Rose Matafeo: Comedy Festival review

Rose Matafeo: Comedy Festival review


Rose Matafeo - Scout's Honour

Were / Are you ever part of the in crowd?

If so, then move along, bucko, we don't want to talk about you here. Because this is the show from Rose Matafeo, the ever so slightly uncool yet totally inclusive stand up who makes the gawky look adorable and you feel like you were never not a part of it.

Starting with an endearingly sung foreign song with subtitles appearing on a screen for us all to follow (which rapidly get out of control), it's an Eurovision style starter with a hint of bizarre singalong about it.

Rose herself is a bundle of nerdy, nervy energy, as she takes us through the things that she's rubbish at. It's the sort of stuff most of us can identify with as we were growing up. But it's the engaging way that she reveals parts of her life that she sucked at that you begin to realise that you too had moments where you were the outcast, or a bit lost in it all.

I like Rose's awkwardness-mixed-with-confidence act on stage; it produces some truly unexpected laughs and some very funny comedy stylings from the most bizarre of topics and ideas.

From an impression of Liam Neeson to a section where she reads from her forthcoming book "Saddest tweets from NZ celebrities" (please let it be so - I predict a major best seller there based on the ones she read out), there's plenty of laugh out loud moments. Attempts at audience interaction - with the promise of cat badges lovingly made by Rose - work well; we're au fait with her easy going approach and despite the usual Kiwi reticence to get involved, it's all at the expense of Rose rather than the crowd.

(As an aside, I do wonder if she must have been the kind of kid who must have spent all their time sticking stuff together with glue and glitter, only to find most of it was on their face / fingers. Though she did reveal that she wasn't sure whether to use her best cat stickers on the crowd - and was tempted to keep those for a very special occasion.)

Scout's Honour is a celebration of a self confessed and self effacing peripheral character, someone who's been on the fringes of the cool crowd but who never really let it bother them despite their apparent dorkiness.

Rose is a rising comedy star on the scene and despite her belief that maybe she's a bit uncool and unhip because of her earlier years, I don't think she has anything to worry about.

Based on Scout's Honour, this star's going stellar and thanks to her warm generousness, we're all along for the ride.