MICF 2025 Review: BIGFOOT: IN PLAIN SIGHT

Kyle McGrath reviews Bigfoot: In Plain Sight for Subculture.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hello, Welcome back to the show. I'm your host Kyle,
and I'm going to be talking about a show that
is playing at the Melbourne Comedy Festival called Bigfoot in
Plane Sight. Now, when an important man walks through life,
he leaves his mark. Well, nobody leaves a bigger footprint
than the Yetti or the sasquatch or Bigfoot, the myth,

(00:23):
the legend, the friend, the lover, the musician, the conservationist.
It's time to do what countless other hikers have done before.
Make sure your fuzzy, out of focus camera is low
on batteries and join in on the hunt. Now. In
the far back year of twenty twelve, famed Canadian cryptobiologist

(00:44):
Robert H. McKinley Jr. Wrote and published his masterpiece, the
book Bigfoot in Plain Sight, chronicling his lifelong journey and
that of his father, Robert McKinley Senior, to meet the
creature of Bigfoot, and McKinley felt that Bigfoot was no
mere monster, but instead a friend and a bond, and

(01:10):
a friendship developed with the creature and proved just how
misunderstood the gentle giant was. However, now, in twenty twenty five,
the local misfits of Handful of Bugs are adapting that
man's life into a scandalous to one person comedy show. Now.
In the show, Robert H. McGinley Junior, played by Alex Donnelly,

(01:33):
is a man on a mission. Through his lessons and
his thoughts and his generational flashbacks, will learn more about
what it means to have belief in things bigger and
hairier than yourself. To understrand his story, you'll have to
go back way back forward, a bit back again, and
so on and so forth. It's the story of a man,

(01:56):
a father man, and a man ape who ties their
fates together. Now, I first caught a show by Handful
of Bugs some years back, completely by chance, and I
immediately recall two things, most of them from the night,
which was that I had a dead leg from sitting awkwardly,
and that the show was one of the funniest things

(02:16):
I'd ever witnessed. There were NonStop gags, great chemistry, and
a script that was refined to near perfection and showmanship
that I thought just rivaled the best comedic performances. All
of this from what was actually their debut show. Since then,
I always make sure to catch each new show from

(02:37):
Handful of Bugs, and I really think that others should
as well. Now Bigfoot in Plane Sight, which is directed
by Lachlan Gough and produced by Skint Producing, It lives
up to that same high bar. The jokes are polished
to a sheen and they come off. They come at
you with the frequency and the success rate of the

(03:01):
early good episodes of The Simpsons. There's even small delays
in laughter. I thought as pockets of the audience took
a moment to realize just how incredibly clever a line
or joke really was delivered, straight faced and with conviction.
The insanity of watching a man go through the one

(03:22):
picture of day time lapse compilation live in front of
you really had the audience in stitches. There's prop work,
physical comedy, and sequences playing up on quick change events
hailing from Danielung. I've seen many folk in arguments with themselves,
but never seen them change clothes and voices. With the

(03:43):
enthusiasm which was displayed by Alex Donnelly, lightning and sound
effects throughout the show leveled up the humor and keeping
us in the audience on our toes. There's even this
jaunty singalong campfire song performed on the banjo, which really
brought the house down. Now, as with prior shows, any

(04:05):
goose or flub lines, or technical difficulties or wardrobe malfunctions
weren't an issue at all, and if things didn't happen
perfectly as planned, Alex was able to move with the
flow and to make it work for laughs anyway, with
tiny and significant errors only helping to highlight just how
well polished and effective the entire hour of entertainment was

(04:28):
or is. So if you go into the woods today
you'll be in for a big surprise. It's an Australian
doing multiple Canadian accents, and between bar fights and arguments
about to bar fights and arguments about the give and
take of polygamous relationships, he's opening our eyes that Bigfoot

(04:50):
may be a conspiracy theory, but he's a loving conspiracy theory.
And as far as comedy shows about bipedal cryptids go,
Bigfoot in Plain Site is well worth the price of admission.
And really I thought it was another hysterically funny triumph
from a handful of bugs. So Bigfoot and Plain Site.

(05:11):
It's currently playing at malt House Theatre's Playbox Room until
the twentieth of April. For tickets, please visit the Comedy
Festival dot com dot au and yeah, it's another really
entertaining show.