Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Her Majesty's Theatre. 5 Jun 2013
If ever there was a back-handed homage, this is it.
Eddie Perfect delivers the Shane Warne phenomenon as a portrait of the underbelly of oafish ocker sports culture. It is not a pretty picture. It is like being slapped over the head by a couple of decades of scandal rags as Perfect serialises the stubbornly obnoxious badboy behaviour of Shane Warne. One might even call it tabloid theatre.
The show is full of mighty anthems belted out with gospel intensity. If one couldn't hear the words one would swear it was a tribute. But the lyrics are littered with gob-smacking vulgarity - as, indeed, has been the shock-headline career of the world's greatest spin bowler.
It's the perfect show, conceived and written by Perfect and starring Perfect as Shane Warne. While Perfect the performer is altogether endearing, his characterisation of Warne is gloriously unlikeable. He emerges as stupidity and crude carnality coddled in a bubble of celebrity. Perfect evokes in him a sense of ingenuous incredulity that anyone should have any expectation of him at all - a spoilt little boy in a big boy world.
Onstage and all around him, there's the all-singing, all-dancing chorus of cricket Australiana.
Everyone wears white which not only symbolises the cricket theme but plays ironic whiteout games with the colourful scandals of the Warnie docu-plot.
It's the dripping irony that saves the show from going overboard with its big celebratory songs. There are a lot of these, delivered with the biggest possible Broadway sell-sell-sell that the performers can put over. Clearly director Simon Phillips has seen that a thematically skimpy show needs to be big and in-your-face. It is loud, too, over-miked and sometimes broken-miked.
The Adelaide Art Orchestra, in tiers across the stage, stars in its own right with a rich, triumphant accompaniment.
The cast is nothing less than taut and terrific. They back up the bad boy with a sense of athleticism, aggression and bloody good vocal skill.
Lisa McCune swings from bimbo to hapless victim of a nasty, boy's own culture playing the role of Simone Warne. Her airing of vapidity is poignant.
Christie Whelan Browne brings the house down as Elizabeth Hurley. It's a long show and her arrival ends it on a high. It's a glorious performance and, indeed, Perfect has spun Hurley into a very pleasing little parody.
Shane Jacobsen is another of the great strengths of the quasi-concert musical. His voice is wonderful and he brings astute characterisations to his several roles, principally Terry Jenner aka TJ. He does a nice line in simpatico.
Jolyon James most ably carries the best song, the outrageous Bollywood number which tells the tale of Indian John and his big pack of cash. Rohan Nichol, meanwhile, makes one catch one's breath with the way he delivers aspects of the spirit of sports sleaze.
Perfect has gone to town on the spin which surrounded the life of the famous spinmeister and there are some nifty boardroom scenes in which Mike McLeish and Andy Conaghan shine in their support roles. Verity Hunt Ballard and Amy Lehpamer don't flag, either. The ensemble work is exemplary and some of the choreographic work is wicked good fun with blocking bats and the odd suggestive ball polishing manoeuvre.
Six years after its first workshoppish presentation, Shane Warne The Musical has grown big and glossy. What a rare and very Aussie concept it is, a musical for blokes. It is, after all, about cricket. It is relentlessly about cricket and about the macho machinery which oils and spoils it.
Some good satire lies within the script albeit some of the best lines are buried in songs. Some of those songs dare to push so intensely at the boundaries of good taste that they slip right over the edge into cringe territory and completely miss the funny bone.
Many of the songs are just too, too long. It all starts to pall.
The show needs some hefty trimming. Shane Warne The Musical is still a work in progress and, since one senses the world's most notorious cricketer has not finished drawing attention to himself, there is doubtless promise for Perfect to revise, tighten up, and redeploy in another six years.
When: 5 to 9 Jun
Where: Her Majesty's Theatre
Bookings: bass.net.au
