Adelaide Cabaret Festival with Master of Ceremonies Robyn Archer. World Premiere. Dunstan Playhouse. 13 Jun 16
The Weill File was The ‘Adelaide Cabaret Festival Gala’ for hard core cabaret aficionados of the Weimer Republic era and its great antagonist, Kurt Weill and all he inspired after him.
The heart of attraction of Weill for audiences and artists is his ability to assign brutally realist, starkly politicised lyrics concerning a genuinely brutal world with a score seemingly apposite the lyric, never failing to keep a listener hooked to it.
Fittingly, Australia’s most renowned expert on, and performer of, Cabaret from this era, Robyn Archer, was MC at an event which not only celebrated the work of Weill, but opened up the books, as it were, on the extraordinary diversity of his output from those Weimer days, right up to his Hollywood career.
Bringing such things to life on stage is a significant challenge. One acquitted superbly by a medley of Adelaide Cabaret Festival 2016 artists banded together, including Eddie Perfect, Ali McGregor, Barb Jungr, Die Roten Punkte, Hew Parham and John Thorn. The six piece band accompanying them was no slouch either; Adelaide Cabaret 2016 artists’ class as well.
Given all Archer had to do was sing one and a half songs (and one would normally expect her to do the whole show, given her famous name is on the banner), what a joy that was that’s all she sang.
Hollywood glamour blended with political angst? Ali McGregor proved she could do that, Eddie Perfect too. Barb Jungr, the capable interpreter of an even later angry political era, was so totally in her element she practically stole the stage. Die Roten Punkte did things with an arrangement involving a Fender guitar with reverb Weill would have adored and Hew Parham ripped the soul of cabaret to shreds while John Thorn quietly addressed its most childlike fears.
David O’Brien
When: 13 June
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: Closed
