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Felix & Friends

 
Johanna Makelainen Review by Johanna Makelainen 4 Published: 19 May 2026 Junk Poets at Caravanserai Show Dates: 1 May 2026-29 May 2026

Not so much a cabaret performance, Felix & Friends is more like a rummage through the stranger cupboards of Brighton performing arts. Hosted by Felix Le Freak, it promises song, surrealism, and smut and delivers all three with the cheerful disregard for good taste.

Obscene, restless and oddly magnetic

Felix presides over the evening as ringmaster, confessor, and resident chaos merchant, pulling the audience through a carousel of musical comedy, clowning, ventriloquism, and deliberately unhinged character work. Her persona is all legs, bad accents, and filthy digressions, with the restless, argumentative energy of someone conducting a committee meeting inside their head. It should be too much. Often it is too much.

The strongest pleasure of the show is its variety. Richard Melanin The Third brings a strain of old-school circus absurdity, complete with Edwardian box-beard, silent showmanship and a knowingly terrible clown act. The material plays with the basics of clown school: disappearing and appearing items, missing fingers, physical slapstick comedy, but there is ageless charm in the commitment.

Lachlan Werner’s Ventiloquest is the sharper and more surprising turn. Brew, the witch puppet, begins as a filthy-mouthed comic device, but the act develops into something stranger: a puppet hypnotising and hacking into the ventriloquist’s subconscious and inviting the audience to join in the rummage. It is rude, funny, and oddly exposing. Beneath the gag is a touching number about control, vulnerability, and the peculiar intimacy of ventriloquism.

The musical material balances the other acts nicely. There is a hilarious rendition of Like A Virgin first made famous by Al Yankovic, and an erratic lip-sync of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. Felix’s grand finale, a doomed love story set in a Brighton gay sauna and climaxing with You Can Wreck My Hole Again, is exactly as delicate as it sounds. It is the kind of ending that knows its audience and refuses to blink first.

For all its deliberate vulgarity, the show has a clear understanding of cabaret as a space for risk, oddity, and transformation. It is not polished, but it has pulse, personality, and a strong sense of its own queer, chaotic ecosystem. At the centre of it all is Felix herself: obscene, restless and oddly magnetic, a character who does not invite you into the madness so much as make it clear you are already part of it.

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The Blurb:

Gird your loins for an evening of song, surrealism and smut! Felix & Friends is Brighton's long running cabaret carousel, hosted by a potty-mouthed drag slag and attended by her very peculiar friends. Expect to hear tragic tales of love and lust as Felix delves elbow deep into the annals of her dating history. Prepare to laugh, cry and squirm as her special guests take the stage to do... unspeakable things. Each show promises new performances, unique experiences and an avalanche of rainbow-flavoured nonsense. So take the plunge and come find us, every Friday night at Caravanserai: Junk Poets. Felix Le Freak is a musical comedian, writer and cabaret performer based in the UK. They are the winner of Drag Idol UK, author of Serving Face and the creator of sell-out productions including Fagwartz; Men and Other Problems; and their long-running variety show, Felix & Friends.