The premise of the show alone, a couple of middle aged singer-performers creating music by smashing to pieces a fairly decent car, makes for an intriguing view, and the audience waiting in the queue are very much excited about the idea of seeing an automobile being destroyed in the name of art. When this finally happens, the pair don’t disappoint by getting out their hammers, axes and bats and wrecking the poor Fiat Punto (the perfect Stradivarius, in their opinion) to some amazing tunes, and jamming session. The problem relies, though, in that it takes them quite some time to do this, and you have to go through some awful jokes and one liners, random un-connected stories that make no sense whatsoever and silent moments where the audience wonders what’s going on.
In saying that, the main act, the ‘raison d’etre’ of the whole show, is absolutely brilliant, and jaws drop to the floor in amazement with their song Let’s Make A Convertible, an African-Jamaican beat made entirely out of their voices and the car’s top, which they axe through to later on use as a violin-of-sorts with a clothes-hanger. Again, extremely weird but really entertaining. The other highlight of the show has the audience in stitches, as the pair dance what they call the ‘Hammer Ballet’, inspired by their newly-created music piece If I Had A Hammer, which they use against the car’s bonnet and windows.
Though inserting a real tree through a Fiat Punto’s windscreen, is something that not all of us can claim to have either done or seen, it is questionable the worth of paying a ticket for 25 minutes of pure joy against 35 of boredom and disconcert.
3/5
Adrian G. Velazquez
