The MILKYVERSE

The MILK canon is rightly capitalised because it is very loud (like a canon, wow) and chaotic. “It’s like Wipeout but inside!”, creator Sean Burnett Dugdale-Martin yells in a press release, proving my point. MILK is long-form improv meets water balloons, whereby a group of players – in this case Salomé Grace Neely, Anna Barker, Sarah Penny, Adriana Dana Vasinca, and Ezra Prattley – create a story out of suggestions from the audience, who pelt them with projectiles whenever they want something onstage to change.

This could be as simple as a performer going from happy to sad, stoked about a hegg (hairy egg, of course) to grossed out by it, or it could be as dire and consequential as a death in the MILK family. This happens when a seemingly ordinary, secretly legendairy water balloon explodes, revealing its creamy contents and changing the course of the show forever.

In The MILKYVERSE, which MC Dugdale-Martin introduces in a fittingly hilarious and hectic manner (in fact, they even forget to tell us what to do with the water balloons) (all good, it’s pretty self-explanatory), our protagonist (Dana Vasinca) has moved out of Mum/Grandma’s (Grace Neely) home into a flat with an exceedingly hairy roommate (Prattley) whose mum (Barker) has a hernia, according to a doctor moonlighting as Chappell Roan (Penny). Tasked with clearing the hair out of the flat lest the Milkyverse combust, the protagonist travels to a different dimension where people (especially whoever Barker is playing at the time) can open doors with their minds! Only doors in their line of vision though! Still, impressive!

Special shoutout to design lead and technician Anne Larcom for a brilliant insertion of Enya’s Only Time in The MILKYVERSE, the third out of six milky seasons that I’ve seen. I love these fun and funny, silly and soggy shows and lean into each one harder than the last. In fact, as a fresher for 2022’s MILKOWEEN!, I threw no balloons! For my second encounter, Milly Monka’s MILK Factory (2023), I threw one! And for The MILKYVERSE, I threw 2(%)! Get it, like two-percent milk!

I will now officially sign off and leave the puns to the experts: Ruff as Gutz, who have churned out yet another udderly fantastic show. Whey to go!