In a summer festival packed with colourful, enticing shows, Briefs: The Second Coming gives new meaning to the phrase “hottest ticket in town”. Even in its late night slot, the raunchy “boylesque” cabaret has a queue circling outside the Spiegeltent in the festival village.
The boys from Brisbane are in town for evenings of very adult fun as part of this year’s Sydney festival and, at the time of writing, it was the second-highest selling show on the program.
The show opens with a striptease – seven buff men behind a flurry of well-placed white feather fans – before Shivanna (the performer more commonly known as Fez Fa’anana), an only slightly mean bearded drag queen from Ipswich, welcomes the excited crowd.
It’s the latest show from the Briefs Factory, a collective of circus, drag, cabaret and acrobatic performers from Queensland. Sydney festival is the final stop on their lengthy national and international tour, with the troupe winning fans from the Perth fringe festival through to London’s Wonderground by way of Edinburgh fringe.
The highly skilled, athletic performances are wrapped up with cheeky humour. There’s a barely clad aerialist contorting through a suspended hula hoop, a naughty schoolboy doing rude things with a yo-yo and a Rubik’s Cube, a monkey man in a yellow tutu snacking inappropriately on a banana, a contortionist in a sequinned jockstrap performing with an illuminated hoop and more. The audience adores every naughty moment of the seemingly effortless performances, whooping and hollering at the efforts, and playing along with Shivanna’s mean-queen instructions.
Sexual energy pulses through the show. One of the most intriguing sequences is a “puppy play” performance with three very different handler-pup couples: a blond, backcombed Nicki Minaj-type with a pup in cone headgear, a tuxedo-clad queen with a pup in full dog mask and a Kardashian-bronzed pair. Each takes their turn to dance up and down the stage, jumping through hoops and competing for best in show. It’s an acknowledgment of just how mainstream fetish has become but the sass does make me wonder why camp culture still needs the nudge-nudge, wink-wink to be accepted.
There is plenty of politics laced throughout the performance. There’s an Indigenous acknowledgement to country, the like of which you’ve never heard before, as well as a profanity-laden shout out to diversity and a sharp jibe at the lack of arts council funding for regional arts, although it’s all done with a light touch.
For the finale, a performer in an uplit glass birdbath is wheeled on stage, before drenching the front row with seductive splashing. Then, to the beat of Barbra Streisand/Donna Summer’s No More Tears (Enough Is Enough), the cast, all clad in sequinned Australian flag leotards, stomp and dance their way up and down the stage in a glorious celebration of flamboyant fun.
• Briefs: The Second Coming runs until 22 January at the Magic Mirrors Spiegeltent as part of Sydney festival
