Hotshow: Lucky You

Published on Wednesday 6 August 2008 20:34

LUCKY YOU **** ASSEMBLY @ ASSEMBLY HALL (VENUE 35)

CARL Hiaasen is famously protective of his work. In the author's Florida home, there is said to be a cabinet stacked full with rejected movie adaptations of his books, something the Demi Moore-starring erotic farce version of Strip Tease can probably take an ignominious bow for.

Director Matthew Francis's production of Hiaasen's 1997 bestseller Lucky You makes its debut at the Fringe with some anticipation, then, for carrying a hearty stamp of approval from the author, who watched an early staged reading and declared it "the best adaptation of my work I've seen".

But it's easy to appreciate why he thought that right from the opening jovial ukulele tune by legendary American folkie Loudon Wainwright III, who was commissioned to record a soundtrack for the play, his sardonic wit an inspirational match for Hiaasen's similarly crisp satirical tone.

Sunshine State veterinarian JoLayne Lucks (Nicola Alexis) wins $14 million in the lottery, but it's a split jackpot – the other winning stub belongs to Chub (Corey Johnson) and Bode (Paul Reynolds), two gun-toting, glue-sniffing white supremacist paranoid goons who want the full $28 million prize to fund a redneck militia.

The resulting scramble, which pulls a journalist, a Hooters waitress and a shop clerk into the fray, is screwball and slightly predictable; it's the surging hysteria of the characters that drives the play – or rather bounces it around zanily as if it were a rubber ball.

Lucks' various religious loony neighbours – two of whom have a scam going with a wonky fibreglass Madonna shrine, and another that believes she once saw Jesus in a road stain – are particularly daft and brilliant. But the stand-out performances come from the racist, bigoted hicks – Johnson's barrel-chested numbskull, and Reynolds' delusional military fetishist.

Between them they steal the best scene (when Chub is set upon by a belligerent crab) and the best line ("f***in' amateurs" – Bode's retort when, following an anti-Hispanic rant about how true Americans are of European descent, he's reminded which continent Spain is in).

This is colourful, madcap, bold and enthralling stuff, which might just make Hiaasen a little less precious with the rest of his oeuvre.

• Until 25 August. Today 2:15pm