Dave Smith and Jarrod Baker are ‘Mrs Peacock’ – the band that doesn’t have a front man with a huge forehead. Six Feet From The Edge is about them trying to write a rock opera… and it’s not really working for them; Dave’s talking about going overseas with his girlfriend; they don’t like each other’s ideas; they don’t have many ideas; they don’t even seem to care that much about having good ideas.

The whole slacker duo planning a gig idea isn’t in itself a cop out (Flight of the Conchords pulled it off) but the fact that every song is about how they’re falling out, falling apart, and failing to come up with new ideas, makes it all seem a bit uninspired; that and the fact that they’re aren’t making very many jokes.

At first I thought the trouble was that it wasn’t honed enough and needed the timing sorted, etc, and I was uncertain which bits were supposed to be funny. It’s like they forgot they were doing a comedy and didn’t think to add bits for us to laugh at.

Most of it is them talking about how they should get on with writing the rock opera and arguing half-heartedly about what to do next and singing songs about lack of direction and insecurity, e.g. "30th Birthday Breakdown", "Is He Breaking Up With Me", "Where Do We Go From Here (Have we run out of ideas)?" The grunge song, "You make me make no sense" is quite cute, though.

There are some good concepts here – I like the surreal (for stand up comedy) fourth wall sense that they’re actually in a hotel room, peering in the mirror instead of at the audience – or performing facing away from us (towards projected images of the various locations of their gigs). However none of their potentially good ideas are fully exploited, or they suffer from a lack of context, such as the boy band song.

The show’s not very tightly put together – they started singing out of sync with one another a few times and stumbled over some of their lines, but I would hardly have noticed that had there been more to chew on. It’s not that I didn’t laugh at all, but I can count how many times I laughed spontaneously (as in not a sympathy laugh) on my fingers.

The overwhelming impression is that Mrs Peacock just haven’t had a very inspiring year. They repeatedly drop in the fact of their winning the Billy T last year – perhaps they are hamstrung by having heaped too much expectation on themselves to repeat last year’s success. 

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer

Can this be the same talented duo whose 2007 Billy T Award-winning show Rock 101 scored the headline "Beautiful, Brilliant, Bliss" over my review?

Given what I’ve said is missing from The Morrisons: Huntly High and Low, I have to credit the potential value in the central premise of Six Feet From the Edge, that the future of ‘Mrs Peacock’ – musical duo Jarrod Baker and Dave Smith – is in jeopardy because their musical tastes are diverging and Dave is planning to go overseas with his girlfriend even though they are trying to write a rock opera together.

In a series of dramatised vignettes, backed by slides of the relevant venues – Outside TVNZ in Auckland; Great Race Ball, Hamilton; Jarrod’s Home, Highbury, Wellington; Dave’s Apartment, The Heritage, Auckland; Baker Family Holiday Home, Kinloch, Taupo … etc. – we are offered a rundown of their lives since winning the coveted yellow towels last year, as they half-heartedly try to get started on the elusive rock opera.

The trouble is they don’t have the acting chops to carry it off. Perhaps they aspire to the minimalist distillation of Flight of the Conchords but it just comes across as low key, uncommitted, slack. Plus their place in the world, their ‘world view’, their value system, is totally limited to – and by – their being a couple of performers with no new ideas and no idea how to go about finding some.

I suspect the only reason Six Feet From the Edge exists at all is that they felt obliged to feed the beast of expectation. So they’ve come up with a show about two guys trying to make up a show except they don’t. And it’s hard to empathise; hard to care. And the odd witty concept – like Rock being the gloved hand of a Customs Officer while Dub is the lubricant – falls flat because it has no meaningful context.

Whereas last year’s show, structured as a lecture, offered black humour, satire and wicked genre send-ups, this year’s songs – ‘Time To Get Up and Fail’, ’30th Birthday Breakdown’, ‘Is He Breaking Up With Me?’, ‘Where Do We Go From Here?’ (and will our air points get us there?); ‘Who’s to Blame?’ – seem self-indulgent and inconsequential. And to my inexpert musical ear, there is not enough to compensate in the musicality per se.

If this was their first show ever, I’d probably say they have potential but our expectations are different now. Last year, delighted by such songs as the classic message to their dead friend Tony, their loyal audience demanded an encore and got ‘Newtown Love Song’. They clearly had a following and were going from strength to strength. But this year – albeit on their second night – there was no encore. If they had done one, it would only have reinforced how far short of their usual standard Six Feet From The Edge falls.  

Maybe what they need most of all is a script writer-cum dramaturg and/or a director.

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer