Nik Rabinowitz - uNIK
If everything feels like a cheap Chinese knock-off, uNik will remind you that we are all unique. Are you living on Credit Crunch cereal? Is your carbon footprint a size 13? Do you no longer feel like you're one in a million? There is hope, because well-known award-winning stand-up comedian of year 2008/2009 NIK RABINOWITZ, returns to Jozi with a comedy show that will leave you shouting "YES WE CAN!" Even if we can't. Directed by Brent Palmer and co-written by Tom Eaton, this is a must-see for lovers of comedy!
One Man One Goat
By Moira de Swardt, 1 February 2008
Nik Rabinowitz, is a boy from Plumstead West, or Grassy Park North, anything but Constantia, Cape Town. He speaks fluent Xhosa and does an absolutely marvelous array of South African accents.
His humour his sharp and it runs the whole range of South African, and international stereotypical and real characters, taking stabs at the inner goats of Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, suggesting that Jacob Zuma do soap adverts for Lifebuoy and he regales the audience with stories of the visit Madame Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka to Australia where she is enthusiastically greeted by an ex-pat who mistakes her for Beauty, a domestic worker. However, the Deputy President takes this in good part, has tea with the white ex-pat and even does a few loads of laundry and the dishes in the interests of service delivery.
His rugby commentary, Eastern Cape style is as loud and funny as his recounting of London tube rides and meeting a black ex-pat working at the airport.
His goat shines only briefly as Rabinowitz discusses Xhosa traditional healers, sangomas and the ancestors, often reverting to isiXhosa to the great amusement of people who understood what he was saying. I suspect that not everything he had to say was reverent. I gathered this goat reference was a follow up to a show not performed in Gauteng and as such some of the humour may have been lost. I was rather relieved that Rabinowitz didnt use the opportunity to work in Johannesburg to indulge in Capetonian rudeness, based on a sense of superiority/inferiority, towards the local audience and there were no putdowns of any nature.
The performance is not suitable for young children because of mild sexual content and it does make use of swear words, but stops short of blasphemy as Rabinowitz documents, amusingly, his recent return to Jewish Orthodoxy in an account of an officer-of-the-law policing pork product transportation.
No one gets left out, the Queen, Bush, Charlize Theron, Paris Hilton, Miriam Makeba singing the Click Song, PAGAD and Nelson Mandela meeting the Spice Girls all get targeted.
It ends with a suggestion for a real Survivor show, Survivor Hanover Park.
All in all, this is upbeat and funny and I went home smiling.
One Man, One Goat starring Nik Rabinowitz is on at The Tesson Theatre, Johannesburg Civic Theatre until 24 February 2008.
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