The Voodoo Rooms provide old-school trendy surroundings for a comedy variety show. Unfortunately ‘Three Balls and a New suit’ does not return the favour. The show does not offer sufficient spectacular or impressive tricks to balance out the disproportionate number of stories, anecdotes and experiences this sole juggler offers up. Mat Ricardo begins his show parading on stage and announcing that it is to be an honest, genuine and truthful piece on his life as a touring and successful juggler. His bill brags ‘every dark revelation is lightened by his dry wit and his truly phenomenal skills’, but the honesty of this claim is soon proved false. It is heavily weighted in favour of his non-stop chat rather than these ‘phenomenal skills’.Ricardo demonstrates great rapport with the audience and brilliant stage presence, easily ad-libbing between tricks and anecdotes. It’s just unfortunate that we don’t get to see enough of his talents, and that the program is so fragmented by the joke-trick-joke order. Each joke that received a laugh was then discussed, losing all the original humour.Ricardo pulls himself back with his excellent trick (one of but a few) of balancing cigar boxes on top of a plastic cigar poking out of his mouth, all of it topped with a glass full of ‘stage wine’. The show needed to be peppered more with impressive tricks like these to entertain.
