It is out! At last. The Cabaret Festival program is public. We can start booking our seats.
Phew.
And how relieved is its artistic director, Julia Zemiro, who is one of life’s enthusiasts; hence someone who is dying to share, share, share.
Keeping secrets has been tough for her; shtum is not her preferred style.
Luckily, the marketing powers-that-be allowed her to leak out bits of the program to trusted journalists so she had a few chances to bubble with excitement. Now, after all the planning and programming, she’s looking forward to the foyer talk during a couple of action-packed weeks in which she will be doing a spot or more of performance herself.
Zemiro realises she has been appointed to the CabFest because she has an appeal to a younger demographic. Her challenge has been to find things which are a bit different. She talked and talked to the showbiz world. She went to Edinburgh Fringe and overdosed on a program so huge she found it hard to work out what she could choose from it. She has a much smaller model to fill. Under 50 programs are the shape of Adelaide’s winter CabFest.
No, it will not be a program full of burlesque, she reveals; only the inimitable Maude Davey who is going to bring back her burlesque show about not doing a burlesque show. My Life In the Nude.
“She does not want to do it anymore. It is a show about why do people want to work in the nude. It is a show so moving and so beautiful that I had to go away and talk about it for three hours.”
But the big headliners of CabFest 2019 are, ta-da, Dami Im and Kate Miller-Heidke, Australia’s popular Eurovision stars, both so dazzlingly young and so different.
Zemiro was blown away by Kate's Eurovision performance and tips her to be in the top five next time. Yes. She will stand by that. Noted.
Of course, Zemiro has a big soft spot for Eurovision, having been the adored commentator for many long years, albeit the public knows her also for RocKwiz, Good News Week, Julia Zemiro’s Home Delivery, and as Australia’s Brainiest TV star, among other things.
But the Eurovision years brought Zemiro into the hearts of many Australians, showcasing her witty smarts. There has been much grumbling about her departure. She laughs it off. It’s best to leave when one is at the top, she explains. And she had been “midwife” to Australia’s inclusion in the competition itself.
To keep the fan base happy, there will be quite a strong Eurovision presence in the CabFest. And also, another thing at which Zemiro excels, Improv. That is an entirely new ingredient in a Cabaret Festival, bound to have people arguing that annual chestnut: “what IS cabaret?”
Look out for Spontaneous Broadway.
To Zemiro the Adelaide Cabaret Festival 2019 must resonate as a something for everyone creation full of surprises. So, her first program is categorised, not by conventional entertainment genres but by internal human preferences such as thrills and risks and ease and laughter.
It will even have "curve balls", taking audiences out of their comfort zones, she warns.
“People might not like every show but they will not be able to argue the skills involved,” she challenges.
“There will be more flesh on the bones. Substance! Shows with strong stories, I can stand by every show. And I’ll be in the foyer every night to talk about them.”
Also, high in the spirit of the Zemiro CabFest is its old inspiration and founder, the late and beloved Frank Ford.
“We pay respects to Frank Ford and I’ll be raising a glass to him nightly,” she asserts.
Another first from Zemiro is the idea of a "Literary Cabaret". This is represented by a show called Liner Notes which derives from the old CD covers one could often barely read because they were so tiny. But one studied and read them over and over while listening to the music. Zemiro says she was a great devotee to Liner Notes and there are about fifteen albums she says she knows inside and out. The literary aspect is the challenge for “interesting writers and performers” (she is not giving away names yet) to listen to a track and then prepare five-minute reactive liner notes to be delivered as a song or a speech or a poem.
“Where were you then? How was the world for you then?” she suggests for the content.
Of course, there will be old-fashioned cabaret things such as concerts and solo performances by talented and imaginative singers. There will be new blood and old blood.
“David Campbell! I’m getting him back off the TV. He’ll do a huge swing show at the Thebby”, touts Zemiro.
Since the Festival Theatre is booked with a musical and Her Majesty’s in major re-creation mode, the dear old Thebby has come to the rescue once again.
Indeed, the razzle-dazzle opening gala show, which now is not officially called "opening gala" but is instead a cabaret party called The House Is Live, will be in the Thebby. And it will feature a wild variety lineup of stars, some of whom are not actually performing in the CabFest. There will be Paul Capsis, Reuben Kaye, Omar Musa, Meow Meow, Queenie van de Zandt, and other new talent on the national rise.
For kids, there is a Random Musical in the CabFest program.
“I might get caught up, too, with my old character. I might bring her up,” Zemiro warns.
“I want people to come to the Cabaret Festival and have a good old bloody laugh.”
She also wants to thrill with the “classic cabaret conceit” of performers telling life stories, to which end siblings Vickie and Linda Bull are likely to be a sell-out attraction.
"From Tongan background to stardom,” cheers Zemiro of the former Black Sorrows singers.
RocKwiz, another Zemiro special, will have its spot. “Rock the Rock Musical,” she declares. Look for Tim Minchin and music from The Who and Queen and Elton John and Abba….and… “shit hot singers to sing the hell out of the songs.”
And, not only but also, some very special dance is programmed. Aaron Cash, special dancer for Cher, pas-de-deux partner for Twyla Tharp, and Ballet Revolution legend, will be on the program.
"What a story he has to tell. What a superb dancer,” swoons Zemiro.
“He’s not 25 anymore but he’s still gorgeous. I wish I could go back and do his dance classes.”
And so it rolls on into a winter wonderland of entertainment.
Names roll off Zemiro’s lively tongue. Look for the lights of the Blues Brothers, Cher, Bowie, Andy Griffiths, and in complete contrast, the bright new sparkle of Deborah Conway’s brilliant 21-year-old daughter Alma Zygier.
There is almost too much to take in.
There is even the beloved Spiegeltent, with vivid big band happenings afoot.
Only in Adelaide, the Cabaret Festival city, can one say: “Yippee, winter is on its way."
Samela Harris
When: 7 to 22 June
Where: Adelaide Festival Centre
Bookings: bass.net.au
Program: adelaidecabaretfestival.com.au
State Theatre Company. 30 Mar 2019
The winds of change have blown a gale on the world of Aussie Rules football.
Not only do we now have female football commentators and a fully-fledged all-woman pro-league football team but now we also have a female interpretation of the classic Australian footy play, The Club.
If eyebrows are up around the town about moustachioed women performing this renowned piece of macho tradition, its creator, playwright David Williamson, is just fine with it. He knows the time is right. He knows the zeitgeist when he sees it.
Director Tessa Leong of the isthisyours? independent theatre company had the idea of a sex change for The Club about two years ago.
“It’s hard to know where ideas come from. They build up sub-consciously,” she says.
She distilled it for a while and then sounded out on a few theatre people in Sydney.
“The first two said it was a great idea but David Williamson would never agree with it,” she reports.
Tessa says her proposal to the playwright outlined "the way in which we are in a stage of world evolution in which we are questioning the power structures that make society tick, our safety and things not keeping people safe, and the abuses of power…
"We are having a discussion around women and the re-interrogation of women’s place in society in a way that has not been seen since the 1970s.
“The play was written in the 70s”.
The Club is a satirical expose on corporate presence in sport. It is a discussion on how to breathe new life into a football club in crisis. It is one of the most performed plays in the country.
“There is something happening now akin to what was happening in the 70s, the discussions of who holds the power and who lays down the law and who keeps everything standing.”
Interestingly, in articulating these thoughts to the playwright, the director of the brave little female theatre company found she was further convincing herself that she had the right idea.
Her thoughts had emerged almost osmotically from her own Aussie roots, from the SANFL games of her childhood, growing up with a footy-mad mum and then navigating her way through allegiances to the AFL when she moved to Sydney.
“We’re in the third season of AFLW. Times have really changed. It’s not just Buddy Franklin that’s the big star now. It’s Erin Phillips.
"Sporting life has changed. And with it we have watched the rise of the corporate AFL. What was once a community activity has become a corporate structure. This is what David Williamson was distilling in The Club."
Williamson concurs.
“When I wrote The Club around 40 years ago, about the all-male, testosterone-driven political infighting behind the scenes in an AFL club, I never thought I’d see an all-female production of the play,” he responded.
“But as my aim was to satirise males behaving badly, who better to make the satire even sharper than a very talented team of female actors/comedians?” says Leong.
“We had to explain to him that we are a company of only so many people with only three actors able to perform the play at this point.
This forced and encouraged us to think outside the square with the play’s characters since the women would be playing multiple roles.”
Knowing that their target production would be with State Theatre in Adelaide, isthisyours? performed a small try-out season of the concept at Belvoir Street, what Leong calls a “conceptual version of the show’s bare bones”. It was a success.
It enabled the company and cast to test the waters with an audience which does not have AFL as its first local loyalty. Sydney is a rugby city, but the corporate nature of today’s sport and the influences of social media on stardom emerge as common threads.
“It was wonderful opportunity we were afforded that generosity by Belvoir,” says Leong.
And so it comes to pass that we now have not only a famously male-oriented play performed by women but also as an historical milestone for the State Theatre Company of SA.
“We discover that we are the first all-female cast and administration team in State Theatre’s history,” declares Leong.
Indeed, with Tessa Leong as director, the company brags Renate Henschke as designer, Susan Grey-Gardner as lighting designer, Catherine Oates as composer and sound designer and actors Nadia Rossi, Louisa Mignone and Ellen Steele as the cast, along with lots of fake moustaches.
Samela Harris
When: 5 to 20 April
Where: Space Theatre
Bookings: bass.net.au
Presented by Spark Creative.
Now in its fifth year, and returning to the Adelaide Fringe for a second season, Thrones! The Musical Parody is about to transport audiences once again to that world of ice and fire through musical parody and satire.
Albert Samuels is both writer and performer in the show. “We were asked a few years back to write a musical comedy of 50 Shades Of Grey,” he recalls.
It was after the success and fun of that process that the team decided to explore Game Of Thrones (GoT) for new material.
“It’s a challenge,” Samuels laughs. “Most stories have a central protagonist. Lord of the Rings is a great example. It follows Frodo and Samwise, and everything else is built around that. Game of Thrones is not so easy however. It is intentionally written from the point of view of a million different protagonists!”
To wrap the entire GoT story into 75 minutes, Samuels and his team have focussed on just a few central characters including John Snow, Tyrion Lannister, and Daenerys Targaryen.
Principally though the show isn’t centred around GoT characters at all; it is primarily about a non-GoT character called Linda, who exists outside of the world, and who has never seen an episode.
“The conceit of the show is that six friends gather to watch Game of Thrones,” Samuels explains. “Linda reveals that she has never seen the show before, and after her friends [recover from being] completely aghast they decide they are going to act out the whole show for her.”
This external context gives the writers a clever device to explore GoT from the viewer’s perspective. It gives the audience an opportunity to “call out the ridiculousness and the violence.”
“We built the show so that even if someone has never seen Game Of Thrones before they will still enjoy it,” Samuels explains. “We wanted to make a good musical that has good songs in it and that has a good story. So that’s why we have the framing device of Linda, who’s going through a really rough time in her life – her husband has just left her. When her friends gather to celebrate, ostensibly they’re celebrating her divorce, but really they want to come over to her place because she has the nicest TV of all of them.”
Once Linda confesses her GoT ‘virginity’ her friends decide that in the hour before the premiere is to air, they will act out the show and bring her up date.
The show does contain coarse language and simulated nudity, so it might be an eye-opener for youngsters. The company welcomes parental guidance, however, for anyone 14 years or older.
“If you would let them watch Game Of Thrones, you will be fine, but if you wouldn’t – you shouldn’t come,” says Samuels.
The cast and team of writers hail from all over the US including, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York and come from different comedy backgrounds including script and screenplay writing for film and TV, as well as for the stage. Samuels explains that the process for creating these musical parodies is one of huge collaboration. There are five writers, two of which are composers, and a head-writer who is in charge of the direction of the show. The lead writer will suggest a scene or song that is needed to progress the story, but all ideas are supported and encouraged.
“Luckily we are all such Game Of Thrones fans that we all came with a lot of ideas,” Samuels says.
A lot of the work done ends up on the cutting room floor, too.
“To coin a Game Of Thrones phrase, you’re constantly killing your babies!” Samuels laughs.
The team might love a song or love an idea, but if it just doesn’t fit, it won’t make it into the show. The collaborative excess is never wasted, however, as Thrones! is continually updated. This latest tour has new content from the TV series’ seventh season.
Part of the success of the show, which is now in its fourth year of touring to sell out houses, is put down to not “coasting” when it comes to the comedic content.
“One of the things we learned from doing 50 Shades is to respect your audiences' intelligence,” Samuels explains.
“We [aim] to give them something that is creative - whether you love Game Of Thrones, whether you hate it, or if you’ve never seen it - and it’ll be a much longer living show”.
As quoted in the review by Three Weeks, Samuels agrees, it is “so much better than it ever had to be” because they didn’t just go for the low hanging fruit.
With the final season of Game Of Thrones slated for April this year, Samuels believes Thrones! has as an exciting future, and likely another good couple of years of performances ahead of it. “There is at least one, and maybe multiple, spin-off shows of Game of Thrones now, and perhaps a prequel to it, so we will see where we go with that,” Samuels says. “There’s [also] Harry Potter of course,” he quips, “but we also just love original material.”
Samuels’ team do another show called Baby Wants Candy, which is a very popular completely improvised musical that Australian audiences really love. Every night new ideas for shows are called out by audience members and the show is made up on the spot.
“We have over 3,500 possible titles for original shows from that alone” Samuels explains.
Thrones! The Musical Parody will play in The Flamingo at Gluttony from the 24th of February to the 17th of March. Baby Wants Candy, The Completely Improvised Full Band Musical will play in the The Box at The Garden of Unearthly Delights from the 26th of Feb until the 17th of March.
More information and a sample of the music of Thrones! can be found on the show’s website, here.
Paul Rodda
When: 24 Feb to 17 Mar
Where: The Flamingo at Gluttony
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Last time Yohai Cohen was at WOMADelaide, he was just one voice in Ensemble Piyut, a large male Jewish litugical choral ensemble.
Just two years later, he returns to WOMADelaide as a featured musician with his own already renowned band.
His rise in the music world has been remarkable.
At only 28 years of age, Cohen reveals that he also has moved from student to teacher.
Cohen is talking from his home in Beit Zait, Israel. Here he is teaching music, particularly the oud, an instrument of which he is now an acknowledged master. But, ironically, his expertise was honed in Australia. He was in Australia for two years studying music and in that time he learned the oud from a Syrian teacher, Adnan Barak.
At Monash he learned the usual things such as classical music theory, jazz theory and, he says, "what people call world music”. He took issue with the label of “world music”, preferring to see it as multicultural.
Therein, like a glove, fits his treasured Andalusian music. This is a sound he will make sure that Adelaide hears.
But for Yohai Cohen it did not begin with the oud. Cohen started out as a percussionist.
“Then I found out I was hiding behind the instrument," he says.
Since he also is a singer, and much admired, it suited that he play an instrument that liberated him to sing.
The oud was already a great love.
He admits that it was hard to learn and it also is hard to teach.
“I just love the sound of it,” he enthuses.
"It is a very rhythmical musical instrument. It includes percussion in the music.”
Yohai Cohen was born to Moroccan parents in the northern part of Israel. Hence, his music is strongly of Moroccan Jewish derivation.
Swiftly, as he mastered the oud, he gathered fellow musicians with whom to express this music, to delve into the traditional music of both Morocco and Israel and especially Moroccan Andalusian music.
“Traditional music is a very rich resource. There is a lot of it. It is never ending.”
He formed his Yohai Cohen Quintet in June 2017 in Australia and went on a Melbourne and Sydney tour. The concerts were sell-outs. Yohai Cohen was an instant hit. And he goes from strength to strength.
He has performed with the likes of the Temen Blues, Eta Sela, Idan Raichel, and Rabbi Haim Louk (New Jerusalem).
He has been performing at music festivals, most particularly in Morocco with one of the great masters of Andalusian music, Elad Levi.
"He is a huge inspiration for a lot of people,” declares Cohen.
“He is my dear friend and he has arranged a lot of our music. Furthermore, he is coming to Adelaide to play with us. He is our special guest. He has never played with us before. But this is very important to us.”
Elad Levi is a violinist as well as an arranger. He is a lifelong student of Moroccan tradition and a leading disciple of a famous Andalusian violinist, the late Yeshua Azulay. He has his own Andalusian music group and he tours extensively.
Cohen sees Levi as adding to the string of great masters who have played WOMADelaides.
“That is what the people come for, the great names of the world who come and play for people who have never heard their kind of thing before, getting them on their feet and dancing.”
Yohai Cohen’s Quintet is known for getting audiences energised with foot-stomping celebratory music as well as gentle, melodic music, spiritual music, and hymns. There also is jazz, funk, and improvisation in their range.
Now living back home in Israel with his parents and sister, he craves to balance the touring musician’s life with home time. This, he says, is valuable for practising as well as teaching.
But, in the end of the day, his hopes are just to be happy, to have a family, to play the music he loves, and make people happy with his music and, ideally, to say something through his music, “something that is my style and to make the experience spiritual”.
He hopes to communicate these feelings to his audience at WOMADelaide, a festival he describes as “very relaxing, just like Australia, and also cheerful, cool and very professional.”
So say all of us.
Yohai Cohen Quintet will play at the Moreton Bay Stage
Samela Harris
When: 8 to 11 Mar
Where: Botanic Park
Bookings: womadelaide.com.au
Derek Tickner. Broadcast Bar.
Direct to Adelaide from his most recent engagement at the hip Heya Bar, so deep in the Fortitude Valley of Brisbane that the sun never shines, is the strummin’ and funnin’ Pommie Queenlsander, Eric Tinker.
For the last five years, Tinker has been roamin’ Australia and indeed the world, perfecting his musical comedy skills. “I’ve played the clubs, pubs and festivals in SA, NSW and Queensland; I settled in Brisbane last year,” says Tinker. “I also travelled around the world in 2016 and was offered gigs in Canada, England, Rome, Malta and Singapore. Musical comedy can break the language barrier that stand-up comics can struggle with.”
Tinker is playing three shows at the cool and intimate Broadcast Bar. “Adelaide is my favourite Australian city. I lived here for ten years and love its laid back and open-to-anything audiences. So I decided it’s the best place to put on my first Fringe show.”
Tinker makes some of the songs his own by fitting new lyrics onto familiar bars. His observations on life through song and guitar are decidedly quirky. How can you go past titles like Achy Breaky Heart 2 – The Zombie Apocalypse? Tinker takes the works of the Bonzo Dog Band, Tom Basden, Wilson Dixon and Pulp down different paths, and plays covers of ironic tunes such God’s Song by Randy Newman.
For something definitely different, Tinker’s the ticket.
Tinkerings is on at the Broadcast Bar, 66A Grote Street, on 21 & 27 February at 8 pm, and 7 March at 7 pm.
David Grybowski
When: 21 Feb to 7 Mar
Where: Broadcast Bar
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au