By Peter Maddern
I first encountered Melbournian Blake Freeman standing in the mid evening, mid week drizzle outside Gluttony, a place where his orbit for flyering now stretched from his moon at The Producers.
There and then one could only be struck with his persuasive personality emboldened under a mop of dark hair and a fulsome smile. From that point last night it seemed I couldn’t evade the menace and so, more than an hour later, I am in the The Producers witnessing his show having been coerced by him and his rash of small flyers up the stairs to the cramped room therein.
Twenty year old comedians are apt to disappoint and it may well have been that the funniest part of the show was the presence of a microphone and massive speaker for a room not much bigger than a disabled toilet. But Blake had it worked out that these trappings were unnecessary and his force-of-nature style would be more amplification than this space would need.
His show, Pieces of a Kid, is well named. His stories centred on being in love and fumbling around single before that occurred, his missing father and then his worst gig to date, which for me was the stand out section of the show. Not much perhaps to hang a glowing review on to be sure.
But the kid has a presence, a talent, a jig and a wit that carries three quarters of an hour effortlessly. I remember seeing Amos Gill stammering around at a similar age a few years back and look where he is now – hosting radio and giving people nightmares with his huge head on the sides of buses.
Blake Freeman is going somewhere similar too; born or diseased with that comedian’s DNA of needing to prove oneself to oneself through pleasing others. But unlike most others his age, Freeman can truly make you smile.
If you want to see a next big thing at this Fringe Blake Freeman may well be it. Once the pieces of this kid are put together, something great it seems certain is going to emerge.
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