The Butterfly Club, Thursday 27th March 2025

The thing about going to the comedy festival multiple years in a row is that you can choose to follow a particular performer to see how they develop. Mike McLeish is hardly a newbie in musical theatre but him doing a solo show felt like going to see a show I would have seen in 2004 so the show suffered from that last year even with a lot of people in the audience who were actually in Keating! there for the show.

As such this show is more of an incremental development of his previous work and more of him finding himself as an individual performer without the cast of musical theatre to hide behind even if he does make fun of this himself.

You would get somewhat more out of it if you are familiar with cabaret and musical theatre in general but is not necessary. It reminded me of the Half Arsed Three with Casey Bennetto at Bella Union where I would drink a lot and rudely heckle him, I did not know why! It was something about that venue and that performer in particular.

I fully expect some familiar faces to turn up in the audience throughout the run as it is one of the rare shows doing and entire month these days which kind of fell out of favour due to the pandemic and people getting sick and having to cancel shows.

Mike’s daughter actually directed this show which was quite interesting. I don’t know too many parents who would let their kids tell them what to do!

It was fun enough and I hope it gets a lot more people during the run than when I saw it. I tried to contribute in being a bit overeager in my responses and hope it was appreciated.

Rating: 3.5 / 5

(He earned the extra 0.5 this year!)

Show details:

Dates: Mon 24 Mar – Sun 20 Apr: 7pm

5 Carson Place, Melbourne

Get directions

Licensed Venue

Ticket link:

https://thebutterflyclub.com/show/pensive-like-a-fox-3ed92298-4730-4f48-a4ab-0df2c344a9a9

Prices:

Full: $39

Concession: $35

Group (6+): $31

Member: $31

Broke Butterfly : $15

Link:

https://www.instagram.com/mikemcleish/