TINA DEL TWIST

An aunt who never quite fitted in

Tina Del Twist is a character rather than a person. She is the invention of the Melbourne actor, singer, writer, director and producer Wes Snelling, who by the time of an Australian Arts Review interview in August 2014 had already spent more than a decade working across radio presenting, tour management and the stage, with credits including La Soiree, Outland, Gingerbread Man The Musical and The Inheritance with Sammy J and Randy. The Age's line on Snelling — "beautiful voice, and a wicked sense of comic timing" — describes the two halves the character runs on.

The conceit of Tina is a woman who was, in her own telling, the friend and confidante of Judy Garland, Bette Davis and Marilyn Monroe, and who has since come down in the world. She arrives with a bottle. She is the bohemian relative, the one who never fitted the family. In an interview with the Edinburgh Fringe site On The Mic, Tina described herself as a middle-ager living alone in the inner city and her comedy as "lightly layered with the dark", naming Nina Simone, Joan Rivers and the cast of The Golden Girls among her reference points. The same interview set out the working method: no scripted crowd work, read the room instead, and "focus on the truth, not in terms of anecdotes, they can be fictitious, but in terms of what truly connects".

Cabaret first, comedy as the garnish

The solo act took its recognisable shape on the Australian festival circuit. At the Adelaide Cabaret Festival in June 2017, Tina played Artspace with a single accompanist, the guitarist Stephen Wier, billed as "Twist". The AU Review's notice from 15 June described a show that lurched deliberately between cheesy drag numbers and hard material about homelessness and social alienation, with the performer breaking off to talk to the front tables and, at one point, wandering over to chat to the crew at the sound desk. The reviewer called it clever and engaging, and compared watching it to a car crash in slow motion — not wanting to look, unable to turn away.

That tonal swing is the point of the act rather than a side effect of it. The songs are played straight; the wreckage around them is the comedy. It is a structure that rewards a strong singer and punishes a weak one, and the notices have consistently landed on the singing.

Caravan in the Sky, and the Edinburgh crossing

The show that carried Tina furthest was Caravan in the Sky, which won the Comics' Choice Award — the prize voted by fellow performers — at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival in 2022. It transferred to Edinburgh that August, playing Assembly Checkpoint at 8pm across 3–7, 9–14, 16–21 and 23–28 August 2022, billed at 55 minutes with tickets at £13–£14.

The staging was a pop-up tent on a two-foot stage. Tina emerged from it in a purple velvet turban and matching dress and then failed, at length, to pack it away again; a set of LED letters had to be arranged first. A three-piece band of piano, drums and cello sat behind her. A stage assistant stood by with portable steps, because the performance involved drifting towards the edge of the platform while drinking from what Chortle's Steve Bennett called a fishbowl of red wine. The song list ranged across Nat King Cole, Eric Carmen and Three Dog Night. One extended bit had the audience filming a Eurovision audition tape.

Bennett's review of 13 August 2022 gave three stars and drew the dividing line precisely: "Come for the music, and the comedy is a delightful garnish. Come for the comedy, and you'll wonder why you're only getting garnish." Culture Fix, reviewing the same run, was warmer, praising an elegant, velvety timbre and a magnetic stage presence, and noting that the audience interaction — mispronouncing names, jokes about where people were from — was a repeated device rather than a one-off. During the same festival Tina also appeared in Reuben Kaye's late-night variety show The Kaye Hole.

The double act with Ethel Chop

The current phase of the work is a partnership. Ethel Chop is the octogenarian creation of the Western Australian performer Andrea Powell, and the pairing of a cantankerous suburban pensioner with a ruined nightingale has proved the most commercially durable thing either character has done. The duo show, Together At Last, took a Comedy Judges Pick at Melbourne Fringe in 2025 on the strength of a citation that read: "A perfect pairing. No other show at this year's Fringe has made me laugh as constantly and consistently!"

That verdict turned into a national tour through the first half of 2026. The run opened at Fringe World in Perth on 14–15 February, moved to Adelaide Fringe on 21–22 March in the Spiegel Zelt at the Garden of Unearthly Delights at $28–$35 plus fees, then took an eight-performance season at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival from 28 March to 19 April — Saturdays at 4.30pm and Sundays at 3.30pm at The Westin Two, 205 Collins Street, at $32 full price and $28 concession, rated 15+ and running an hour. The tour finished at Brisbane Powerhouse on 17 May. The festival listings carried pull quotes from The Age ("excellent comic timing") and the Sunday Times ("sidesplitting... hilarious").

Where things stand in September 2026

The next thing is a new show rather than a revival. Ethel Chop & Tina Del Twist Can't Come Around Today is listed in the Melbourne Fringe Festival programme for the 2026 edition, which runs from 29 September to 18 October. The listing describes it as a brand-new piece following the national tour, pitched as comedy and cabaret with a suburban streak and framed as something to be experienced rather than watched. As of mid-September the festival page was still showing no published sessions, with booking pointed at the Fringe ticketing line.

The listing also carries a five-star FringeFeed notice from 2026 — "this brilliant standout show... you'll be wracked with the hysterics from start to finish" — and an audience reaction from the Adelaide run that catches the register better than the star rating does: "Total chaos, full commitment, and absolutely hilarious. For a pair who spent half the show catatonic, this was genuine laughter from beginning to the end."

Powell has described the duo show as an absolutely bonkers piece of theatre, largely built on clown technique and on subverting what an audience expects to happen next. That is a fair description of where the character has arrived: the cabaret scaffolding is still there, and the singing is still the thing that holds it up, but the comedy is no longer the garnish.