What Rhymes With Cars & Girls

What Rhymes With Cars & Girls is one of the riskier ventures MTC has taken on this season, but a well worth risk it was.

It does have a celebrity element to it (songs, musical direction and live performance by You Am I frontman Tim Rogers) but remained a bold gamble for MTC – a new script, a first-time mainstage director and a pair of actors with little fame in Melbourne. And they have struck gold on all accounts. Well, most.

The plot is really nothing special and a tad trite in essence: the old boy-meets-girl straight-white-people romance we’ve seen a hundred times, with a dash of star-crossed lovers for good measure (albeit tempered with interesting political discourse on classism). But Aidan Fennessy’s writing is beautiful, adopting a vernacular poetic style both accessible and multifaceted, weaving from spoken scene to song with ease. Director Clare Watson’s engagement with the material, attention to detail and finesse with every directorial element lifts and supports amazing performances from actors Johnny Carr and Sophie Ross who created nuanced, believable, strong yet vulnerable characters.

It would have been nice to invest the play with some kind of guts and grunge and give it a bit more to say, but as far as clean and easy love stories go this one is a damned sight better than most and the perfect show for a date night.

Fairfax Studio, Arts Centre to 28 Mar