Amos Gill Is Gillty At Rhino Room’s Howling Owl – Adelaide Fringe Review

Rhino Room’s Howling Owl – Thu Feb 19 Amos Gill has been standing up since a young lad. This is not his first hour, he’s only 23 and he’s been snapped up by good management, done TV, moved to Melbourne, an Adelaide rite of passage, moved back and is now Mr Breakfast Radio. He’s got rock star looks, plenty of stage confidence and still manages to be likeable. He started with some good compering skills, forced some energy into the stifling hot room and built rapport pretty much instantly. There were clearly a couple of fans, or at least listeners, for his radio show who were too happy to interject, but he handled them with grace, giving them the acknowledgement they wanted without getting bogged down. He skated on thin ice in citing that one of the benefits of becoming well known is that he gets to shag better looking women, which he then modestly qualified down to ‘one woman’ but the audience had heard what sounded like a brag and one that made him sound shallower than he is. Most of his stories concerned him fucking up, the glee with which his father collates his twitter hate mail for him early life experiences and an account of a spectacularly disastrous relationship with a young woman in Melbourne. The problem is that these long anecdotes that need to be tightened and gagged up for a stand up show and sometimes he touched on stuff that merited deeper exploration, but hurried past it. Definitely worth seeing, the show needs running in. The performance was certainly accomplished; the audience was thoroughly entertained even when Gill was distracted by members of the crowd and the furniture dragging upstairs. I hope his commercial success doesn’t smother his writing development. Julia Chamberlain Amos Gill is Gillty continues at Rhino Room’s Howling Owl until Sat Mar 7. Book at FringeTIX on 1300 621 255 or adelaidefringe.com.au/fringetix. Click HERE to purchase your tickets.