Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Quartet Bar. Isobel Marmion, Caitlin Ellen Moore and Kidaan Zelleke. This show is a work in progress. 9 June 2024
Pop culture may soon have a new buzz word – ‘Bumbling’.
Bumbling began life a few years ago as an Adelaide Festival Centre InSpace project.
It’s a quirky blend of immersive theatre, guided Adelaide pub crawl tales, pop fizz tragicomic rom com, and a large dash of bee science.
Bee science is a very, very important element. Keep bumble(ing)bee in the back of your mind. An insect social anthropology project sort of thing.
Got it? Ok.
Isobel Marmion is pumped, dancing about in a pink clubbing dress as the audience saunters in. She is a total 90s chick.
When the show starts proper, out comes a script dripping with the best rom-com style, new writing in ages. Marmion endears herself to the audience instantly.
This off beat, sweet, bee loving girl had her heart broken on Valentine’s Day by a guy she’s been heavily into while he’s been heavily, unwillingly into her. She buys 11 books on bees the next day, and decides the audience are going to help her have a ‘recovery night’.
We are informed St Valentine is patron of lovers and beekeepers. Ah, a plot point begins to form and so gradually thicken.
Search for love, cruising Adelaide’s pubs and clubs with gal pals, is quietly hooked to the social behaviour of bees, their ‘hive’ as the show progresses.
What else is love, but sweet nectar? What else is a bunch a girls on the town but a swarm of happy bees seeking good times while maintaining the hives social status quo?
Marmion beautifully articulates a sense of herself as a vulnerable little bee subject to the joys and dangers they face from the environment they find themselves in.
Keeping things interesting, Marmion always has her mobile phone at hand. Despite doing a show! The heartless guy actually sent a text! Audience members are selected to mind the phone and told to stop the show if he replies!
Kidaan Zelleke’s direction is smoothly understated. Roaming the space and mastering the production’s pace is key to its success given how pivotal audience involvement is.
Successfully meshing the audience with the work itself is the hidden genus of Bumbling in its current form.
What is Bumbling? Seeking the nectar of night life, club to pub, as flower to flower!
David O’Brien
When: 8 to 9 Jun
Where: Quarter Bar
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Dunstan Playhouse. 8 Jun 2024
It’s easy to wax lyrical about Kate Miller-Heidke. I’ve seen her a few times over the years, and not only does she never disappoint, she’s now ageing like a fine wine. Sometimes brittle in her early years, she has developed into a mature and oh-so-smooth entertainer, one of Australia’s most iconic and revered female artists. There, I’ve gone and waxed again.
While operatically trained, Miller-Heidke has always given the nod to a broad range of contemporary musics, and tonight was no exception, as we opened with a blast of AC-DC. Short-lived, but funny.
The set opened with Fire and Iron, and as she sang of the love and life lost, you could hear a pin drop. But bar for the susurration of pleasure that seeped through the theatre, no-one was moving.
This is a pared back show, essentially Miller Heidke and music director / accompanist and life partner (baby daddy?) Keir Nuttal on acoustic six string guitar. She’s joined on a number of songs by vocalist Jess Hitchcock (whose own show A Fine Romance opens on June 13). It’s the sparseness that allows the songs to really shine through and showcase the basics – Miller-Heidke and Nuttal’s playing and arrangements. At times there’s an intimacy between them that almost feels like we’re intruding, such is the subliminal communication between them.
Miller-Heidke is a storyteller but they’re not always the beginning-middle-end kind of narrative. Songs like Sarah, which tells of a young woman who was drugged and abducted from a music festival, leaves us hanging; what happened? Sarah has no memory, and the guilt seems to lie more with Miller-Heidke than the abductor – how could she have let this happen to her friend?
A quick foray into Muriel’s Wedding the Musical, which Miller-Heidke wrote with Nuttal, has the audience chuckling through Amazing; this was an opportunity for Miller-Heidke and Hitchcock to have a lot of fun with their vocal duet, and fun they had!
Miller-Heidke has a dry sense of humour, and she’s not afraid to poke fun at herself and drop in a self-deprecating comment, as evidenced by the story of her first single and the comments from ABC listeners, one of whom never wanted to hear it again. Unfortunately he was the only caller…
Pulling us back to the personal, we are jolted with a song about “dancing on the grave of an arsehole”. The incredibly powerful You Can’t Hurt Me Anymore is visceral; the anger and rage Miller-Heidke feels about her childhood abuser is transmogrified to a powerful statement of survival and endurance. Who lives, wins.
Keir Nuttall is an absolute pleasure to listen to. While he exhibits great chord voicings, he is virtuosic in his leads and creates a room of sound with loops and popping rhythms, and the way these two work together with just keyboard and guitar is genius. This reaches its apotheosis in Humiliation with its extended solo and raucous outro.
Words gets an airing, as does the haunting Last Day On Earth and the always gut-wrenching Caught In The Crowd.
And course we couldn’t have a show without a nod to her Eurovision entry, or as English host Graham Norton described it, the “singing windscreen wiper”. For my money, Zero Gravity should have won the bloody thing – it had everything! Most of all, it’s a great song, and with Hitchcock and Nuttall joining in, she absolutely nailed it – again.
Talking Heads Psycho Killer ended out the set (interspersed with a bit of Stairway To Heaven from Nuttal) with a Paint It Black intervention and again we were treated to an impresario performance; the vocal gymnastics performed by Miller-Heidke left us in no doubt that she is at the top of her game, and we are the better for having been there to witness it.
The audience gave her a standing ovation. I’m generally a bit of a sceptic as to the veracity of most standing ovations in Adelaide; audiences appear to give them in grateful obeisance for having a good time, and there have been occasions where I feel I’m in a parallel universe. In this instance; brava.
Arna Eyers-White
When: 8 to 9 Jun
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Space Theatre. 8 Jun 2024
New Zealand company A Slightly Isolated Dog (go figure!) give the iconic gothic story a sexy, high-camp, over-the-top, high-energy makeover while preserving the fundamentals of the story: “We all have a darkness in us, but we push it down”, which is the oft-said refrain of the hard-working cast. The large crowd in the Space Theatre, which has been turned into a black-box theatre replete with bentwood chairs, round tables and electric candles, are all up for a good time. Judging by the whoops, cheers, gales of laughter, and willingness to play along with the performers (and their silly faux-French accents, which really signals we’re in for a silly time!), the audience was not disappointed, but this reviewer was.
Some of the strengths of the show were also its weakness: a large crowd on a mostly flat auditorium floor, but they did not enjoy clear sightlines; an energetic, brash and engaging cast that simultaneously wanders amongst and works the crowd, but it’s too difficult to hear them clearly (depending on where you sat), and there was no amplification; a fast-moving episodic unfolding plot that depends crucially on audience participation, which is willingly given, but it can’t always be clearly seen or heard (it’s as much visual as it is aural).
Occasionally there is a powerful rendition of a song to underline the course of the narrative, such as Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood, which is a cute spin on the conflicted mind of Dr Jekyll who loses (or finds?) himself when he becomes Mr Hyde. A rap trio is especially effective and well performed. But the musical numbers are probably less in number than would be expected in a cabaret performance, and the event more resembles a cross over between stand-up and improvised story telling with slap-stick physical theatre that would suit the Fringe Festival in an abbreviated form.
Much store is placed on highly impressive sound effects throughout the performance to underline words, action, and mood. The cast and the SFX operator have it down pat – the timing is exquisite, the sound quality and inventiveness is superb, and even the audience gets in on the act. One young fellow became an instant gun slinger and shot down the cast (and possibly other audience members!) in an impressive impromptu display of gangster gun slinging!
There is so much happening in this show. The pace is dizzying, and unrelenting – it’s almost flawed – and it’s difficult to leave the theatre without much more than having had a good laugh (which is an altogether good thing in these dismal times), and perhaps a nagging feeling that we all have darkness within, but we push it down.
Kym Clayton
When: 8 to 9 Jun
Where: Space Theatre
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Dunstan Playhouse. 8 Jun 2024
Standing ovation.
Fascinating Aida must be used to it by now. They are world-travelling super smarty-pants old-school satirists - and they come to the Cabaret Festival like a zephyr of diabolical eloquence.
These are erudite women, masters of their own dastardly lyrics, all three of them endowed with musical skills and showbiz chutzpah. One could fret about pronouns (as one does so much these days) but the Fascinating Aidas describe themselves as “queens”, albeit with mellifluously androgynous vocal range. They are hats-off fabulous, although perhaps not the entertainment fare for people not up with the zeitgeist of today, tomorrow, and yesterday. Their references are wildly catholic and their targets met, bullseye, with a silver arrow.
They are Dillie Keane, Adele Anderson and Liza Pulman with newish chum accompanist Michael Roulston. For forty years Dillie and Adele have been at it with Liza a mere twenty. She’s the young one, lithe and high soprano.
They laugh in the face of the ghastly aging process singing that we are next in line and what a mess we’ve made of the world for the next generation and, by the way, we haven’t finished.
Their songs are expertly arranged, their harmonies tried and true, their self-written lyrics ever full of surprises for those not au fait with their work. Some songs such as Cheap Flights have been out online for seeming aeons and were among the entertaining comforts we all sourced during Covid lockdown. It is joy to hear it live as their encore.
Oh, the fun they have with a poke to provoke the woke. Oh, how silly they are in the botox send-up. Of course We Go Dogging is beyond risqué, but the Fascinatings are not the market for shy prudes or, for that matter, right wingers. Their bring-down of Trump brings the house down.
They’re comic bliss on steroids. They are Lehrer-esque with non-binary bells on.
If only their season could have gone on and on. One would have seen them again just in case one missed a glorious word.
Samela Harris
When: 8 to 9 Jun
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Cabaret Festival. The Banquet Room. 7 Jun 2024
Mark Nadler - along with his ubiquitous rubber-ducky, makes a welcome return season to the Banquet Room at the Festival Centre for Cabfest.
It begins as a strap-yourself-in one-man show and it never stops. He simply is an experienced and class performer, who owns the stage from the outset and never lets go. This is a consummate performance.
Nothing and no-one, is sacred. He references an audience member as "nothing more tragic than a hapless drag queen". The Banquet Room he compares to playing at the Holiday Inn - at least it's the "big room at the Holiday Inn". A late comer who arrives with a bag of chips is regularly referenced. Yet all is delivered with style and panache and a generous dose of personality.
In a partly self-mocking way, Nadler recalls his risqué COVID home-podcast that includes his dog. It doesn't get broadcast.
At the show's beginning, Nadler tells us that his only planned numbers are his opening and his closing songs. The rest is a spontaneous, come-as-you-are show. His wealth and breadth of experience serves him brilliantly. Though too, he is able to adapt. Having promised "more Gershwin" (which had not eventuated) he replaces this final number with...'"more Gershwin". He is so at ease. This is his stage.
His brilliant vocals and skilful piano playing remain the focus. His songbook is wide and rich, and his pianism is exceptional. With his range, skills and variety on full display the audience rarely has time to draw a breath. Nadler progresses so quickly from song to anecdotes and observations (and everything in between), that we are clearly seeing a one-man, all-singing, all-dancing, all-talking virtuoso performance. The likes of which are rarely seen. Catch your breath for a moment and you're in awe.
With the welcoming of his handpicked guests, Gillian Cosgriff, Mark Lebante, and Joan & Flo, this is Nadler's moment of generosity - championing the talents of all three. All had played at the earlier Gala Performance, or in Nadler's words the "Galah Performance."
Cosgriff ranges from Why Try To Change Me by Cy Coleman to a brilliant piano duet with Duke Ellington's Dont Get Around Much Anymore. It is sassy and wildly energetic. Lebante's signature piece focuses on the playlist of Nat King Cole - and both he and Nadler balance and counterbalance each other harmoniously in a rich duet. With a change of pace, Flo and Jo sing One Night Only from the show Dream Girls; however it is their own number of having drunk too much that is the highlight, and so very funny.
As the end of the show draws nigh, Nadler individually thanks all of his crew. Another nice and generous touch. It is clear that this is not so much a curated show - but rather a spontaneous one. Closing with Who Could Ask For Anything More (complete with tap shoes) is so apt.
Just perhaps, Mark Nadler may one day get his own star at the Festival Centre's ‘Walk of Fame’? It will be well deserved.
Brian Wellington
When: 7 to 9 Jun
Where: The Banquet Room
Bookings: Closed