Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Dunstan Playhouse. 8 Jun 2019.
The extraordinary Lisa Fischer and her terrific band Grand Baton have returned to the Adelaide Cabaret Festival after a three year absence and, once again, they are a triumph.
Lisa Fischer’s career is an intriguing one. For thirty years she has been an indispensable, but unheralded, vocalist in The Rolling Stones touring band. In the spotlight for her thrilling solo in Gimme Shelter but in the shadows for the rest of the show, she has played to audiences of up to half a million people, most of whom wouldn’t know her name.
Those who have seen Morgan Nevile’s 2014 Oscar winning documentary 20 Feet from Stardom, about the experiences and tribulations of back-up singers such as Darlene Love, Merry Clayton, and Claudia Lennear, who made significant contributions to recorded music for little more than gig economy reward, will recognise Lisa Fischer as a key contributor not only to the Stones, but Luther Vandross and Sting.
So to see Fischer perform as the major star she undoubtedly is, in the intimate confines of the Dunstan Playhouse, is a rare treat. Taking the stage to a warm welcome (led by the many who have seen her before and wouldn’t miss this for quids) she immediately connects, greeting the audience and introducing her New York-based band, Grand Baton, a psychedelic-soul-jazz unit featuring Aidan Carroll on bass, drummer Thierry Arpino and musical director and multi-instrumentalist J.C.Maillard.
Fischer begins humming and vocalising while Arpino lays a catchy percussive rhythm with timpani mallets, joined by Carroll’s deep thrumming bass. The vocal improv starts to form words- “You’re lights are on, but you’re not home/ Your mind is not your own/ Your heart sweats/ your body shakes/ Another is what it takes… ” It swaggers but is gathering intensity; Fischer weaves the vocals between two microphones – one for reverb and echo effects, the other for her soaring multi-octave excursions.
Another verse and she hits the chorus “You know you’re gonna have to face it, you’re addicted to love.” As she hits the last phrase J.C. Maillard opens the throttle on his electric guitar, peeling off rich,
raunchy fuzz chords John Scofield would be pleased to own.
Addicted to Love, Robert Palmer’s 1986 signature dance hit, cruises for eight or nine minutes as Fischer, draped in majestic off the shoulder silk, draws up her skirts to sashay with the band as they revel in their irresistibly nimble groove.
Also a skilful raconteur, Fischer recalls her grandmother telling her that she was part Cherokee and recently deciding to have a DNA test to identify her ethnic heritage. She was astonished to find Cameroon, Sub-Saharan, Indian, a slice of British but no American. That was the lead-in to a reflection on the fluidity of population and migration. And - “We come from the land of ice and snow/From the midnight sun, where the hot springs flow..” Led Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song - linked in enticing mash-up with Fragile from the Sting album Nothing Like the Sun.
It unfolds into a splendid sonic raga with Fischer’s keening reverb vocals, the unerring rhythm section and J.C. Maillard, his face a curtain of thin dreadlocks, weaving keyboards, mesmeric oud-like melodies from his custom built SazBass (an eight string elecro-acoustic instrument modelled on the Turkish baglama) as well as multilayered Sufi Qawwali vocals. He is a fascinating musician to watch in action.
A jazzy, spacy reading of another Sting/Police classic follows – Message in a Bottle, gradually coming into recognition as the band entwine with Fischer’s vocals. She is a marvel of expression and control. Her voice spans from bell-like soprano to sultry contralto. It is said that she has a vocal range from A2 to G6.
Reflecting on her teenage parents (sixteen and seventeen when she was born) and her mother’s tribulations in love, Fischer interprets yet another intriguing contemporary composition – Blues in the Night by Katie Melua - with a downbeat melancholy theme of abandonment. “A man is a two-face,/A worrisome thing who’ll leave to sing/The blues in the night.” Carroll is now on acoustic bass, Arpino is using brushes and J.C. a melodic acoustic blues guitar.
This unadorned lament then segues into Ane Brun’s setting of Laid in Earth from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas highlighting the pellucid operatic quality of Lisa Fischer’s virtuosic soprano. It is a spell-binding experience and it is inexplicable that recordings of these superb live performances have never been released.
Fischer’s versatility is evident yet again with a jazz medley of Heart and Soul and the Peggy Lee standard, Fever. The band is at its supple best and Fischer moves around the front tables of the audience, working her double mics and serenading some rather bashful “silver foxes” in the matinee crowd. J.C. plays a flawless flamenco solo before switching to another excursion on the SazBass.
It is a splendid close to the set, but luckily there is more. The encore announces itself with those famous lines Lisa Fischer would have heard so many times 20 feet from the spotlight. “I was born in crossfire hurricane/ And I howled at the maw in the drivin’ rain/ But it’s all right now, in fact it’s a gas / But it’s all right I’m … Jumping Jack Flash.” The Rolling Stones, Beggar’s Banquet, 1968.
Like the re-inventions by Robert Plant and his Shape Shifters, Fischer, J.C. and the others have given this rock classic a Moorish makeover. The Stones rhythms are large as life but Fischer’s vocal inventions and J.C.’s Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan chanting (expertly blended with vocal embellishment from the sound desk) turns a familiar oldie into a dervish-like spin with the music of the spheres. The majestic Lisa Fischer and Grand Baton are a joy to behold and musically out of this world. You’d have to say they’re a gas, gas, gas.
Murray Bramwell
When: 7 to 8 Jun
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: Closed
Joh Hartog Productions. Bakehouse Theatre. 6 Jun 2019
Carole and Martin have returned after six years mercy work somewhere in the Third World. Their old besties from med school days invite them to dinner. They have stayed in touch over the years but they also have grown apart.
German playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig uses two dolls, little plastic Peggy Pickit belonging to the five-year-old daughter of the now-very-comfortable couple who stayed at home, and a simple hand-carved wooden doll brought back as a gift by the childless overseas volunteers. With sponsorship help from the friends, they cared for a needy child in that other world but political upheaval prevented their bringing her home.
These facts unravel through the course of pre-dinner drinks and a dinner eaten on stage.
Schimmelpfennig uses an almost cinematic stop-start dramatic device to reveal the undercurrents of the couples’ emotions and through Joh Hartog’s very snappy direction and with equally snappy lighting from Stephen Dean, this freeze frame effect gives the play a magnificent life force.
While it is dealing with difficult issues of political extremes and delicate issues of strained marriages and friendships, this is an extremely entertaining theatre work. The characters are credible. The themes are relevant and thought-provoking. The script is vital and full of sparks and swipes and snipes, delivered with vigour and savage humour by the four actors.
Hartog has adorned the little Bakehouse stage with side-by-side living-room and dining-room settings and, somehow, it looks really expansive. Thereon, a freshly prepared cold dinner and a loaf of welcome home-made bread are consumed by the actors, along with a lot of stage alcohol, as the complex fast-forwarded and rewound facets of the storyline are delivered.
There is not a dull moment. The play sings with tension and the sorrows of the human condition. It has been compared to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf and, indeed, there is a common thread.
Krystal Brock, as homecoming Carol, has a heartbreaking aura of bravado masking disappointment, while being slightly don’t-care dishevelled. Lucy Markiewicz is the proud mother in her snug bourgeois world, inventing spookily cute play interactions between the two dolls. Both women are secretly jealous of the other.
The men are more cynical and just as two-faced. David Hirst as home front Frank is exquisitely supercilious while Brendan Cooney plays it wise, world-weary, and lost.
This is a magically engrossing piece of theatre, profoundly satisfying and very highly recommended indeed.
And, oh, after all the sturm und drang, it has an utterly perfect ending.
Samela Harris
When: 6 to 15 Jun
Where: Bakehouse Theatre
Bookings: bakehousetheatre.com
Cabaret Festival. State Theatre Company. Royalty Theatre. 4 Jun 2019
The premise of Peter Quilty’s celebrated quasi-bio play about Judy Garland is that there was just no stopping the superstar’s lifelong dependence on uppers and downers, despite her own better judgement and despite the efforts of her fifth and last husband Mickey Deans.
The play rings with the truth of tragedy and it sings with the pain and passion of a showbiz train wreck; bringing to life the tortuous tales of arguably the world’s most adored torch singer.
Elena Carapetis and the stupendous State Theatre production team have taken over the tired old Royalty Theatre stage with a glamorous alignment of framing lights and a stage curtain beyond the stage curtain. The lush red drapes over the old boxes add further glamour to the veteran venue.
The play is set in a luxury London hotel suite equipped with grand piano for rehearsals. While the golden drapes represent the hotel window out of which bankrupt Garland threatens to throw herself when the manager harasses her about paying the bill, they also draw back to reveal the five-piece band led by Carol Young. It is a fabulous club band, exuberant in wind and percussion and yet, able at the right moments, to melt into utter, sweet melancholy.
The curtains form a backdrop for Garland's public performances while, in rehearsal scenes, the curtains are drawn and it is actor Stephen Sheehan at the grand piano who accompanies the singing. Sheehan is in the role of her English pianist, Anthony Chapman. He’s one of her lifelong string of adoring gay accompanists, assistants, supporters, and friends. Sheehan plays the character with elegant effeminacy. His poise is supreme both in the role and at the piano. It is a sublimely nuanced and beautiful performance.
He vies for Garland’s loyalty against Mickey Dean, the nightclub manager and fiancée who is desperately trying to keep the wheels on amidst the dramatic emotional and pharmaceutical excesses and financial calamities in the last months of the singer’s life. Nic English’s handsome face seems to age right before the audience’s eyes in this role as he surmounts the carer’s psychological hurdles and hits the bottle in Mickey’s own battle of love, exasperation, and desperation.
Garland is a ravaged powerhouse, a lifelong junkie spinning through the stop-start pattern of addiction, negotiating with Mickey, and veering between washed out and wonderful. On this difficult voyage, Helen Dallimore delivers her with absolute skill and commitment. It is a rip-roaringly intense performance, exhausting to behold. And it hits the mark. Dallimore not only achieves the lilts and idiosyncrasies of the Garland accent but also the timbre of her voice. And out come all the great songs, big and loud. Thus is the renowned Peter Quilter play both a tragedy and a concert - with Elena Carapetis’s exquisitely costumed production bringing down the rafters as the audience stamps and cheers its approbation.
An entirely superfluous encore defused the perfect poignancy of the play’s ending for some purist members of the audience. Others were in such Judy euphoria that more would never have been enough.
Samela Harris
When: 31 May to 22 Jun
Where: The Royalty Theatre
Bookings: bass.net.au
DreamBIG Festival. Arena Theatre Company. Dunstan Playhouse. 30 May 2019
If being an autistic child is challenging, then so, too, is being the parents of a child on the spectrum. They not only feel the pain of their child’s battle against the odds of being different but they are burdened with the loving task of trying to find explanations and solutions for their child.
And so it goes in Robot Song.
In its DreamBig promotional material, this interesting hour-long musical creation purports to be the story of Juniper, the 11-year-old school girl who has received a spiteful hate letter from other school children telling her that she is a robot and should never have been born. While the production is delivered as Juniper’s show about her own true story, it is really, and extremely touchingly, the tale of a darling, doting dad tip-toeing his way through the emotional maelstrom of autism to find peace and confidence for his daughter. He is ever there behind her, backing off when she resists, nourishing her self-esteem and enabling her projects.
Juniper’s parents both are artists, so she comes from a free-thinking, non-conformist environment in which it is not at all peculiar to have a giant rubbish skip as a magical best friend in the back yard.
With an appealing cartoon face on its front, the big bin furnishes the stage very colourfully. When the show opens, it is mum on the keyboards and dad with a laptop and a table of paraphernalia flanking Juniper who is centre stage with a standing mike. She makes one of the great entrances as a robot blazing with lights; desk lamps and torches rigged all over her. It’s part of the dad-ingenuity world. She introduces her show in a dither of uncertainty and then, gaining confidence, lets the audience know that she is an imaginative character who loves dissecting words: there is an “us” embedded in the word music; and “eat” is in “breathe”. She tells us that she writes songs, loves robots, and knows stuff.
Performer Ashlea Pyke has a wonderful Broadway voice which gives substance to the professionalism of this beautiful theatre piece which has come from Bendigo.
It is based on the life experience of its writer and director, Jolyon James.
It is musically very strong, with its fabulous score delivered live on stage by pianist Jo Abbott in the character of Mum while Phil McInnes darts, dives, and dashes around as the devoted Dad. McInnes has a lovely stage presence and he moves with a dancer’s grace and precision.
The hour-long story evolves through added interactions with cartoon characters on a big screen, a touch of audience involvement, letters fluttering like birds, much interpretation of robots and schoolyard bullying, and a great, big spectacular denouement.
The ostracisation of the outsider is turned around with the assertion that no two people are the same, being different is not only okay, believe it or not, but it is the way of the world and is nothing less than “awesome”.
Diversity rocks. And so does parent love.
Samela Harris
When: 30 May to 1 Jun
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: dreambigfestival.com.au
DreamBIG Children’s Festival. John Bishop Room. 25 May 2019
Mary-Frances Doherty is a Belfast performer who has come here to show 12-year-olds that their joys and sorrows are pretty much the same all over the world.
She plays Katie in her nice sparkly birthday frock, hosting a party a bit half-heartedly because her best friend has gone to another school and another party and, well, she is bereft. So thanks, audience, for coming to this party for which she has piled a table with marshmallows and party poppers and blow-up toys. And thus is the performance an offbeat interactive party with audience children being asked to play Truth or Dare and do little turns or admit things. Some questions hit the right targets. One child was thrilled to expound on her sporting success. Another admitted her friends thought her too loud and “I don’t have an indoors voice”. For one very shy child, being asked to sing a song in front of all those strangers was deer-in-the-headlights hell. Talking of which, Katie has to answer the “truth” question of her most embarrassing moment which, she admits, was not getting to the loo in time. The children won’t be forgetting that little scene for a while. Pleasingly, when Katie has made a real mess of the room and starts resignedly to clean it up, little girls rise unbidden and swarm out to help her. It is a nice reflection on the nature and upbringing of our children. Despite the fact that, at the end of the 50-minute show, everyone is invited to share in the chocolate birthday cake, the children afterwards reflect that they didn’t really expect Katie and her party would be so sad. Fear of missing out and fear of being rejected by friends is common to them all.
Samela Harris
When: 22 to 26 May
Where: John Bishop Room, Adelaide Festival Centre
Bookings: dreambigfestival.com.au