Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Festival Theatre. 22 Jun 2024
It’s always a big load to carry, being the child of a revered artist when you’re working in the same field. Lisa Simone carries this weight well, perhaps because she doesn’t try to be her mother, Nina Simone. Comparisons are artistically odious, and in this instance, there isn’t much in terms of their vocals to compare them. The timbre and throaty nuances of Nina’s contralto simply aren’t present which makes it simpler to consider Lisa on her own merits, albeit while performing songs that Nina made famous.
Lisa was a latecomer to a singing career, spending 10 or so years in the military, and has enjoyed a very successful career on Broadway (Rent, Aida, The Lion King) and recorded a number of albums. This tour is very much dedicated to her mother’s body of work; Keeper Of The Flame was recorded by Nina in 1967 and is a most appropriate name for the show.
The program began with an extended instrumental number from the 16-piece band, who tested themselves out with various instrumental solos, while still paying very close attention to their chord charts. This made for a bit of a stilted beginning, but it is difficult to have a free-swinging vibe when you’re just not used to playing together.
Simone came on to sing the eponymous opener, and the softly spoken singer quickly won over the audience as she went on to tell anecdotes, jokes and some lengthy stories between songs. All the favourite standards were there: Fine and Mellow, Gal From Joe’s, Pay’em No Mind and audience participation came in Go To Hell, while band members also got to perform a few scheduled solos, a highlight being James Muller’s guitar solo in the blues Do I Move You.
After a brief interval, Lisa was back with a very up-tempo version of Mood Indigo, and then went on to perform some of the greatest songs that form Nina’s legacy. Black Is The Color (of my true love’s hair), My Baby Just Cares For Me, Feelin’ Good and I Put A Spell On You. She then placed her own stamp on the concert by closing with her own Finally Free, really showcasing the voice (and amazing breath control) that has won her accolades and award nominations on Broadway.
This carefully and closely curated show pays homage to the late and great Nina Simone, and at the same time allows Lisa Simone to come out from under that shadow, showing that she is a performer in her own right. It would be great to see her let loose and get a bit of improv happening on stage; for this performance however, the audience was more than happy to listen, sing along at times, and give this talented performer a standing ovation. A good close to a fabulous festival.
Arna Eyers-White
When: 22 Jun
Where: Festival Theatre
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Banquet Room. 21 Jun
Michelle Brasier and Ben Russell play a divorced showbiz couple whose luminous careers have descended to casting for the Wagga Wagga Amateur Musical Society. Their CabFest show features the divine Gillian Cosgriff onstage at piano under strict instructions to stick to “plinkyplonk" and not, under any circumstance, upstage those two stars.
Being an award-winning comedienne, musician, actor and composer, she plays her part as well as she plays the piano and, come the show’s denouement, she plays the audience most charmingly, too. An endearing CabFest star she is.
Brasier is pretty impressive, too. Talk about confidence. She’s so over the top, she’s a flood - so very funny and, of course, talented with capital T’s and an extremely short skirt. Russell is something else. One has never seen an actor with a more actorly face or, indeed, actorly demeanour. The two of them caricature most beautifully the divine arrogance of the very toffy repertory fallen stars who have succumbed to their own myth of stardom, now “resting" in the sticks.
Their shtick is very good fun and there is plenty of ensuring improv as they bring on their auditioning comedian singers.
First up, Boo Dwyer who, of course, is fabulous and hams it up nicely as the amateur hour discovery. Very Weilley, too. (A bad Kurt pun.)
Broden Kelly turns up as a loudmouth Ocker spouting Adelaide’s unfashionable suburb’s names for cheap, easy and successful laughs. He plays at his dream of being a Gypsy. The audience loves him to bits. It is loving everything.
Jealously, Braiser explains the audience’s enthusiasm with a gag about how it would even laugh at being asked if it liked drinking water. “Yes", it torrents. She and Russell conclude that this is all part of the odd phenomenon of being cabaret performed in a 6.30pm timeslot. Silly them. The Banquet Room tables are laden with champagne bottles. There’s a bar outside the door. This critic has a pink gin and soda in hand. It’s Adelaide CabFest time. It is Friday after work, for heaven’s sake. The sell-out crowd is happy already.
The next auditioner has a name that is hard to catch. She identifies herself as “the brown one”. She turns out to be fabulous and fearless Leela Vargehese. She sings beautifully, strips off her butch black leather outfit to reveal a white coat and brings the house down with the I’m Your Dentist song from Little Shop of Horrors.
Then Mad Dog Malcolm struts through the audience. What a roughy! He says he’s only here because his old mum wants him to audition. He then sings They Call the Wind Maria. It is so pure and powerful and utterly sublime that the room holds its breath. Dammit. Give him the job. Any job. Can I marry that voice?
Finally, an overly breathless and inept would-be star comes aboard with words and sheet music in hand. She’s been a bit too busy to learn her song, she says. Not surprising. It’s CabFest supremo Virginia Gay. Um, yes, a teeny bit busy. She does the Sweeny Todd pie song and throws ham, ham pie and, indeed, very well-cured gourmet ham into a dauntingly energetic performance. One may mention the voice. She is right at home in that big-musicals genre and her vocal range is very pleasing. She puts out. She’s a team player and it is her team.
The Wagga Wagga pair insists the room stays black so that their “plinkyplonk" pianist won’t show off while they exit to consider their verdict.
Cosgriff lures a couple of audience members to illuminate her with their iPhones and she gives a spellbinding performance.
Even she ends up being selected for the Wagga Wagga musical and everyone sings a grand finale of Magical Mr Mistoffelees from Cats. And they sing it and sing it and…er. Everyone’s singing it. Did they say for 20 minutes? They have 20 minutes to fill? The show has run short? Perchance they are one auditioner short.
For an improv show, one wonders why two of the country’s most accomplished improv performers could not have improvised a rabbit out of their hat when they had time to spare.
Oh well. Big deal. The audience gets back to the bar early.
It’s Cab Fest time. The warmest winter festival in the world. It was a good laugh. Everyone one is plain old-fashioned happy.
Samela Harris
When: 21 to 22 Jun
Where: Banquet Room
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Space Theatre. 21 Jun 2024
Murder for Two is a cabaret version of theatrical romps of the likes of The 39 Steps, where the action races by at a dizzying pace performed by a handful of actors (in this case two) playing multiple parts. Gabbi Bolt plays a detective who is eagerly learning the ropes of the sleuthing profession, but is a stickler for protocol, and Matthew Predny plays a bevy of witnesses and potential suspects to a murder. Without elaborating the convoluted plot, witnesses are questioned, motives are unmasked, opportunities are exposed, and the case is eventually solved!
On a raised stage in the cavernous and uninviting expanse of the Space Theatre, the packed-out audience enjoys ninety minutes of slapstick humour, witty vocals and vamping piano playing, very tightly executed sound effects by a gun tech team, and elaborate story telling told at an unrelenting pace. Bolt and Predny are in their element, and apart from the sound effects, they do everything – it’s a tour de force.
Murder for Two is the creation of Kellen Blair (book and lyrics) and Joe Kinosian (book and music), and they pack a lot into the show; it’s almost too much. It has a relatively long performance history and has played off-Broadway. Everyone loves value for money and feels gypped when too much of folding stuff is doled out for too little time, but this show edges in on the other extreme. It is often overwritten, and the detail becomes an obstacle for the two performers to overcome. They are often forced to play the action too much at the same frenetic level with precious little ‘light and shade’ and almost no let up. Sometimes it feels like you’ve done ten rounds with Mike Tyson with your hands tied behind your back! BUT …. This didn’t seem to matter to many of the sold-out audience who sat back with their obligatory glasses of oh-be-joyful and let it all wash over them. Like sponges, they gleefully soaked up the fun bits and revelled in the occasional pratfall, faux violence, and politically incorrect references.
This is a show for anyone who likes a tongue-in-cheek laugh and enjoys whodunnits, but doesn’t really want to think too much about it!
Kym Clayton
When: 21 Jun
Where: Space Theatre
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Johanna Allen. Dunstan Playhouse. 19 Jun 2024
Johanna Allen utilises the metaphor of the bin chicken in describing her means of picking out cultural morsels of songs from every era that sustained her, for this show. Then segues that into the bird of song metaphor, illustrating fabulous women of song who are an inspiration, roaming from Ella Fitzgerald and on (yay for a dash of Puccini to balance out the 80s pop stuff).
It’s like being an artist, she notes, this scrapping and greatness at once.
No scrapping for this song-bird, at all. She’s sharp. On point. Holds her audience with absolute ease. Equally sharp and mesmerisingly gifted is accompanist and Musical Director Mark Simeon Ferguson. A formidable creative team indeed.
Allen is cheeky as she takes on Kylie Minogue then a Disney fave with a backwards looking “did I just do Disney?” comment. This is the fun first half of the show, including a phones-in-the-air moment for the snog song some in the audience may not have ever snogged to.
Roars from the blues to that Les Miserables ballad, proving without doubt Sarah Brightman can’t sing. Allen gets to you with this torch song, mid-show, like no one else will. Truth, hurt and hope are so powerfully, honestly rendered. This second half of the show is deeper. It gets into you.
Allen’s voice is capable of spanning and mixing operatic and pop forms in a single song, something one would rarely find (unless you happened to be Freddie Mercury).
From here it’s all France, Spain to Hammerstein with a very sweet cheeky take on Patti LuPone whose show just happened to start bang on at the end of Allens’. Cheeky, but with much respect.
One has not seen Allen on stage for a long time. This show was one huge treat of a catch up.
David O’Brien
When: 19 Jun
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Festival Theatre. 19 Jun 2024
Cabaret Festival 2024 headliner Patti LuPone had every tool in her arsenal ready to bring a Festival Theatre full house whooping and thundering to its feet.
She had given a performance of sheer impeccability. Sheer professional prowess.
She is the goods. She knows it and she shows it.
“They didn’t think I’d last on Broadway! Hah!” sings the Broadway legend.
Three Tonys later, as a stunning septuagenarian, she can reflect and jest about bygone years and the physical woes of age while flourishing her maturity with cool panache.
Everything about her 100-minute performance is five-star from the set of the shining black Steinway Grand with its simple glass vase of crimson roses to the perfection of sound and subtle lighting changes. Not to mention her accompanists: her musical director Joseph Thalken on piano and the sublimely talented Brad Phillips sitting amid his five stringed instruments in a forest of instrument stands. Thalken’s arrangements deliver ethereal moments when the world is just guitar music together with that soaring mezzo voice of LuPone’s. Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina lingers in the mind.
LuPone does not waste a lot of time chatting. She has a slick script written by Jeffrey Richman in a concert conceived and directed by Scott Wittman. It is her Life in Notes and it is adorned by the musical “touchstones” which punctuated the years: from summertimes at the age of nine in Northport, NY, to Julliard classes and years in NYC and hippie 60s when her apartment looked like “a Bombay bordello” through to the melancholy of the aching AIDs 80s … A tear falls. There’s the covid lockdown in NY with her husband and son, washing hands and vegetables and appreciating time itself. There’s aging and humour about teeth and wigs.
And, of course, there’s Broadway and big numbers. There’s Alfie and Ladies Who Lunch, I Dreamed a Dream, My House, Forever Young, Lilac Time, I’m Ready to Go Again; familiar songs and less common songs, powered forth by that voice of such durably rich range.
As for the frocks. Well, for the first half she wears a tailored black suit with glittering lapels over a black fashion bra and chic flared slacks. After interval she wows in a silver lame sheath with a shimmering translucent silver floor-length cape flowing like a dream from the shoulders.
Thanks for your memories, Patti LuPone. Adelaide adored them - and you.
LuPone is continuing to tour with this snazzy show and methinks we’ll hear audiences cheer from wherever she may go.
Samela Harris
When: 19 Jun
Where: Festival Theatre
Bookings: Closed