A confession: I saw this show at the Melbourne Fringe last year and really enjoyed it.  When I saw it was playing in the Wellington Fringe Festival I was keen to see it again.

Bucket’s List is an idiosyncratic piece comprising mime, live music and narrative.  These simple elements are woven together to make a screwball love story with a heart of gold. 

Our hero, Buckets (played with big eyes and winning smile by Justin Kennedy) has spent his life working in “the temporary liquid containment industry” until a surprise change in circumstance sends him on a quest to find fulfilment in his work and personal life. Via a stumbling block or two, he learns the ways of love. 

Kennedy’s charismatic performance is supported by a compelling voice over narration from Felix Noblis, which drives the bulk of the action, and live music provided by a stone-faced guitarist Rhys Auteri. His dead-eye stare at the audience coupled with earnest down beat covers of a gamut of popular love songs add a surreal dimension to proceedings, and act as a counterpoint to Kennedy’s endless enthusiasm. 

We need this darker edge. The quirky romance starts out twee and feel-good before it dives into some more peculiar territory, and it is the weirdness lurking around the outside of the story that lends it depth, and saves it from sentimentality. 

This is a romantic comedy, while being nothing like any romantic comedy you are thinking of. For those who like their balls odd and their beats off, this is an outlandish story with a sweet heart. 

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An easel stands upstage depicting a three-bucket pyramid, identical to the one below it.  About the stage a sizeable number (there is no collective noun for buckets as far as I’m aware) of regular-sized shiny coloured plastic buckets are stacked into pyramids, along with one smaller one, plus a mysterious jumbled pile of different sized buckets and containers… 

Rhys Auteri, a surly looking man with an acoustic guitar, enters and seats himself on a downstage stool and begins to play Gene Pitney’s ‘Half Heaven Half Heartache’ in a leisurely earnest tone.  With the anticipation of humour generated by the playfully dressed set, I’m admittedly expecting a punchline that doesn’t occur; the song concludes and he gazes into the middle distance with a combined look of puzzlement and ennui.

Enter ‘Buckets’ (Justin Kennedy), a tall, gangly and bald lovable dimwit in a diarrhoea-brown cardigan who got his treasured nickname through long, dedicated service – almost twenty years – to the ‘temporary liquid retention industry’, his great life’s passion.  Sadly however, this is all about to end thanks to a total collapse in the bucket market due to everyone in the world now having one. 

One could be forgiven at the outset for thinking this is a reasonably innocent feel-good family show, before the more perverse elements of Buckets and his story are introduced.  Virtually the entire script, with a single notable exception, is spoken in voice-over by storyteller Felix Mobis, whose measured vocal delivery perfectly expresses the storybook style of playwright /producer Sarah Collins’ hugely imaginative tale, as does Kennedy’s definitively clownish presence. 

Capably directed by Yvonne Virsik, the ensuing adventures of Buckets are nicely augmented by Auteri’s unplugged juke-box classics-thru-the-ages soundtrack, from Johnny Mercer’s ‘Personality’ through to Bob Seger’s ‘We Got Tonight’ and, as they say, many more.  Auteri also takes the role of the possum residing outside the apartment building Buckets shares with a range of old, young, scary and angry married couples. 

Buckets soon learns he loves his new job as a wedding DJ as much as, if not more than, his last one.  He becomes obsessed with ‘first dance’ tracks as selected by the respective happy couples, ultimately leading to a new, strong desire to find a companion for himself.  

Not to give too much away, eventually the ideal being emerges, blending his desire for intimacy with his love of buckets – created by Barking Spider Visual Theatre and gracefully operated by Jem Nicholas. She is an ingenious and fantastical visual highlight.

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