Review | Shazzam Kids! gets the tick of approval

Famous Sharron: Shazzam Kids! | Cockburn Central | Until 27 January | ★ ★ ★ ★ 

Famous Sharron has carved out a niche in the local community as a hostess, comedian, popular culture pundit, and now she tackles the most challenging audience -children.

Famous for being famous, Famous Sharron is continually poking fun at our selfie obsessed world, and has no shame in declaring her ambitions to be even more famous this week than she was last week. For Shazzam Kids, Sharron joins forces with the not-nearly-as-famous illustrator Samantha Hughes.

We took youth reviewers Benjamin and Isabel along to the show. Famous Sharron greeted then outside the show and gave each a colourful feather from her feather boa. Ben was not impressed with the offering, noting that he would have preferred to be given a feather boa of his own, rather than just a lone feather.

Parent and guardians were thanks for bringing the kids out to a see a show in a tent on a day where the temperature had topped out at 41 degrees, the powerful fans at the front of the tent were a welcome addition. As co-star Samantha is currently extremely well progressed in a pregnancy she’d opted to sit out today’s performances, and was replaced by husband Glenn.

In collaboration with kids in the audience Famous Sharron workshopped several characters for the storytelling exercise, creating a hero, a sidekick and an arch-villain. The kids described the features each character would have and illustrator Glenn brought them to life as giant cutouts.

They also recorded the sounds that each character would make, Benjamin was particularly pleased with his performance as the robot sound of the sidekick who was a robot dog. For the record the sound robot dogs make is “dooby doop doop beep bop”.

In between creating the characters Famous Sharron got the kids on their feet for a series of dance routines that were sold as an essential part of the show; “so that you’re tired when your parents take you home.” The kids were happy to comply.

This show was simple in its execution, had maximum involvement from the participants, and there were enough quick witted remarks to keep adults entertained too. An hour zoomed by quickly.

Isabel declared the show to be fun, Benjamin said it could have been improved if Famous Sharron paid more attention to his advice about evil henchman needing two dinosaur like fingers. Isabel awarded the show four out of five, but Benjamin felt it actually deserved a hundred.

Famous Sharron: Shazzam Kids! is on until 27th January – tickets at Fringe World.  

Graeme Watson