fringe: the naked magicians

adelaide fringe - the naked magicians
Let's get this out of the way right off that bat... for a show called The Naked Magicians, I was incredibly disappointed by the amount of actual full frontal nudity.

If you put the word "naked" in the title of your show, I'm pretty much going to expect to be seeing at the very least your butt and preferably your cock for the majority of the show. But the fact that it took them a good length of time before they even got their shirts off, and then one of them disappeared and got dressed again was not the type of "naked" I was hoping for.

What I got instead was nudity designed to appeal to the straight suburban female audience. Predominantly tame, non-threatening nudity. And that's fine... women made up of at least 90% of the audience, that's their target demographic, there's nothing wrong with pandering directly to that group.

And it's not like they're not very nice to look at, even before they take their clothes off. Christopher is the cheekier of the pair, very pretty and can wear the hell out of a waistcoat as well as those very well packed Aussiebum superhero trunks... Mike has the rocking hard-body and is much more willing to put his cock out on display (briefly, during the finale anyway). They also both know how to flirt up a storm.

I'll be honest, it took a fair while for me to warm up to both them and the show in general once I realised that we weren't in for a night of full frontal male nudity. But they're sweet and they're funny and, the nudity thing aside, they're good at what they do. And I did get into the swing of the show by about the half way mark.

Having now seen a range of magicians over the last few years of the Fringe I'm starting to get an eye and an appreciation not so much for how a range of tricks are done while they're happening, but more once they're over thinking "well, that must have been the point where they palmed X" or "while he was doing A, the other one must have somehow been doing B". And it was the same here... which isn't to say they aren't excellent magicians... they really are very, very good with the sleight of hand stuff. There was literally only one trick that was incredibly obvious how part of it was done and that's because it's an oooooooooooold style trick that everyone has to have seen some version of before, albeit done this time with a mostly naked man (and a fully clothed one)... also possibly because I'm a special effects and movie behind the scenes nerd, so I've seen what I assume the mechanism of the trick is on multiple occasions.

It also helps when you need a good distraction for the audience to have some flesh on display, which I would have thought that they would use to greater advantage. They did make pretty good use of music though.

At the end of the day it just wasn't exactly what I was expecting and perhaps not as much in my ballpark (so to speak), but that's okay... judging by the very vocal and enthusiastic female audience, they were clearly doing something right.

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