Troy Rogers' autobiographical one-hander Drug Baby is a vaudevillian solo show — a confessional, a homily and an emotional car crash all at once — playing the Boom Boom Room of Erskineville Town Hall for Sydney Fringe 2026. Mick Daley reviews a musical redemption tale delivered with ukulele, slam poetry and unvarnished sincerity, whose emotional honesty almost outweighs its shortcomings.
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Troy Rogers' autobiographical one-hander Drug Baby is a vaudevillian solo show — a confessional, a homily and an emotional car crash all at once — playing the Boom Boom Room of Erskineville Town Hall for Sydney Fringe 2026. A musical redemption tale delivered with ukulele, slam poetry and unvarnished sincerity.
When a bearded man in an archaic suit emotes upon a darkened stage accompanied only by a chair, a mike stand and a ukulele you know you're in for a species of vaudevillian spectacle. That's no spoiler. Promo for the autobiographical Drug Baby wore its heart on its blurb, so I'd already guessed it's a musical redemption tale.
The purpose of the chair remains a mystery, perhaps implying that any one of producer/writer Troy Rogers' incidental characters could be sitting in judgement. To be fair I missed ten minutes of this one-hander owing to confusing directions from venue staff, so may have also misread the purpose of the chair.
Troy advertises his piece as genre-less and that's a necessary caution — there's no fourth wall here. It's a confessional, a homily and an emotional car crash all at once. The small audience is hunkered around a man letting it all out, and no one runs for the exits in the diminutive Boom Boom Room of Erskineville Town Hall, despite hysterical screaming from a more glamorous production next door.
Enabling the spartan production is a simple lighting scheme; red for anger and dark deeds, two shades of blue for lighter musings and musical interludes, and white; mostly associated with the protagonist's saintly Nan, who rescued him from his junkie parents.
There is some use of sound effects, but they're so transitory they almost intrude on the atmosphere.
What ensues is a blow by blow description of a downward spiralling drug use resumé, beginning with an amniotic heroin addiction. Rogers' Nan is responsible for his juvenile course correction and also, sadly, for his best comedic line, which he tragically muffs by pre-empting it.
Throughout the hour-long performance Rogers' beard, deportment and dance moves smack of a Hugh Jackman fetish and I had to wonder, would Hugh have made a better fist of this script?
As a piece of slam poetry it's a tour de force. Rogers shows few problems with enunciation and an easy familiarity with the script, so the whole thing rolls along with rarely a missed beat. But the barrage of cheap rhymes sometimes veer into sleight-of-hand hoopla.
Imitating a voice ragged with emotion is a mistake. Not that we don't buy his sincerity; a monologue delivered with such earnest exactitude can only be genuine, but the absence of the fourth wall does not excuse a descent into ham-fisted posturing.
The ukulele is deployed for adaptations of Seventies pop songs that reinforce plot themes and provide musical relief from the arc of misery and deprivation. These rely on a reasonable singing voice but their tenor rarely departs from Rogers' narrative tone, so the effect is unvarying.
That's not to say he lacks emotional range or an actor's physical vocabulary. It's just that he rarely changes gear and the subject matter has a predictable arc, so the corollary is something like a pamphlet for the Mirabel Foundation, a charity largely responsible for Rogers' salvation. He leans heavily on their interventions and much of his rhyming come off like the affirmative memes such an organisation might use.
His enduring affection for guardian angels Nan and her friend Anne provides emotional weight to a production whose sincerity almost outweighs its shortcomings. That's down to Rogers' emotional honesty as much as his adroitness with the script, especially when furnished with such bold conclusions, made literally with hand on heart, as (through my misfortunes) 'I have become a beautiful man'.
Like the pop music he employs, there's little artifice or mystery to Rogers' writing. It's to the point and what it lacks in guile it gains in getting a heavy job done.
Which begs the question; what is the job? What's the point of a performance whose backbone rests in baring the soul and making a burlesque comedy of it? The answer lies in one of Rogers' (many) revelatory declarations. After a pithy discovery of his inner child he throws away all inhibitions and declares, 'I just wanna dance, I wanna sing, I wanna play!' Hugh Jackman couldn't have sung it better.
Writer/Performer: Troy Rogers
Photography: Frankie the Creative; Robbie Pacheco
Reviewed by Mick Daley.
Event listing: sydneyfringe.com/events/drug-baby
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