Duo succeed in making something joyful out of grief
Jonny and The Baptists: The Wedgewood Rooms, Southsea
IN a change from their usual shows, which are often heavy on the political satire, musical comedy duo Jonny and The Baptists offer something a bit more personal in their latest outing, Dance Like It Never Happened.
This isn’t one of those comedy shows, though, where there’s a narrative running throughout and we all get to feel like we’ve learned something profound about the human condition by the end of it.
It is, as they gleefully admit, their attempt to make something joyful out of grief.
With Jonny Do na hoe catching Covid right at the start of the pandemic – only for it to become long-Covid, and Paddy Gervers (‘The Baptists’) simultaneously having a mental breakdown, they claim to represent a microcosm of the nation.This show is their attempt to make sense of it. But as Jonny says: ‘We were weird before C ovid. Two years of not leaving the house hasn' t made us more mainstream...’
They rightly skewer the government’s ham-fisted-campaign to get people in the arts to retrain – remember the adverts: ‘Fatima's next job could be in cyber’?
But in their hands, this becomes a song about creating their own detective agency as it’s the only thing they’ve got the skills for after watching endless crime dramas on daytime TV. There’s also Cocaine Gran about a nonagenarian Scarface with its hilariously bloody climax. It’s all a metaphor for post-Brexit Britain apparently. Honest.
Given that the show was supposedly about grief, you wouldn’t be surprised to hear it induced tears.
Fortunately they were tears of laughter.