All-female comedy quartet, Cracks Only, for regular end-of-month Baxter gig.

The Baxter is proud to announce that Cape Town’s all-female comedy sensation, Cracks Only, kick off their year-long, month-end series of gigs at the Baxter’s Flipside on Friday, January 28.

The Cracks, award-winning actress Anthea Thompson, comedy stars Shimmy Isaacs and Anne Hirsch, and veteran columnist Marianne Thamm, caused a minor sensation with their show, Cracks And The City, directed by Alan Committie, which played at the Baxter in July last year before transferring for a three-week run at On Broadway.

Each month the Cracks will serve up a fresh cocktail of stand-up, music, brand new filmed sketches, which have become a much-anticipated part of the show. Celebrity guests will include the likes of political icon, Evita Bezuidenhout, internationally acclaimed crime writer, Margie Orford and South Africa’s own Janis Joplin, Karen Zoid. Other surprise guests who will feature will be announced later.

Make a regular month-end date with hilarity.

Seating in the new venue is limited so book early. Shows start at 9.30pm and last approximately 70 minutes.

Say “yes” to Cracks

Anthea Thompson is one of this city and the country’s most watchable stage and television actresses and will be remembered for a variety of performances including more recently in Shirley Valentine, Educating Rita and Taming of the Shrew. Her television credits include Laugh out Loud for M-Net, Mazinyo.Q, Fela, Madam and Eve and Out on a Limb all for the SABC.

Shimmy Isaacs‘s hilarious and touching autobiographical play, Allie Pad Funny Worcester, was one of two works voted “Best of the Ikhwezi Festival” and has enjoyed considerable success since then including a restaging at the Baxter Golden Arrow Studio this month.

The bitter-sweet but hilarious play shows off Shimmy’s unique stand-up comedy and physical theatre talents and is a breakthrough story of a young woman’s determination to break the cycle of history to chase her dreams.

Shimmy’s first stage play, Dens Wit Me, co-written with Levi Saville and Vicki Bawcombe, was a sleeper hit at the National Festival of the Arts in Grahamstown in 2007. Shimmy, graduated, with honours, from AFDA’s film school before heading for New York where she completed a three-month course in acting at the Black Nexxus Acting school. She has been performing stand-up in Cape Town for the past two years.

Anne Hirsch, born and raised in Bloemfontein, moved to Cape Town where six years later she emerged from UCT with a Masters degree focusing on comedy. She has performed and co-written three successful one woman shows and went on to win SABC’s So You Think You’re Funny? (Season 2) crowning her the funniest new stand-up comedian in the country.

Since then she is the only white woman to have ever performed as part of David Kau’s Blacks Only comedy tour performing to sold out audiences in Bloemfontein, Joburg, Cape Town and Durban.

While Marianne Thamm is better known as an award-winning columnist and journalist (she writes for Fairlady, The Sunday Times and many others) she has led the secret life of a comedian for several years. She first tasted fame (but not fortune) with the Cape Comedy Collective in the late 1990s but opted to return to the more unstable world of freelance journalism.

Marianne won the 2007 South African Comedy Award for Best Humourous Columnist. She performed her comic lecture “Survivor 1970s” for the first time at the command of her Excellency Evita Bezuidenhout at the 2009 Voorkamer Festival in Darling.