New Zealand Comedy Festival regular, ‘Frenchman’ Marcel Lucont, returns to the city of sails from the city of lights with his new show Marcel Lucont – Is.  

The show promises to muse on mortality, morality and masculinity in a multimedia mélange. It delivers all that plus diatribes on obesity, fecundity and seduction. Along the way Lucont manages to insult Americans, Australians, the Brits and all of their children.   

He opens with an operatic flourish and a two-fingered salute, and just gets weirder from there. One of Lucont’s tricks is to take a well-known story or saying and give it another ending. His alternative version of the ‘marshmallow experiment’ is quite something.  

Along with smouldering wine quaffing and witty ad-libbing, the show includes poems and even a couple of songs. ‘May contain traces of food’, a ditty about processed food, is unpronounceable but very catchy (and well worth remembering during your next trip to the supermarket).

Just when you think Lucont is wrapping up a fine evening of entertainment, voila! He brings out a series of quick-fire surprises guaranteed to get hearts racing and pulses pounding.

Vive la France ! 

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Before Marcel Lucont’s show begins we sit in Foxglove’s Ballroom before a screen showing Lucont’s eyes and a message that reads, “If you have a question before the show begins, tweet it to @MarcelLucont. If you are lucky, he will answer it…” 

Once Lucont appears he warns us that his energy is not going to rise any higher than it already has (we should have brought our own) and we settle down to an hour with this quiet, arrogant, devastatingly FRENCH man.

Lucont’s is very much persona comedy. He has adopted the role (how much of it is himself is impossible to know, but it is certainly an act) of the urbane, highly-arrogant, sexually-worldly Marcel Lucont, poet, singer, author, artiste.  

This is also a show that utilises the skit mentality. While Lucont could (and on opening night certainly does) make good use of his laconic delivery to cover for a variety of technical issues, it is still clear that there was an order and a plan and the audience can tell when something has gone awry.   

It is unfortunate that only one audience member has sent a question to Lucont as the Q and A session may well have been the highlight of the show otherwise – Lucont opens the floor to questions from the audience due to the lack of Twitter response, but as he has basically been really mean to the audience all evening it is hardly surprising that only one person asks a question (they are shot down as an idiot).  

Marcel Lucont IS is a polished show and people who like it will love it. The “Pourquois” section is particularly enjoyable, as is Lucont’s understated wordplay.

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer