SUGAR | Black Flamingo | til 5th Feb | ★ ★ ★ 

When I left SUGAR, the friend I went with immediately made an offhand comment about SUGAR being a kids show. As an 8pm production in Fringe’s Palace Gardens, advertised under cabaret in the Fringe guide, that wasn’t really what I was expecting. And I wasn’t the only one to miss that memo. There wasn’t a single child in the entire theatre.

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The skillset of the show is diverse and incredible, from singing to ballet to aerial silks, every person on the stage earned their place in what should have been a whirlwind variety show with a sweet tooth colour scheme.

Except that SUGAR is not actually a whirlwind variety show.

In the beginning we are introduced to Sugar (Claire Thomas), our title character who is caught up in a world of social media and self esteem issues to boot. Her costume is beautiful, and semi-futuristic pastel nightmare she’s in is straight from Black Mirror’s Nosedive.

What follows, however, is a somewhat shaky plot in which each of the cast’s incredible talent is shoehorned into sets linked by weak and heavy-handed segues.

With such high skill, it’s hard to put a finger on what actually went wrong. I think it was ultimately a difference in vision. The message that was being told through the dialogue was a pantomime society’s approach to modern internet feminism: an incredibly strange thing to pair with an anti-technology message, considering the power and voice social media has recently given women in movements like #metoo.

The aerial acts especially elicited more emotional response and conveyed more meaning than any of the dialogue. Drama, building relationships, and moments that made the audience audibly gasp were all marked by airborne motion, drawing the performance into the rafters and giving SUGAR a professional edge. For a moment it’s an exceptional show.

Then the music stops, the singer pauses, everyone’s feet are back on the ground. It falls immediately flat. From the didactic message, to the simple way it’s presented, we barrel quickly back to what it was which made my friend think of a children’s program. By the end none of the audience were entirely sure what the show that they had attended was meant to be.

I have no doubt about the potential of the cast of SUGAR, and perhaps they just need to take a message from their own show: you don’t need to dress up and dumb down what would otherwise be incredible female acts.

SUGAR is running until 5th Feb. Get your tickets from fringeworld.com.au

Annique Cockerill