Hole! Review: Plug In for One of the Fringe’s Wildest Musicals

★★★★★

After last year’s incredible Fringe success, with five-star reviews coming out of every orifice, American Sing Song return with Hole!, the story of the citizens of Garth, a cult in Nebraska whose prophet has foreseen the Great Sucking. Soon everyone on Earth will be sucked into the sky anus first unless they plug up their holes.

Comedic duo Jake Brasch and Nadja Milena take to a plinth as Connor and Luke who, after being expelled from the cult, begin to realise their queerness and embark on a deplugging mission in search of the Cincinnati Daddies, hoping eventually to return, arms open, to the cult that cast them out.

It is an astonishingly stupid premise, pursued with such precision and commitment that it becomes completely irresistible. Hole! builds an entire mythology from buttplugs, prophecy, sexual repression and impending anal apocalypse, then treats every new escalation as though it were the most logical development imaginable. The writing is sharp, the jokes are densely packed and there are no cracks in the comic timing.

Brasch brings a wonderful innocence to Connor alongside genuine musical prowess at the piano, while Milena counters him with an all-knowing side eye and unexpected gravitas, particularly as the cult leader. Their contrasting energies are perfectly matched, one wide-eyed and earnest, the other seemingly always half a step ahead of both the characters and the audience. Together they give the ridiculousness a strange credibility. However absurd the world becomes, they never stop believing in it.

Musically, the show remains deliberately simple. Brasch at the piano is joined by Milena creating almost Foley-like accompaniment from cups, household objects and an increasingly improbable collection of sex toys. It gives Hole! a wonderfully handmade quality, where the joke is not simply that a vibrator or buttplug has become an instrument, but how seriously the pair commit to making it one. The joyously celebratory ode to sky fucking will be lodged in my mind for a very long time, as will the insistently catchy “raw, chafed, raw, raw, chafed”.

Some of the smallest jokes are just as effective. A recurring fixation with celery, and Milena’s increasingly obvious disdain for it, becomes funnier every time it resurfaces. It is exactly the kind of unnecessary detail Hole! commits to so completely that it eventually feels entirely at home in this bizarre little universe.

For all its filth, there remains something unexpectedly tender underneath Hole!. Connor and Luke’s journey takes them from unquestioning belief, through sexual awakening, to the realisation that discovering who they are does not necessarily erase their desire to belong. The show manages to take religious repression, queerness and chosen family seriously while wrapping them in one of the stupidest theatrical premises imaginable. Somehow, beneath all the plugging, deplugging and anus-first apocalypse, there is real sweetness.

The expanded staging and costume design make the world of Garth feel much more tangible than before. Brasch and Milena now appear more convincingly cult-like, almost alien at times, and the added visual language allows this strange world to feel clearer and more fully realised. It is a bigger production, but crucially not a bloated one. The added detail expands the Hole! without plugging up the scrappy charm that made it so successful in the first place.

Even seconds-long interruptions to seductively drink from Stanley cups become perfectly judged comic moments, the pair stretching the silence while winking, flirting and playing with each other and the audience. Their control of the room is effortless, and Hole! is often at its funniest when they allow a ridiculous moment just that little bit too long to breathe.

Hole! remains one of those rare Fringe shows where the stupidity is the sophistication. Every ridiculous choice is pursued to its absolute limit, but Brasch and Milena never lose sight of the strange sweetness sitting underneath it all. The world is clearer, the production is bigger and the joke somehow still has plenty of room to go deeper.

The bottom line? A year later, those five stars are still coming out of every orifice.

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Cowbarn at Underbelly Bristo Square

Until 30th August (except 17th)

2130 - 2250

Tickets Here