Adelaide Cabaret Festival. The Blue Room. 20 June 2019
Improv is alive and well. Devilishly so. There are few things quite as funny as out-of-control comedy in the hands of expert exponents.
Seriously, the audience could laugh no more. The only flaw to this outlandish mayhem was the cast’s general insistence on locating the audience members who may or may not have suggested song titles for the show.
The improv performers choose from said suggestions placed in a bucket on the stage whence they have to contrive a musical number featured from a fictional on-the-spot Broadway musical. They perform under pseudonyms and have to abide by stringent, albeit confounding, improv rules. This show harks back to the glorious heydays of theatre sports, reviving the arts with absolute expertise, imagination and, that invaluable facet, sophisticated terms of reference and advanced theatre skills.
The audience gets to vote on the best insane confection. And then a full winning musical is performed by the raggle-taggle song and dance improv stars on stage.
The production rests on host Russell Fletcher, weaving the acts together and keeping track of the often convoluted machinations of John Thorn, the world’s most accommodating and infinitely versatile musical accompanist. And thus on Thursday night did the audience experience a murder musical called Cold Case in which bodies were stashed in showroom refrigerators. The big song was called Chill Out it’s just Murder. Then there was My Wintergarten, a Brechtian saga of the country girl with big hopes in 1950s Berlin. There was a show called Does That Equate? Nah. And a gorgeous song called Fruit and Freckles. There was comic shtick of invisible halls and doors, songs which did or didn’t rhyme and gloriously over-the-top cornball characterisations. It really doesn’t make a lot of sense in the re-telling. You have to be there. And it is a thing of boundless, rib-aching joy to be there.
This is classic theatre fun and games which has been part of the performance training and background of Cabaret Festival director Julia Zemiro - which is how it comes to feature for the first time on a CabFest program. She has brought us the top improv team in the country, maybe the world. And, to boot, she stars in the line-up, here as Gretel from Bornhoffer singing the not-hit song What can I buy with three dollars? and giving Adelaide another taste of just who she is. A bloody funny talented star! More. More.
Samela Harris
When: 19 to 22 Jun
Where: The Blue Room
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Nicci Wilks. QBE Cabaret Lounge. 20 Jun 2019
The smallest show in town. Brava Nicci Wilks.
This performer is not just the director and star of the show, she is the theatre itself.
She virtually wears the Teensey Top, a drape of crimson curtains hanging down around her from aloft like a plush umbrella. A miniature velvet curtain opens to reveal a tiny stage complete with elegant footlights. Nicci’s face is the backdrop. It looms huge in the darkness. Her voice in French accent prepares the one or two person full house audience for the highs and lows of the five-act, 7-minute show. It has death, dance and intrigue, music and fortune-telling.
Never has there been more intimate theatre. One breathes the same air, standing face to face, eye to eye with the performer in her little velvet world. It might be a micro show, but it has all the trimmings - including an intermission with gin and popcorn on offer. Nicci has a quick ciggie, very French. And back for the dramatic denouement of miniaturist mayhem. It is just a tiny wee treat, a festival folly, an ingenious and genuinely unique theatre experience, exquisitely wrought by a highly skilled and fearless performer.
Samela Harris
When: 20 to 22 Jun
Where: QBE Cabaret Lounge
Bookings: Free Event
Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Dunstan Playhouse. 19 Jun 2019
Dickie Beau straggles through the red velvet curtain upstage, exploding into view in sailor outfit, precise vaudeville like moves, bravura charisma, suitcase and umbrella in hand. He’s immediately seduced the audience.
Then follows the most extraordinary, heightened evocation of comic dialogues in voices surprisingly like stars of the Carry On films; Kenneth Williams and more with the most precise physical choreography to character imaginable.
Is that his real voice?
Even then, when you twig it’s an offstage broadcast voice, it’s still not yet clear how cleverly the show name hides an extraordinary depth, deeply engaging, seriocomic profundity harboured beneath such a shallow, surface level description.
Unplugged here, is nothing of the kind which normally comes to mind. Lip syncing is involved obviously, yet doesn’t even stack up to predetermined experience or expectation.
It is in fact, key to something so deep you only realise it quarter way through the seemingly too swift 90 minute deep dive into the soul of this thing we know complexly as language, more poetically profound, ‘the word’ and through words, identity.
What is a disembodied voice? What does it mean?
This is the ongoing, perplexing, fascinating, fantabulous and illuminating experience of this production. Beau propels us through powerful, yet measured expositions on the voice, the word - from lip-synced Annie Lennox song Here Comes The Rain Again, to deep considerations on how we perceive the world via the first words of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Beau resolves the whole conundrum in such a deeply personal way, despite the many laughs, one can never again see themselves or their world in the same way ever again.
David O’Brien
When: 19 to 20 Jun
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Adelaide Festival Centre and Vitalstatistix. Space Theatre. 19 Jun 2019
While it may not have been Cher fan and cabaret creator Larissa McGowan’s goal to inspire me to review the pop icon, it was great fun, post-show, watching clips of Cher in her eponymous 1970s TV show, a moving and nostalgic rendition of I Got You Babe with hubby Sonny Bono (written by Sonny), and a generous Cher joining three tribute singers from the Broadway cast of The Cher Show in a sisterly If I Could Turn Back Time. Wow.
Brisbane-born Larissa McGowan won a swag of national awards for dance during her career with the Australian Dance Theatre in the 2000s. She subsequently choreographed with the ADT and has since been creating dance with numerous companies across the land.
Larissa’s opening act has her miming the hit If I Could Turn Back Time while dancing satirically, sometimes scurrilously and overall in an exaggerated agitated fashion sufficient to elicit a few laughs. One knew then this wasn’t your typical tribute act - if there was going to be any tribute at all. Yet there was; in fulfilling Cher’s reputation as a tough female accomplishment in a man’s world, through song selection and mimed scenes of some of her bolshie movie character creations – I’m thinking of the mother and principal interview scene about a special needs child. Larissa has great skill in conveying Cher’s enigmatic and understated persona which foiled with her theatrical flamboyance signaled by a blizzard of head pieces and costumes (set and costume design – Jonathan Oxlade and Renate Henschke).
There is the Cher that was and the Cher that is, and as the one hour show progresses, Larissa’s Cher becomes more fractionated and discombobulated, perhaps going through the pangs of plastic surgery disfiguration or ungraceful ageing. This is wonderfully manifested – maybe too early in the show during Gypsys, Tramps & Thieves – in a terrific bit of theatrical magic through an awesome, techno-perfect synchronisation of Larissa’s angular choreography, co-creator and sound designer Steve Mayhew’s resampled aural extravaganza, and Chris Petridis’s stark and colour contrasting lighting. To my ear, the entire show was dubbed, even when Larissa was voicing herself. As the hour’s end drew near, Cher as a singing force was no more, yet the obtuse and jerky choreography lost some of its impact, and the end came rather suddenly.
If you were looking for your plain vanilla tribute act, you probably misunderstood the program and could be disappointed. A more open-minded fan will revel in the multitudinous references to Cher’s songs and movies and be fascinated in Larissa’s and Mayhew’s interpretation of the fading but not fallen diva of pop in this world premiere.
David Grybowski
When: 19 to 20 Jun
Where: Space Theatre
Bookings: Closed
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