'It's Wild, It's Bold':
Freak Show Fit For All
Rosemary Neill | The Weekend Australian Magazine
September 13, 2024
This is Bezzina’s fifth festival. Under her tenure, Queensland’s biggest annual cultural event has solidified its reputation as one of Australia’s most significant and ambitious festivals. Bezzina says her lineup this year is “a celebration of difference, humanity and joy”, and an invitation to different audiences – whatever their gender, ethnicity, sexuality or social class – to “find your fit”.
Reflecting this theme, The No Bang Theory is an entertaining one-person show that uses classic musicals as a vehicle to question popular culture’s reductive depictions of autism.
Sitting comfortably under Bezzina’s “find your fit” banner is The No Bang Theory, the one-man show that deftly uses the musicals obsession of Gen Z writer-performer Oliver-Hetherington-Page to challenge myths about “cute” autism. Rotating through a series of lorikeet-bright jackets, Hetherington-Page is a 26-year-old musicals nerd who is “surprisingly heterosexual”, on the spectrum and a virgin.
He is also a gifted singer and writer of biting satire who reckons shows such as The Big Bang Theory are maddening. He claims the award-winning sitcom makes its apparently autistic protagonist, Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons), the butt of every joke. And although Sheldon constantly says inappropriate things, he gets his girl.
In contrast, Hetherington-Page declares “there is no banging here … or, as Sheldon Cooper would say it, coitus’’. He has been longing for a girlfriend since he was an adolescent but the stars have never aligned for this young man who went to see Wicked 10 times and affects a Dame Edna-style sense of superiority towards his straight man accompanist, Tim Forrester.
None of this is to suggest The No Bang Theory is self-pitying. On the contrary, Hetherington-Page is an entertaining storyteller with an encyclopaedic knowledge of musicals and his solo show is, as the blurb promises, “packed with more banging show tunes than a night of karaoke.