Alice Tovey: Personal Messiah – Melbourne Fringe

Alice Tovey is a fierce operatic rock goddess. In her second coming since her hit debut Malice at last year’s festival, she returns to rain down enough fiery wrath to make even the most vengeful of patriarchal monotheistic deities quiver in awe.

Tovey’s writing and performance is unapologetically blunt and relentlessly punchy. With sardonic wit and a bramble bush of satirical barbs, she tears apart the canon of inadequate and incompetent religious, social and political figures that are followed, worshiped and deified in our local slice of contemporary western culture.

Tovey’s devout troupe of anointed minstrels, The Apostles (lead by the show’s co-writer and musical director Ned Dixon) command the impressively diverse score with nimble dexterity, and provide the driving force of the show’s transcendent energy.

In such an impossibly big and resolutely uncaring universe where the only sensible alternative, as Tovey preaches, is comfortable nihilism, you may as well worship her.