Fowler’s Live. 13 Mar 2012
The advertising in the Fringe Guide promotes Anything Goes Cabaret as “…an evening of burlesque, boylesque, cabaret and drag steeped in the smoky trails of Weimar Berlin”, but nothing could be further from the truth. Regrettably, all it was steeped in was rank amateurism, lack of imagination and style, and absence of originality.
All acts were performed to recorded music–which is not of itself a bad thing–but most performers struggled to keep in time with it.
The MC’s patter and brogue was facile, forced and boring, and generally elicited underwhelming responses from the audience.
The strip tease acts were more strip than tease, and wish to God that some of them didn’t go as far as they did. It is simply not sufficient to merely take off one’s clothes–it needs to be part of a narrative, and the only act that ventured the semblance of a plot based it on a crudely but mildly humorous re-wording of the late and great Peggy Lee’s hit Fever! It might have worked better if the actor was a better singer and actor than he actually was. Shock tactics alone count for little.
I found the whole event an appalling waste of time, as did others who left at various times during the performance and didn’t come back.
Kym Clayton
When: 14 to 15 Mar
Where: Fowler's Live
Bookings: www.adelaidefringe.com.au
