Review: Briefs – Close Encounters (Underbelly)

If you like watching muscular bearded men leaping about wearing little more than full make up (and who doesn't) then you'll have a ball at this latest offering from Australian circus-drag-'boylesque' collective Briefs.

With a thunderous, diva-heavy soundtrack including the likes of Kate Bush, Donna Summer and Nicki Minaj, this 65-minute spectacle feels like the kind of superior, drag-tastic circus you might expect to see in the wee small hours at the closing ball of Sydney Mardi Gras at its most extravagant. The Close Encounters subtitle refers, at least in part, to a futuristic, outer space running theme that feels tenuous at best, tedious at worst. Most people will be here for the acres of super-firm male flesh, exhilarating physical stunts, pumping dance music and sassy, camp attitude. The Briefs boys certainly deliver on all these fronts.

The absence of narrative does mean however that your attention may flag if the current specialty act spinning, capering or soaring around the central stage at any given time, is not your bag. That unfortunately happened to me rather more often than was desirable, especially given how short the show actually is. I could have lived without the forays into contemporary dance, and not all of the humour lands, although Fez Fa'anana's amusingly bitchy ringmaster is a lot of fun.

Also on the credit side, Thomas Worrell is a genuinely breathtaking aerial artist and Dale Woodbridge Brown is a manically funny recurring White Rabbit (as in Alice In Wonderland) character, although quite how all the alarm clock routines pertained to the intergalactic theme completely eluded me. Paul Lim's nightclubby lighting design is pretty stunning.

It is not entertainment to think too deeply about, and nor is it trying to be, although the sequence where an audience member was pulled on stage and virtually lapdanced by one of the buff boys did make me uncomfortably wonder if it would have been cheered so loudly by the cosmopolitan audience if the participating performer had been female.

All in all, it's a night of sexy, high-energy, cheeky (in both senses) fun. If you go, take as many friends as you can muster, and get a few drinks in. You may need them.

Briefs – Close Encounters runs at the Underbelly South Bank until 30 September.