Adelaide Cabaret Festival/Michael Nolan, Emilie Zoey Baker, Sean M Whelan. The Blue Room. 14 Jun 2019
Not a tribute show nor a cover band act playing the Blues Brothers soundtrack. No, this show is something greater than these obvious things.
Liner Notes Live: The Blues Brothers is a journey of reminisce, exploration and excavation of the influence this famous film/soundtrack has had on culture, as much as it has on the lives of five diverse Australian celebrities, ranging from a famed children’s author to a mighty drag queen.
It’s a massive experience. Host Michael Nolan sets the scene and atmosphere with a rousing intro performance singing “hardy, hardy ho!” The eight piece band, a loose and cruising smooth blues beast bubbling with hot energy, serves to reinforce the greatness of the songs, not pummel the audience with them. Nolan gives the overall history of this blues culture masterpiece then the magic begins.
From cowboy hatted Andy Griffiths’ extraordinary riff on the Blues Brothers as it should have been a western thing (a truly awesome take on it, cue paper cups chucked at him from front row,) to Maggie Beer’s quiet, emotive focus on the lesser, but loved voices and songs tucked into the edges of the film, comes a sense of the outer possibilities The Blues Brothers presented as a challenge to musical sensibilities.
Bring on the wonderfully suave, deeply erudite Dave Graney with that gravelly, warm textured voice of his. Graney offers a deep, profound spirited evocation of what the blues is, quoting three texts that leave the audience in no doubt about what the heart of this thing is, the power of soul, that empowered love and rebellion.
Who better to provide life examples of this spirit than the grand comic goddess of music, Julia Zemiro? Her Jailhouse Rock experience packs one hell of a punch, a fired up shining example of how a song stuffed up becomes a perfect expression of the actual spirit behind its creation. A call to arms celebrating the cool ‘stuff you’ attitude the Blues carries. A moment in her life that gave her a freedom she needed.
Freedom, heart and soul get a fiery showing thanks to Kween Kong’s literally hot-as-toast performance (cue support blues babes handing out pieces of toast,) giving full rein to the fierce, hot black blues vibe that really is the divine backbone of the soundtrack.
Omar Musa finishes the night by pulling back the speed of the evening, offering up a most beautiful piece of poetry spinning off the most lonely and heartfelt songs of the soundtrack, that imploring need of “someone to love me.”
This film, these songs were all about a call from God. But it’s much, much more than that. This was an evening like no other, making manifest just how extraordinarily significant and wide reaching its power really is, even today.
David O’Brien
When: 14 Jun
Where: The Blue Room
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Quartet Bar. 15 Jun 2019
Canada’s SoCALLED is famed for Jewish hip-hop. Going back to his roots, in collaboration with Adelaide’s Zephyr Quartet is easily one of the best things he could have ever chosen to do in his creative life.
SoCALLED brought to his rapt audience in the Quartet Bar a veritable wide history of Yiddish Theatre songs, Holiday songs, Klezmer and more.
The marriage of voice in performance with quartet arrangements is so profoundly affecting. Impassioned urgency, thrusting back and forth in voice and gesticulation is matched with vivid plucked strings and light bow strokes creating an added heart beat to the dramatic, emotional, yet clearly cerebral lyrics.
Never has this famed quartet been seen so in love with the music they were playing. Clearly it had much to do with the wonderful artist leading and guiding them. The material stretched from the early 20th Century, across two world wars to the present; always maintaining a zest for life, for robust self-reflection and cry to action in service of a people, a culture.
So much soul, so much love, so much sombre, heartfelt reflection in one evening always gilded with a tinge of happiness like sparkling gold.
David O’Brien
When: 15 to 16 Jun
Where: Quartet Bar
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Cabaret Festival. The Blue Room. 9 Jun 19
It’s not the famous movie. It’s a strange Melbourne confection of dark matter. Something spooky is going down, they say, having tip-toed into the room with their hooded heads illuminated by torchlight.
It’s the cabaret creep show, definitely R-rated with a wealth of profanity-adorned sexual and sinister content. It’s just a bit on the could-be-shocking side, but it takes more than weird psycho-pathology to shock an Adelaide audience. We simply like or don’t like. In the case of Suburban Gothic it comes right down the middle. At one moment from the three skilled entertainers, Mark Jones, Aurora Kurth, and Karlis Zaid, it is universal humour, as in the song about getting lost trying to visit friends in those confounded mazes of developer estates. Then, it is the overkill song about seven dildos at the side of the road which is having a go at consumer society and then ends up with a rather violent snipe at employers enjoying staff redundancy.
Perhaps the length of the songs is what drives them over the edge. It’s hard to find a snappy ending. The song about going down in an air crash is so ghastly, I would exhort flying-phobic people just to stay right away. It is a cruel song.
Albeit beautifully done, the dying disabled child number is tough and similarly, the domestic violence song. Brilliant but awful.
Piece de resistance is perhaps the flasher song which tries hard to give flashers some status as performance artistes and sends it all up deliciously. A winner. And thus, with these splendid performers and excellent backing, does this work directed by ex Tripod Steven Gates, make for 70 minutes of off-the-wall fearless weirdness.
Samela Harris
When: 9 to 10 Jun
Where: The Blue Room
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Cabaret Festival. The Blue Room. 8 Jun 2019
Well, darn it and heavens to Betsy, darlin', here comes Dolly Parton with a baritone voice.
This English-born Aussie Dolly Diamond fits absolutely none of the conventional Dolly Parton bills. So, Parton Me is a good title for the show.
This is one very big Dolly, squeezed absurdly into a tight yellow Dolly jumpsuit. This is a breathless, hoarse Dolly who whispers out Dolly lyrics and occasionally resorts to a beautiful baritone note or two. This also is a very funny Dolly with a good line of satiric patter and audience schtick.
Dolly Diamond is well known around the entertainment traps but this is her Adelaide Parton Me premiere and she attracted a house packed with Red Hat ladies and Dolly fans. Whether they expected what they got is another matter. Some looked a wee bit askance. But there was a lot of love in the air.
For this critic, a long-time Dolly fan who has actually pilgrimaged to Dollywood in Tennessee, it was a totally surreal Dolly experience with a very strong sense that of all people, it would be Dolly Parton herself who most would appreciate this gorgeous, brazen and totally dissimilar mimic.
Dolly Diamond, who has a writer called Michael Dalton, is just a downright feel-good, mischievous, out-there entertainer. Just a bit too generous for her own good. For part of the show, her two lovely backing singers are joined onstage by the huge Adelaide Gospel Chorus and, indeed, they adorn the stage as an upbeat life force. But handing over Dolly’s gospel solos to their leader, Charmaine Jones, for an elongated super-soaring virtuoso soul gospel rendition just takes the cabaret show right out of cabaret and into another zone. Would that Dolly D had kept the spotlight on herself. She’s worth it.
Samela Harris
When: 7 to 9 Jun
Where: The Blue Room
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Thebarton Theatre. 7 Jun 2019
Julia Zemiro warned that the Cabaret Festival Gala opening would not be in the convention of past Cabaret Festival Gala openings and it wasn’t, insofar as it was outside the CBD in the dear old Thebby Theatre. For many of the establishment, it may have been a first venture into a venue famous for rock concerts, albeit Adelaide Festival aficionados have fond memories of significant arts events there; Pina Bausch top of the list.
Lesson of the night was that it is a beaut old theatre with good sound.
Otherwise, well directed by Craig Ilott, it was a not-gala gala Cabaret Festival night in which Zemiro introduced a swag of her 2019 line-up, newbies and oldies.
She also presented the divine Meow Meow with the CabFest Icon Award. Meow Meow made it an opportunity to salute Julia Holt, original director of our winter festival, and to play absurdist games with the trophy and with the audience and life in general. Meow Meow is one vivid, clever, fearless, funny, utterly unique performer and she deserves all the plaudits in the business.
State Theatre artistic director Mitchel Butel partnered Zemiro in her opening segment and showed his colours as an absolutely delicious song and dance man. He had impish good spirit which one hopes may transition into his era with State.
In the absence of Adelaide’s beloved Hans, Zemiro introduced Adelaide to Reuben Kaye, a gorgeous camp champ of song and patter now resident in London. He wears arguably the world’s biggest false eyelashes with expertly glittered lips. He sings beautifully. He is provocative and funny and downright classy. It is impossible not to adore him.
The line-up moved seamlessly on and off stage, the program’s moods moving from cheer to melancholy.
Queenie Van de Zant brought the house to respectful silence before she brought it down. She can sing. She is funny. Another hit.
Omar Musa did his rap poetry, bouncing rhythmically across the stage, brown man with black politics, he said, a marvel who has risen to stardom with poetry.
There was Nkechi Anele shouting soul Idol-style and Alma Zygier winning hearts with lovely 30s jazz songs. The Swell Mob swarmed all over the place in their scruffy period garb, pulling up petticoats, kicking up knees hot from the rowdy pubs of Olde England.
Paul Capsis made his appearance, his astonishing voice shrilling and thrilling as ever, although he seemed in himself just a bit downhearted.
He was chirpier in the grand finale with Meow Meow, but who wouldn’t be?
Maude Davey strutted down the centre aisle, a glory of sleek skin and showgirl feathers. She sang The Angels’ famous anthem, Am I Ever Going To See Your Face Again and the audience roared its response in an epic version which culminated with gorgeous Davey throwing herself hard on the catwalk floor. A dramatic gesture perhaps signalling that she is giving up nude performance.
The variety show climaxed with a storm of golden particles pouring from aloft and the whole, gorgeous auditorium shimmered in the joy of it. A lovely spectacle. Not a gala, mind you.
And did I mention the band?
Directed by pianist Daniel Edmonds, with lots of brass and fabulous percussion, it just swung and sizzled and purred and gave a power of finesse to the show. And CabFest 2019 was up and away.
Samela Harris
When: 7 Jun
Where: Thebarton Theatre
Bookings: Closed