A collection of some of the city’s most hilarious women will come together from July 5 to July 11 Flipside@ The Baxter. The line-up includes honorary ‘crack’ Marc Lottering, award-winning comic actress Anthea Thompson, two young actresses who are cooking up a storm on the comedy circuit, namely Shimmy Isaacs and Anne Hirsch, and the veteran award-winning columnist, Marianne Thamm.
Thamm, who has been hatching this concept for several years, believes that women make comedy differently from men and with ‘Cracks and the City’, ‘Cracks Only’ offers a more nuanced space for these female performers to make their comic magic.

Marc Lottering is an honorary ‘crack’ because he just is. One of this country’s most beloved comedians, Marc has become a household name since his stage debut in 1997. He is helping the sisters to do it for themselves because he can and they want him to.

Anthea Thompson is one the country’s most watchable stage and television actresses. She has had a long and successful theatre and television career and will be remembered for her triumphant performance in a recent production of Shirley Valentine at the Kalk Bay Theatre. 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 autobiographical play, Allie Pad Funny Worcester, has just been selected as one of two plays voted “Best of the Ikhwezi Festival” and enjoyed a two week run at the Golden Arrow Studio at the Baxter. The play combined stand-up comedy and physical theatre to tell her life story and introduce the characters that impacted on and shaped it. Shimmy’s first stage play, Dens Wit Me, was co-written with Levi Saville and Vicki Bawcombe, and became the sleeper hit of the National Festival of the Arts in Grahamstown in 2007. She played the role of Julia. 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. She is currently running Comedy Wednesdays at Stardust Theatrical Dining in Tygervalley, which hosts the best comedy line-up in the Cape.

Whilst 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. The show is rumoured to be funny.

Cracks and the City is at Flipside@Baxter from 5 to 10 July at 9pm and 11 July at 6pm with tickets costing R85 per person or R170 for the show and a meal from Tuesday to Thursday only. PG 13. For block bookings and charities call 021 680 3962.