The Corseted Rabbits Collective. Rumpus. 16 Jul 2022
English actor/playwright Amelia Bullmore packs a lot of intellectually challenging, emotionally confronting material amidst downright fabulous, unashamed 80s pop culture layers in Di and Viv and Rose.
We’re offered a fly on the wall view of a 30 year friendship between three UK women who meet at university in 1983 and proceed to unpack old home life and live a new home life in what we in Australia call share housing.
It’s a tricky, cracking tragicomic text, littered with to die for lines belying a heady thread of gender politics, sexuality and polemic. Di, Viv and Rose’s journey is one birthing bursts of lightning bright epiphanies of understanding both shallow and profound, subsumed by the minutiae of messy ordinary life. So it seems.
Bullmore’s writing challenges Director Rachel Burke and cast Julia Vosnakis (Di), Georgia Laity (Viv) and Isabel Vanhakartano (Rose) to work the innately dark/light structure of the text in such a way its comedic elements do not overwhelm, but delicately highlight the seriousness at the text’s heart.
Burkes’s direction, supported by Set Designer Meg Wilson’s austere grey wall set with offsets and pull on/off furnishings, and Technical Designer Mark Oakley’s projections ensures this balance is achieved in a mercurial relationship to the performances.
Filling the space with exceptionally taut character acting befitting outward expectations of a Classic Brit sitcom, (The Young Ones comes to mind,) Vosnakis, Laity and Vanhakartano communicate an extraordinary tension between funny and not funny; between ‘that’s life’, and ‘why should that be life’?
The characters seem 80s sitcom enough, initially. Di’s a sporty lesbian studying business. Viv’s a hard headed sociology student. Rose is an art history student big on sex.
Burke and ensemble use these character labels as launch pads to something more complex.
Complexities of being women relating to the world, complexities of women relating to women.
Burkes’ ensemble sets a cracking pace. Dropping comic lines as if they weren’t with extraordinary skill, subtly easing in and out of their characters’ label to reveal dark depths yet never losing the delightful, frothy thread of humour sustained in the text.
A seriously thought provoking production loaded with humour, intent and range well beyond an 80s cliché.
David O’Brien
When: 15 to 24 July
Where: Rumpus - 100 Sixth Street Bowden
Bookings: evenbrite.com.au
Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Victoria Falconer. The Space. 24 Jun 2022
Willingly living on the periphery of human life, yet drawn into it by her insatiable creative drives, Australian artist Vali Myers (1930- 2003) was a living conundrum.
On one hand, wild, untameable, more a creature of the natural world opposing human civilisation. On the other hand, possessed with a sensibility uniquely equipped to express through dance, sketching and painting a vision of the world and herself that opened disturbing, mystical and surreal visions of truths lying beneath the seemingly ordered and orderly reality of the surface world we all perceive. From the bush, to the denizens of Paris, New York and Italy post WWII.
Victoria Falconer’s exposition of this extraordinary artists life and inner being is an intensely engaging, alienating, reflectively introspective production which constantly pushes the audience towards two states of mind simultaneously; a deepened sense of the mystical, of things natural; and having to accept a hard harshness, a drive to live that is clearly dangerous to be too close to.
Myers is portrayed not by one, but several women garbed in Myers’ famed flaming red tresses, Kohl rouged eyes and variations of dress covering her lifetime from youth to close of life.
This tack allows gradations of Myers’ unconventional, forceful life and a wonderful sense of differing emotion, passion, innocence and cynicism. It most particularly, powerfully magnifies myriad strands of Myers’ personality and creativity in musical performance.
While Myers’ diaries provide linking dialogue and transitions, it’s the songs composed for this production that provide the means of expression to the hard-to-grasp depths of this singularly complex being. That, alongside a deeply beautiful, trippy lighting design and evocative burn-through projections of Myer’s most striking art works.
If anything could improve the show, it would be a higher production value to projections and possibly staging it in the round.
The ensemble of nine actor/musicians and one canine’s work is deliciously transfixing to experience. They work to evoke, what at production’s end becomes, a wordless, otherworldly phantasm of this creature called Vali Myers we sense beyond her own creations.
David O’Brien
When: Closed
Where: The Space
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Her Majesty’s Theatre. 18 Jun 2022
Cabaret is an interesting type of entertainment to describe. In its modern form, it originated in Paris (arguably) in the late 1800s in the Montmartre area. It largely comprised stand-up comedians, actors, vaudevillians, and musicians all poking fun and thumbing their collective noses at the establishment. There was often a subversive element in what they did, sang and said, and this was particularly evident in German cabaret during the Weimar period of the 1920s. Cabaret was often held in intimate venues with the audience seated at tables in close proximity to the performers, but this is less common in today’s mass entertainment market and in festivals that ostensibly celebrate the cabaret genre.
At its best, cabaret is funny, subversive (with as many sacred cows being irreverently and mercilessly slaughtered as possible), energetic, audacious, and, above all, abundant with quality music and well-sung chansons! Meow Meow’s appropriately named cabaret show Pandemonium has all those features, in spades!
Meow Meow, aka Melissa Madden Gray, is originally from Canberra, but having performed in diverse major international venues to rave reviews, the world is truly her stage. She has exquisite comic timing and physicality, and a superb singing voice that is fuelled by top-notch technique, excellent diction and enviable pronunciation across a number of languages. She has a sensual stage presence that demands (and gets) your full attention. She is magnetic.
Meow Meow begins the show with a false-start: she first appears on one of the theatre’s balconies, and ‘realising’ she is in the wrong place attempts to climb down to the stage with her bag of costumes and various stage accoutrements. Eventually she makes her way to the stage and en route enlists the help of several members of the audience to help her change into a costume. She explains that she is “running on reduced circumstances” – blame COVID lockdowns – and she needs to get help where she can! This routine alone is almost worth the price of the ticket, especially when one of them takes out his pen knife to help sever a pesky strap! Meow Meow’s rib-tickling riposte is quick and …. cutting!
Having taken to the stage, it is clear that Meow Meow wants to invoke the intimacy of traditional cabaret and involve her audience as much as possible. Audience participation can often go down like the proverbial lead brick, but in Meow Meow’s seasoned hands, men in the audience veritably clamour to volunteer their services, although they are invariably ill-suited (or incapable!) for what they are asked to do, even in their “own time”! It’s all part of her formula, and it is oh so funny and will never get ‘old’!
Meow Meow performs a wide range of songs from various cabaret traditions, especially French and German, and is backed by the excellence and might of the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra expertly conducted by Nicholas Buc. The stage of Her Majesty’s is jam-packed, and the lighting design and sound engineering exposes it and everyone in … full majesty!
Meow Meow’s performances of Ne me quitte pas by Jacque Brel, and Surabaya-Johnny by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht were sublime. Her rendition of the 1931 Weimar Republic classic It's All a Swindle (Alles Schwindel) by Mischa Spoliansky and Marcellus gave us a poignant reminder of what we have all endured through the recent state and federal elections.
Meow Meow doesn’t just sing from the traditional canon of cabaret songs. Tonight’s song list also included her own compositions, such as the hauntingly poignant Mon homme marié (My Married Man) and Hotel Amour that she co-wrote with Thomas M Lauderdale. Radiohead’s Fake Plastic Trees also features, and Meow Meow channels the song’s central character: her presentation is achingly beautiful.
And then there’s her performance in several languages of the 1960 hit Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini by Paul Vance and Lee Pockriss, but there’s nothing shy about her act. It ended in, well, pandemonium with the members of the orchestra all throwing their scores into the air, and the audience howled with laughter.
Her version of Be Careful by Patty Griffin underscores the song’s essential message about female vulnerability, and it speaks to the men in the audience as much as it does to the women. It is a seminal moment in the concert.
Throughout, the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra is at the top of its game, and they clearly enjoy the experience of performing with Meow Meow, as opposed to playing for her and accompanying her own trio. Indeed, she orchestrates a wonderfully amusing entrance of the orchestra to kick off the send half: entering one-by-one (yes, it did take some time!) they individually ‘bowed’ with great humour and flourish. They take centre stage, and relish the occasion, but the night belongs to Melissa Madden Gray and her alter ego Meow Meow.
Make sure you see a Meow Meow concert when the occasion next presents itself. It’s one of those things you simply must do before you die…with laughter!
Kym Clayton
When: Closed
Where: Her Majesty’s Theatre
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Dunstan Playhouse. 17 Jun 2022
Louise Blackwell is a well known musical Francophile around Adelaide’s live scene. Partnered with her exquisite band The French Set, Blackwell has extolled the joys of French song to live music lovers with great, committed passion.
Louise Blackwell – Love on the Left Bank is her deep, profound, bravura exposition and tribute to the life of France’s most profoundly influential chanteuse of song and culture post WWII - Juliette Grèco.
Director Catherine Fitzgerald and Musical Director/Arrangements Mark Ferguson provide Blackwell with perfect structural support needed, allowing her to offer a sublimely svelte, smooth moving, thought provoking, captivating and emotionally layered experience to an audience, who were enraptured.
Enraptured by an artist looking like Grèco but much more importantly, delivering the goods vocally, politically and emotionally. Pick a song, the popular ones are there; Sous Le ciel de Paris, Dèshabillez Moi to mention two. Blackwell’s performance is staggering in its command of emotion, sensibility and vocal prowess that follows Grèco’s lead with room for her own voice in emulating her.
Fitzgerald’s direction ensures a smooth flowing ebb of movement and energy from Blackwell and band, and not just physically. The subtle transitions from Blackwell narrating, to Blackwell as Grèco speaking are masterful. Blackwell’s every gesture and movement around the stage perfectly partners her beautiful narrative of Grèco’s life with an intensity that hits home with thoughtful, not brutal, gravitas, That gravitas is backed up musically by a band that is pitch perfect, exquisite in its taut, yet gently textured layering of strings and brass.
David O’Brien
When: Closed
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Spiegeltent. 16 Jun 2022
Somewhere near the close of the last century Paul McDermott was discovering the joys of a hidden side to Adelaide via a late night session at the legendary 1990s venue the Silvermine, in suburban Glen Osmond.
McDermott immortalised his experience in the song On The Inside (Adelaide looks beautiful tonight), a number which closed the show in customary style, since McDermott and sidekick (“my plus one”) have taken to ushering the audience outside of whichever venue they’re in, performing a little impromptu ‘extra’, as they did last Fringe.
Time seems to be a theme in this review, and it’s as good a theme as any. The audience was modest sized for an early evening opening night, and commented upon by McDermott in less than flattering terms. He didn’t mention the popularity of faux leopard skin print, so that was a plus. As our host, he was flinty eyed and salty, not murderous and vituperative as he was last year. Paul McDermott needs a target to focus his vitriol upon, and in the absence of last year’s villain Scott Morrison, that meant half-hearted jabs at the audience. It wasn’t pretty and it wasn’t very passionate.
Which brings us to the Funhouse; McDermott played the MC, and much of the show was about the additional performers. I’m not sure that’s what the audience signed on for. There was muted applause for Phyllma Box, a tattooed Drag Queen; quite a bit more for standup comedian Dilruk Jayasinha; and bemused shrugs for Captain Ruin. Were they there simply to establish the shows’ ‘cabaret’ credentials, or because there wasn’t much to the show itself?
Not to condemn with faint praise, but Box was a by the numbers performer (synching to Dead Or Alive’s Spin Me Around is quite 1990s), who used nine or ten costume changes in what became the least surprising reveal ever for a Drag Queen strip. Jayasinha turned a Melbourne lockdown routine into an ode to wanking and autofellation, which is nice for him, and Ruin roller-skated and escaped from a straitjacket. I know. Amazing!
Ruin also closed out the evening’s guest performances with a swinging rendition of a man with a bowling ball (yes, a big one) swinging from his penis. It’s a trick I haven’t seen since the Jim Rose Circus made it a party specialty about 25 years ago, and I hoped never to see it again.
So this show was much more than just McDermott and his faithful sidekick running through some songs. And yet, it was also so much less. After all, we heard only sparingly from McDermott as MC for the night, and were rewarded with a mere four songs. Song For Karens was used to sledge an audience member, Pete Evans Magic Machine was used to sledge the nutter and paleo TV chef, Young Fascists In Love was without a target, and Magic Machine was largely unchanged from the song we’d heard 15 months earlier when it had been reprised outside the Rhino Room by McDermott and Glen Moorhouse for their footpath encore. This despite there being a three piece band tonight, so the question ‘why?’ seems entirely apt.
Why now? McDermott needs a target and the show suffers when he doesn’t have one to pour scorn upon. Does he turn his attention to things which pleased him when he was younger? That part of the show seemed steeped in the 1990s, and his audience (most of us over 50) were broadly onside, but where was this going to take us in terms of his incisive humour?
This was not a bad show, not at all, although as a review it sounds dismissive. McDermott is too canny, too clever an observer not to realise at the moment he is a rebel without a cause.
Alex Wheaton
When: 16 to 25 Jun
Where: The Spiegeltent
Bookings: adelaidecabaretfestival.com.au