Erin Harrington reviews The Brothers Rapture – A Holy Hip-Hop Cabaret, written by Corey M. Glamuzina, with music by Matt Hadgraft, at Little Andromeda, Friday 24 May, 2024.
Harold the Giraffe has nothing on Fathers Foley and O’Dea.
The Brothers Rapture – A Holy Hip-Hop Cabaret presents a Behind the Music-style account of the rise and fall of two unusually liberal Irish priests, Diarmuid Foley (Corey M. Glamuzina) and Shay O’Dea (Keiran Bullock). The pair are community sex educators who realise that the best way to connect with The Youth c.1999 is by delivering their talks on STIs and pre-marital mucking about as slightly sweary, vulgar raps. Their overseer, Sister Riona Murphy (Cassandra Hart), is appalled at the content but savvy enough to sniff out an opportunity to promote the church. She helps them develop from a novelty act into a globe-trotting musical sensation, all the while walking the line between sinfulness and piety, and nursing her own secret ambitions.
The result is an effective one-hour comedy rap musical, written by Glamuzina with beats from Matt Hadgraft. It combines The Boondock Saints, Father Ted and early 2000s nostalgia with the white boy bar-spitting of Epic Rap Battles of History, all with a glug of thoroughly un-Catholic Family Planning prosocial messaging thrown in for good measure. It’s also surprisingly good-natured, more focused on leveraging the absurdities of organised religion and its comic potential than on actually taking a crack at it.
The Melbourne-based actors offer a focused, high-energy performance that’s a real high-wire act – absolutely no room for error. Glamuzina and Bullock’s double act is very entertaining, becoming more ridiculous as they move from earnest collaborators to bitter, coked-up rivals. I particularly love Hart’s soft-voiced take on Sister Riona, who seems to hover in the background, a little malevolently, like the The Blues Brothers’ Sister Mary Stigmata. The raps themselves are skillfully written and delivered, dense with wordplay and double entendre. The most successful sequences for me, such as the increasingly frenetic montage “Judge Thyself”, are those that really push up against and mess about with the constraints of the medium, ensuring that the gag doesn’t get too old.
The show’s ridiculous lighting design gives us possibly the most complicated and fastest-moving plot I’ve seen at Little A. Such big lighting for such a little space – it’s a wonderfully and stupidly over-the-top approach. It helps maintain a madcap pace while offering lots of sight gags, flicking us between concerts and performances (hello Eurovision!), and highlighting backstage drama, driving us swiftly through time. For all the show’s bombast, the night I go the Little Andromeda audience is very into it but uncharacterisatically quiet. I wonder if there’s scope for a bit more crowd work early on to rev up the energy, and have the audience participate more in the concert-like atmosphere.
My only real quibble is that it’s a hell of a thing to deliver such rapid-fire lyrics for an hour, so well, and in comedy accents – that’s really working in hard mode – but it does mean even the slightest slip in verbal dexterity has implications for clarity, particularly with two people rapping in unison. The Brothers Rapture requires, but ultimately rewards, a lot of active listening.
The Brothers Rapture – A Holy Hip-Hop Cabaret runs at Little Andromeda From Thursday 23 – Saturday 25 May, 2024.
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