Improvised Comedy Xmas Show!

Deck the Halls with wit and folly! This Thursday night I'll be performing with my professional impro group The Big Hoo-Haa Melbourne in our XMAS MEGA SHOW! Everything will be totally improvised and LOLtastic! It's our last show of 2014 and also our last ever show at The Portland Hotel - which has been our home for the past 4 years. We will be announcing our exciting new venue at the show! Details here.

Q&A Hosting - La Mama Theatre

On Tuesday 9th December at 9.30pm I will be hosting a Q&A Forum at La Mama Theatre, Carlton, following a performance of Dog Day Trio as part of the Explorations season. I've done Q&A hosting before and love engaging with the audience and creatives in a way that is so different to what I'm used to as an actor. 


Festival Entertainment

Another job I do regularly is Roving Characters at Festivals and this weekend is no exception. Today, my duo "The Litter Sisters" (who are experts in talking rubbish) roved the Johnston Street Festival in Fitzroy. We had a hoot bantering with everyone and anyone and introducing our pooch puppet to the crowd. We also wore a lot of ridiculous things.

Lotta and Lolly Litter AKA The Litter Sisters. I'm on the right looking particularly silly.

MC Gig

I've done quite a bit of MCing in my time from music festival stages to large-scale corporate functions to cabaret nights and now, I can add to my list book launches. Last night, I MCed the launch of "The One Breast Goddess" - an inspirational book written by life coach and acting teacher, Clare Elizabeth Dea. It was a fantastic evening with live music and speeches and plenty of bad puns from me!

Corporate Video Shoot

This week I shot a corporate video playing the lead role for Westpac. I got to play a Restaurant Owner transitioning to a new EFTPOS system. I love doing Corporate Videos!

Monologue for a Murderer

I'm currently in rehearsal for an intriguing new play called "Monologue for a Murderer" by Kate Rice and directed by Jeremy Rice of Always Working Artists. It's an intense play which delves into the dark depths of a high school shooting that took place in Germany in 2002. Our season at La Mama Courthouse runs from Wed 29th Oct - Sun 9th Nov. Further info and tix here.

Virginia Woolf Radio Play Recording

Yesterday, we spent the day in the Studio at 3MBS Radio recording our beloved Radio Play on Virginia Woolf. Such an interesting, ongoing project which began its life at La Mama theatre's Explorations Season last year as a Play with Songs, now it's a Radio Play. Who knows what it will become next? It's our own creation, which gives us the power and pleasure to develop it into whatever we want. We have the highly experienced Faye Bendrups as Composer and Musical Director and the inimitable Peter Green as Producer. Stay tuned - literally!

Claire Nicholls & Andi Snelling recording Virginia Woolf Radio Play, September 2014 (Open Cage Photography)

#TrueRomansAll - my next project

Here is a thing what I find myself in...

It's a special collaboration between Bell Shakespeare and Pop Up Playground and is based on Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. #TrueRomansAll will pull together site-specific performance, improvisation and Shakespeare, all under the umbrella of 'Choose-Your-Own-Adventure.' I will be performing the role of Calpurnia - Caesar's wife - and cannot wait to hit the rehearsal room.


The Lion's Bride Q&A Hosting

There's a nifty little show on next week at the Northcote Town Hall called The Lion's Bride by innatum theatre. It's got all those ingredients which I love - physical theatre, mask work and poetry. I'm excited to have been asked by the company's artistic director Tammie Kite, to host the post-show Q&A Session next Thursday 28th August. In preparation, I'll be reading Gwen Harwood's poetry, which isn't bad homework to have now, is it?

Short Film Shoot

Last weekend, I shot a dark, grotesque short film called Boots, written and directed by Greg Carroll. I have worked with Greg in theatre before, so it was a fun experience working with him in a film context - such a different medium. It was also inspiring working with Andre de Vanny, an actor whose work I admire and who I recently saw star in a very slick production of Glory Dazed at Red Stitch. I can't wait to see the final cut of the film.

Feature in the Melbourne Observer

I have never observed the Melbourne Observer, but obviously they have observed me! Below is their feature on Quills by Mockingbird Theatre, playing at the Arts House Meat Market until August 15th.

Interview on SBS Radio

I've just had the pleasure of being interviewed in French by Jean-Noel Ducasse on SBS 1 Radio as part of their French Arts segment today. He chatted to me about my role in Mockingbird Theatre's production of Quills (opening tomorrow) and my career so far as a Melbourne-based actor who has spent a lot of time in the industry in Europe. You can listen to the interview here.

Quills Trailer

I dare you to look away. You won't be able to.

The trailer for the upcoming production of "Quills" by Mockingbird Theatre, in which I play the roles of Madame Royer-Collard and Lunatic. It's wonderfully debauched and macabre.

Accent Mania!

I've had quite the accent mash-up week. Just as I was in the thick of working on my R.P accent for Quills which opens in 2 weeks, I landed a voice-over job requiring an Egyptian and a Romanian accent. Thanks to my degree in foreign languages, and an obscure passion for linguistics, I am able to hear the nuances of accents quite quickly and precisely. And so I had a great time in the studio yesterday recording these clips and it's always useful to add new accents to my repertoire.

Virginia Woolf Radio Play

Last year, I co-penned and co-devised a nifty little Play with Songs on Virginia Woolf and the women of the Bloomsbury Group. We took our inspiration from Woolf's "A Room of One's Own." We performed it to sold-out houses at La Mama as part of their excellent Explorations season. This year, we are transforming our gem of a piece into a Radio Play which we will be recording in the coming months. It's a wonderful challenge to create a project from scratch, particularly about such a heavily analysed historical figure, and then continue to re-work and re-work and re-work it! The songs, composed by Faye Bendrups, are absolute genius and capture the essence of the struggles, the creativity and the wit of these incredible Bloomsbury women. I look forward to further research on Vanessa Bell - the role I play - and the next phase in this ever ongoing process of co-devising.

Claire Nicholls as Virginia Woolf and myself as Vanessa Bell.

Improvised Singing

I had a fantastic weekend participating in a very fun workshop run by Impromptunes, whereby I learnt some tricks and traps of improvising songs. Generally, when I do impro, I love the chance to improvise a song, but I'd never properly learnt about song structure, so it was great approaching it from a more concrete foundation. I also discovered that I can get away with rhyming "Swamp" with "Forest Gump" (when sung in a Forest Gump-like accent!)

Quills - Mockingbird Theatre

I'm thrilled to have been cast in the roles of Madame Royer-Collard/Lunatic in Mockingbird Theatre's production of Quills by Doug Wright, to be performed at the Arts House Meat Market in North Melbourne from 1 - 15 August and directed by Chris Baldock. This will be a wonderful opportunity to develop my own Lunatic character from scratch and improvise this throughout the play. On top of that, I will also be playing dominatrix Madame Royer-Collard who is in the midst of leaving her husband . I look forward to an intense personal journey with this project.

The Penelopiad Pitch!

A show I performed in last year, The Penelopiad by Stork Theatre, was recently accepted by Regional Arts Victoria to pitch to go on tour next year. Our original run of this gem of a show was hugely successful, selling out every single show for 3 weeks straight, as well as garnering #9 in Timeout's Top Ten Best Theatre Shows of 2013 and making it into TheAge theatre critic Cameron Woohead's 'Best Of' wrap-up for 2013. And so, today, we proudly pitched our show to a full house at the MTC. It was such a joy to re-visit the text and songs again and even more special, was the re-connecting with the cast again on stage.