Dinner
You can honestly have a rollicking good knees-up at Witches in Britches. We know. We’ve had one. But that’s more something you’ll conjure from your soul than your surroundings. As far as novelty dining goes, this is just so daggy it comes full circle and becomes great. Visiting the bar helps – a ghoulish den replete with faux snakes and eyeballs where jugs of Carlton Draught, busty wenches and syrupy Love Bite cocktails provide a bolstering shot in the arm. This isn’t such food as chefs or diners dreams are made of – squishy pasta licked with a tame Napoli sauce is followed by your choice of two mains and a chewy date pudding, seemingly fresh from the microwave. Our lamb actually has a decent slow-cooked stickiness, and though the chips and lettuce both want for crispness they provide the much-needed ballast to get you from door to the post-show disco in an upright fashion. Keep your mind ratcheted wide open. If in doubt, just add beer. It gets better, we promise. GC
...and the show
The venue is decked according to a low-budget exploitation horror theme, but the stage show tends toward rude, pop-culture parodies. The gags come thick and fast, the good, the bad and the heinous. The brow is so low it might as well be a simian shelf: words like puerile, distasteful and imbecilic spring easily to mind. But there’s an infectious earnestness, too – the warmth of improv comedy – which is guaranteed to win over all but the most self-righteous. There are some decent singing voices in the cast, but the heart of the show is James Seamark, a priapic little goblin whose shuddering pelvis will be in your face all night. A new show is due to be launched in May, which is good, because the current routine – “Witches of Oz” – has worn perilously thin in places. Still, if your tastes are broad enough – like, Broadmeadows broad – the witches and their tiny, tiny britches will, as promised, have you in stitches. AF