- A Succulent Chinese Musical?! is the latest meme-to-musical success.
- Performing at Sydney Fringe Festival, this production takes a close look at the life and crimes of Jack Karlson.
- Karlson’s spectacular 1991 arrest outside of a Chinese restaurant in Brisbane is picked apart with extraordinary wit.
Turning memes into musicals is a pointed comment on how absurd life has been since “going viral” became a household phrase.
And yet here we are, at the Sydney Fringe Festival, seated in Darlinghurst’s beautiful Eternity Playhouse while the life of “notorious crim” Jack Karlson is cleverly retraced with as much theatricality and laugh-out-loud humour as the man deserved. The conceit? Eating a meal, a succulent Chinese meal.
Back in 1991, Jack Karlson was arrested outside the China Sea Restaurant in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley. His arrest was daring, dazzling and oddly Shakespearean, owing to Karlson’s unique verbiage: a hybrid of rehearsed grandiosity and bargain bin bogan-ism that neither Kath nor Kim could ever understand.
A rollicking roll of the r’s buried Karlson’s spectacular arrest deep into the Australian psyche. “Gentlemen, this is democrrrrrracy manifest,” replaced Anchorman and Borat quotes as unimpeachable apex humour that still, 16 years after the video was first uploaded onto the World Wide Web, inspires deep, side-splitting belly laughs. “Very nice, how much?’ could never.
It starts with a ticket! For more information or to grab a ticket, click here
The charge: Performing a musical. A Succulent Chinese Musical.
Although it has only played in Adelaide and Sydney thus far, Kate Stewart’s A Succulent Chinese Musical?! is poised to become one of the finest meme-to-musical adaptations to date. Stewart and co-writer Rick Butler have turned in a beautifully balanced piece that uses factual pieces of Karlson’s backstory to construct a fantastical narrative parsing every pivotal moment that led to the weirdest arrest ever put to film.
The real-life Jack Karlson came from a life of insurmountable hardship and loss, spurring him towards a laundry-list of institutions, homes and prisons. He was a convicted criminal who had escaped gaol three times, and, from the man himself, desired freedom over everything else. As per reports, he was also a very kind and optimistic amateur playwright, often described as “larger-than-life” and adventurous.
This fractured personality is captured beautifully by Butler, who embodies Jack Karlson with nuance and a seething wit that really cuts through. His sharply-drawn caricature tracks Karlson’s linguistic upbringing from the moment he befriends fellow inmate and playwright Jim McNeil (true story), played with equal heft by Max Newstead.
If the script is to be believed, it was his budding relationship with McNeil that inspired Karlson’s colourful personality, shifting him from an “unschooled vagabond,” who describes prison food as “dry as a dead dingo’s donger,” to an artiste with an uncanny knack for phraseology. After his first on-stage arrest, the two form a bond that’s built as much on fantasy as freedom, escaping prison and kickstarting an overindulgent criminal career where jewellery heists become a means of making money, and a string of dine-and-dash incidents becomes a way of preserving it.
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Unfazed by relentless pursuit from Mellisa Glinn’s dogged Constable JJ, Karlson eventually meets and marries Victoria Luxton’s vivacious Eve Karlson, the Bonnie to his Clyde and a catalyst for a deeper journey into a life of crime. By this point, Jack has built up such a distinctive way of being that his moment of fame feels like an inevitability.
And that’s because of these impressive songs. From “I See You Know Your Judo Well” to “I’m Under What,” musical director Vincent Huynh and musician Jeremy Kindl do plenty of heavy-lifting while each song steadily works in quotes from Karlson’s arrest to show how this man’s way of talking naturally evolved over the years. “I’m Under What” is particularly memorable; a scene of extraordinary wit where Karlson’s urgent question serves as a punctuation mark to each piece of dialogue, building with the furious chaos of a Vegas showstopper.
Butler and Stewart know their way around a sentence. How they work in subtle, hilarious references to Chinese food throughout the 60-minute production adds another layer of sharp humour that’s impossible to forget. From Karlson calling Eve his “dumpling darling” to a scene arguing over the correct pronunciation of Chow Mein (Chow Mine, Chow Meen or Chow Main?). It’s hard to imagine a Sydney Fringe Festival show as funny as this (and yet the festival always manages to surprise).
Special mention must be given to Tisha R. Kelemen, who is billed as “Everyone Else,” playing everyone from a judge to an Irish Judo coach and an overly emotional Chinese restaurant waitress. Butler remains the star of the show, but his fellow cast members are so utterly brilliant that his pin-point impersonation of Australia’s favourite illicit impresario often fades into the background.
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A Succulent Chinese Musical?! is what happens when everyone brings their finest form to the table. I don’t think anyone would go into this expecting a seriously impressive piece of theatre. The very idea makes it sound like a quick cash-grab, a gimmick riding on the back of internet fame. That couldn’t be further from the truth; this production puts meme humour in a headlock and deepens the lore of Australia’s most singular criminal.
A Succulent Chinese Musical?!
Where: Eternity Playhouse; 39 Burton St, Darlinghurst NSW 2010
When: September 3-13, 2025
Price: $42
A Succulent Chinese Musical?! has wrapped up its run at Sydney Fringe Festival, but you can still grab tickets to many of the month’s biggest highlights over at sydneyfringe.com.
