The Politics of Vodka Lime & Soda | T!ts Akimbo

Watching the Politics of Vodka Lime and Soda was a nice change of pace from a usual night out in the Valley. The raucous, colourful and entertaining show took place in Blutes, a bar in the middle of Brunswick street mall. It featured three young women trying to have a good night out in the face of their insecurities, dealing with men and breaking out into awesome karaoke numbers.

I was genuinely really delighted by the musical numbers, and I was surprised because that's usually not my thing. They were really fun and would cut between sharp cheesy choreography in the characters heads, to their real life drunken stumbling and screaming into the microphone. I think this would have been really easy to mess up but the way it broke up the action was really natural and the actors' delivery had me deep belly laughing at several points.  

While that aspect of the show was almost fantastical, I thought they balanced it well with a grounded story. The show would occasionally cut to the critiques of a male dramaturg who was speaking with the director and was hypercritical of the woman focused perspective of the story. He questioned whether or not they were alienating men in their audience, gave them condescending advice about the marketing and producing of the show and criticised their characters for being unlikeable. He was a little funny and over the top but it was really clear that his character was an amalgamation of all of the transparently misogynistic critiques they had received in the creation of this work. He was a joke that the creators and the audience were all in on, and for me invited questions of how exactly I related to the work.

There were a few bits that made me laugh pretty hard because I had been in very simmilar situations just the night before, and there were parts that I personally didn't connect with as someone who really doesn't interact with men when I'm out. Two of the characters were queer and the disscussions of it felt kind of squashed in with the rest of the story, it didn't seem to have any affect on the way the women acted in this space. Only considering that the characters were trying to date and be desirable, that fell a little flat for me.

On the other hand there was a discussion towards the end of the show that felt like one of the most honest and grounded parts in the work. The main character, Iz, was drunkenly comparing their night to the metaphor of a tree falling in a forest and nobody being there to hear it. "If we come out and we sit here, and nobody comes up to us, did we really even come out at all?" It was goofy but it also reflected a mindset that I see all the time and have to fight against personally almost every time I go out. I liked the metaphor they used because it fit really well with that feeling but showed how ridiculous that mindset is when you take a step back from it. And like they said in the show, it's nice to know it's not just me.

So even when the perspective didn't line up with my own I still found it was authentic and honest and very entertaining. The bar setting was really cool and it felt very warm and lived in, with a responsive audience who I think felt quite at home, laughing loudly and groaning knowingly along with the characters. It was really cool to be able to go into a bar in the valley and see a piece of theater and they even opened up for karaoke right afterwards.  I’m really looking forward to seeing what the collective, T!ts Akimbo, does next!