she’s a highly skilled physical performer. Each song is absurdly twisted through a change of lyrics or emphasis; it’s both clever and deliciously funny. Yet beyond this, the show’s power lies her skillful juxtaposition of the base and corporeal, with nuanced commentary.

Lucy and Friends runs through 23 August.

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