Gabbi Bolt has been making musical comedy for a while now, from one-woman shows to viral TikToks. She’s toured with several theatre shows and she’s about to reach a pinnacle she wasn’t aware she was moving towards: getting an award from her high school for accomplishments in her field.
Gabbi isn’t
sure if she’s deserving, giving a long list of much more worthy winners from
the past. She wonders if trying to be famous while the world is ending is not the best
use of her time. But she’s calibrating her and our expectations: she wants to
be the right kind of famous and if she is getting the award, she’ll pass on
whatever wisdom she has to the theatre kids in the crowd.
After
seeing Gabbi’s second show, Odd Sock, at MICF in 2023, I’ve been waiting
to see what she would dream up for herself next. In the meantime, she’s kept
herself busy – including several seasons of the Hayes Theatre production of Murder for Two.
Small
Poppy is a
wonderfully hilarious show about self-belief and self-delusion. The songs are
eclectic in style and subject matter. Where else would you get a takedown of
TikTok influencers, an ode to Gabbi’s “commie boyfriend” and a rap about LuciusTarquinius Superbus (beware Wikipedia wormhole!) and the origins of the phrase “tall poppy syndrome”?
Nowhere else.
Gabbi’s
show moves at a mile-a-minute and there’s lots of juicy political content in
amongst her angst about where her career goes from here. Small Poppy is
filled with sharp observations, wrapped into beautifully-executed songs.
I hope
Gabbi gets to that ideal-level of fame sooner rather than later, but in the
meantime, go see her before she disappears on the last shuttle out of here –
entertaining billionaires as they escape the planet they’ve destroyed.
- Keith Gow, Theatre First
Comments