Clyde Built Theatre’s The Real Housewives of the Zombie Apocalypse is like any Real Housewives reunion — only there’s flesh eating zombies with a craving for Ozempic, drama, and less than legal business practices. The dead rise as the housewives argue, until all but two have been bitten. There are all kinds of receipts, timelines, and screenshots in this reunion… except for characters you can actually connect with.
As a Real Housewives fan, the thought of marquee stars Lisa Rinna and Jen Shah crossing franchises and banding together in their million-dollar mansions to fight the living dead is hilarious. The cast are clearly passionate, especially the housewives, who each have a Real Housewives archetype to follow: from the one with questionable sources of income, to the one who definitely doesn’t run a cult.
Pandora (Rachel Hepburn) and Alexandra (Eliza Twaddle) are the highlights of the cast. At times I thought Erika Jayne was making a surprise appearance as Pandora with her snide remarks and side eyes. Twaddle also does a great job at portraying a dull, ex-country star, legacy housewife.
Despite these performances, the show falls flat. It introduces us to a new group of housewives that the audience feel no connection to, making it hard to relate to or root for them. Emotional moments such as Penelope (Roslyn Dale) missing her husband are forced and drag on longer than they should. What makes Real Housewives such a good watch is seeing the highs and lows of their lives, alongside their outrageous personalities; in The Real Housewives of the Zombie Apocalypse, this is nowhere to be found.
Laughs come few and far between, though this may be because the audience couldn’t hear the cast for most of the show, as the mics were perpetually either too loud or too quiet. For a show based on one of the most controversial and joked-about TV franchises, there were also markedly few jokes and references to its source material.
Overall, The Real Housewives of the Zombie Apocalypse left me disappointed. The cast embodied their assigned housewife types perfectly, knowing when to be snarky and when to be “authentic” (by Real Housewives standards) but the writing and music let them down, failing to strike a chord with the audience.
The Real Housewives of the Zombie Apocalypse is running until 22 August at Forest Theatre at Greenside @ George Street. Buy tickets here.
Image provided by Clyde Built Theatre to The Student as press material.
