REVIEW:

Elixir Revived
14/03/2025
The Vault
Fools Paradise

The print ads for Elixir Revived promise a crew of attractive, half-naked men performing gravity-defying feats designed to make audiences gasp and hoot. And that is exactly what it delivers.

It plays like a goofy Magic Mike show, blending acrobatics with tongue-in-cheek eroticism and broad slapstick. Aside from the mock assassination that bookends the performance, it is aggressively unserious, evoking the silent comedies of the 1920s. The Marx Brothers have risen from the dead—except now they are calorie-conscious and clad in tight black underwear.

The men prance about the stage in all their sinuous glory, indicating emotions with arched brows and impish grins, earning laughs with pratfalls and devilish pranks. One pretends to urinate on an audience member. At another point, during a tense knife-throwing act, the lights dissolve just before the performer hurls a fake knife directly into the crowd. It offers visceral thrills rather than psychological ones. Set to popular music, there is limited reliance on special effects or flashy pyrotechnics. The men and their bodies are the stars, and the show is only interested in delighting and titillating spectators.

The thin narrative, which involves scientists conducting experiments in a post-apocalyptic world, hardly registers. The quartet are the special effect, and they have a great time on stage, performing with a joy that is infectious.

It doesn’t have the same impact as a show like Rouge, which fuses music, comedy, romance, and horror to dazzling and provocative effect, transporting the audience through a range of emotional landscapes. If Rouge left me exhilarated and moved, Elixir’s pleasures are more superficial, but it is a slickly produced and energetic spectacle. Besides, in a season full of shows exploring the darker sides of human nature, what is wrong with a little levity?

Elixir Revived has been lovingly assembled, and not a hair is out of place. Even when two of the performers broke into giggles after an apparent mishap, the ‘mistake’ was obviously choreographed. 

Playing in the air-conditioned Vault tent within Fool’s Paradise on Victoria Square to large crowds, it offers an hour of awe-inspiring lunacy - full of safe, adolescent humour that will probably strike most Fringe enthusiasts as a welcome change.

4 Stars

Luke Kane
For Adelaide Review Team