Escape to the Megaverse

Brothers Eden and Josh are stuck doing the same show every night but want to break out and do something different for a change. They find themselves lost in the Megaverse and seamlessly jumping between sketches. They cover Game Boys’ signature 90s pop-culture nostalgia and TV and film as well as a healthy dose of pure fun, even one scene that feels truly magical. 

The show is driven by Eden and Josh complaining about performing the same thing over and over again. They open a portal to the future and talk to themselves from the end of that night’s show to check in on how they went. This conversation is repeated in reverse at the end of the show as part of the finale.
After this introduction, the show jumps into more traditional sketches including a parody of The Bachelor involving a live camera feed which brings audience members onto our on-stage screen, as contestants while they sit in their seats. 

There’s a mimed high energy covid RAT test set to music by RATATAT and featuring a lot of famous rats. 

A poorly deep faked Mark Zuckerberg appears and tries to sue the boys for copyright infringement against Meta. This culminates in Mark Zuckerberg downloading himself into the physical realm and being defeated by his only weakness – a falling share price. This scene devoles heavily into Star Wars references placing Mark Zuckerberg as The Emperor.

After vanquishing Mark Zuckerberg we stop for a news break with GB24. Some joke headlines give way to a cross to the ‘Gambling Desk’ for all the latest gambling news. In a segment sponsored by Fest Bet and hosted by Chook and The Reverend, this sketch takes aim at the oversaturation of gambling ads. They talk through all the different gambling companies as if they’re sports teams and talk about their latest player recruits aka ‘problem gamblers’.

Next we utilise live green screen to perform a VR trip outside the venue to go across the road for a sausage roll from the local petrol station. While the audience watches a first person POV on the screen they are confronted by various hazards on their journey. The audience chooses what genre the interactions will be performed as including Noir, Fantasy, Children’s Show, Sci-Fi and Equine. 

Following this, we have some more fun with the green screen and use Eden’s head as a basketball to perform some spectacular moves all backed to Harlem Globetrotters music. 

The next scene involves a mock rehearsal between the two brothers practising a segment from earlier in the show. As they give notes to each other, they swap themselves out with audience members who are given scripts to continue the scene and then start giving notes to each other in a kind of endless loop where it ends up with entirely audience members on stage. This continues with the audience members being scripted to describe how ‘this bit is only funny because it’s done by an audience member’ – critiquing our own ideas, very meta. This culminates in the whole audience joining in with a script to follow on screen before busting out into a giant live sized game of Tetris. 

We have giant flat Tetris pieces that we feed into the back row who then pass them down to the front. The camera will capture the audience ‘playing space’ and display it on screen while the audience attempts to pass the pieces down to create a line. With all the sound effects and music you’d expect. 

In a stark change of pace we move to a silent piece performed to music. Eden wants to eat some cereal but is missing a spoon. A digital spoon appears on screen with Josh controlling it while wearing a green glove in front of the side of stage green screen to give the illusion that the spoon is floating on the screen. Eden attempts to interact with it in various ways and has to work out how he can transform the digital spoon into a real one. We go through many attempts – at one point he pulls a real green spoon out from behind the TV. 

The big finale for the show is our attempt to create a full scale multicam sitcom live on stage. We detail the plot of our very own 90s sitcom which we’ve written. The show culminates with us living out our sitcom fantasy complete with opening credits, theme song, laugh track and even three cameras. Using QR codes, we use audience members’ phones to be the cameras which get displayed on the screen and cut between like a real life sitcom. It’s our dream of ours to be in our own sitcom and this is the closest we’ll ever get – whether it’s a great success or huge failure, it’ll be fun either way!

As the wrap up of the show we open the portal again to revisit our past selves and bring on our big emotional finish. It’s legendary singer Kamahl singing a version of ‘What a Wonderful World’ with altered lyrics which talk through all the sketches everyone has just witnessed. 

There are themes of repetition and revision in this show which we use to critique our own creative process and let the audience be a part of that. They help mould parts of the show for what is truly their own unique, one of a kind performance for that night.