Jonny & The Baptists hit on the laughter cure at Oxford

Dance Like It Never Happened: Jonny and the Baptists at the Old Fire Station Oxford, on Saturday, June 1. Review by Jon Lewis

Dance Like It Never Happened was meant to be a show about grief by former Oxford-based musician-comedians Jonny Donahoe and Paddy Gervers. Both lost people close to them before and during the pandemic and they wanted to honour them with songs. During the pandemic Donohoe caught Covid on the first day of the first lockdown and was ill for the subsequent 10 months. He caught it twice again. Gervers, who hasn’t yet caught Covid, developed mental health problems.

Mental health has been a struggle for Donohoe as he suggested in Duncan MacMillan’s award-winning Every Brilliant Thing which toured to Oxford’s North Wall in 2015. Mental health was also a key theme in the two Christmas productions Donohoe wrote for the Old Fire Station, Thirty Christmases in 2016 and Working Christmas in 2017, both with music by Gervers.

During lockdown, the duo started a mental health podcast which they still record, mostly every week.

The show they intended was to be serious in intention, but still entertaining.

What the audience got, in the duo’s ‘favourite’ theatre on the tour ‘except for a couple’, playing a sold-out gig to an audience who knows them well, was a riotously funny improv night with wickedly delicious song lyrics that veer from the very silly to the highly erudite.

They decided to mix up past hits with new songs from Dance Like It Never Happened, blending in anecdotes about an Old Testament musical they are writing, but don’t think they’ll ever complete.

The pair’s rapport is evident throughout having worked together for 11 years, and this enables them to ride out Donohoe’s unexpected (really?) decision to perform The Frog Song, where he plays God – ‘typecast again’ – sending a plague of frogs to earth.

He jumps manically about the stage inventing his lyrics while Gervers’ verses are word perfect, ‘because it’s my job’, Gervers says laconically. Garden of Eden about Adam’s woman-blaming actions, and Isaac, about the worst possible parental love, give a hint of the potential production.

The jokes, and their targets, come thick and fast – Laurence Fox, particularly targeted.

A wonderful night.