Frank Woodley: Extra Ordinary

Some of us still yearn for the reunion of comedic pair, Lano and Woodley, but whether or not that'll ever happen, at least we get to see the guys doing their separate things. Frank Woodley started off as a solo comedian decades ago and has returned to filling the stage alone — and it was quite a sizeable stage in the Powerhouse Theatre at the Brisbane Powerhouse. The cavernous space isn't the kindest to a lone comedian, but luckily Woodley's honed his stagecraft well and knows how to cut through to the back rows.

The nearly packed theatre enjoyed Woodley's amicable persona as he topped and tailed the night with a piece about how he'd written a Shakespeare play — not an actual Shakespeare play but a play about the great Bard. With stories about how he got his wig and a pair of women's knickers in Kmart for the bald part, he provoked chuckles in the early part of the evening moving to out-loud laughs at the end when he had an audience volunteer read the other role of the script with him, complete with made-up Shakespearian-isms.

Other topics that got the Woodley storytelling treatment were the dubious benefits of the cricket box (surely its main purpose is to make the target bigger so the bowler can aim at it), playing Under Nines football, why men used to don white curly wigs to go to war, and catwalk models trying not to fall over while they haughtily strut.

The anecdotal style seems like it's a stream of consciousness, which it obviously isn't, but that's the beauty of seeing a comedian in top form. On ya, Frank.