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
Who Died and Called you King. The Mill. 14 June 2024
Gritty down to earth road show tale theatre, in production and performance, with a brilliantly developed black comedy end makes You Are the Kitten a gripping, must see, think-lots-after experience.
New Years Eve, Sydney:
Claire (Chrissy Miller) has busted out of home after a mother/daughter argument. She crashes into Elisabeth (Britt Ferry), a none too together human leading a too thin for its own good greyhound.
Somehow, in the midst of their equal or opposing goals for the day (which coincidentally includes mutual need to escape one thing, person or other), they hang together; kind of bond; build a loose plan to do NYE together. See fireworks at midnight.
What ensues is a series of encounters and experiences in which both women, with different backgrounds and realised, or unrealised, sufferings explore that through bent, wonderful, and twisted encounters culminating in a significant moment. The moment an op-shop owner blows dope smoke into a small kitten’s face. It’s a pivotal symbolic image. Are their lives, their experiences as awake or aware as a stoned kitten? Let’s see.
Ellen Wiltshire’s direction is ideal for stripped back bare bones theatre in which narrative is key, as is the design. Gloria (the greyhound Elisabeth leads) is represented by a heavy length of jetty rope, synonymous with Sydney harbour. That dog’s suffering is emulated in howling voice by Elisabeth during its part of the narrative.
Playwright Nicole Plüss’s characters are a brilliantly opposing yet united pair; Claire, a middle-class girl awaking to the reality of her sexual abuse by a family friend; Elisabeth, a very street wise, deep in poverty, smart arse, housed in a shit hole, with a cat house, filled with real cats.
The power of this gripping production is the choices these emotional misfits make. Claire is so easily led. Elisabeth so easily willing to offset her realty with such remarkable, gutsy, pop philosophy, chutzpah. It’s also too funny for subject matter. They are an absorbing duo of compatible incompatibilities. Ideologies that somehow find a wondrous dark unity.
The twist and turn of imagery and shared narration/action between Claire and Elisabeth is seamless as it is physically played out onstage. This is majestic poor theatre at its finest. Then it does a marvellous turn in the last quarter of the production. It’s the kicker. The thing that makes one think!
Playwright’s great achievement, well set by Director.
David O’Brien
When: 14 June
Where: The Mill
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Cabaret Festival. The Banquet Room. 14 Jun 2024
The nature of improv is such that it is very hit and miss, and often both. This production is no different, although it is fortunately more hit than miss.
Jane Watt and Rob Johnson have been leading this show for some time at various festivals and it runs quarterly at the hayes in Sydney, so if you missed it this time, catch it next time you’re there. The remainder of the cast is a moving feast, and this production also featured Artistic Director Virginia Gay, who seems to pop up all over the place.
Julia Zemiro, Tom Cardy and Orya Golgowsky round out the cast, with Victoria Falconer improvising wildly on piano – kudos to her!
The show began with a quick, episodic improv game to smooth the way for those who hadn’t been exposed to the concept before, and there were surprisingly quite a few this night. A little more ‘miss’ with this one, but they were just warming up. Audience member Chloe provided the key words for a song (favourite film, place to go, etc) and the cast began to feel their way in, managing to create a workable and entertaining song of ‘Die Hard and the Mall’s Balls’.
Then on to the musical, which was created in the same fashion with audience suggestions. Hence we ended up with ‘The Pageant: The Musical’, with key words dictating that it had to be a children’s pageant, and must contain baton twirling and helicopter parenting.
Gay came straight out of the blocks with Zemiro as her feisty stage mother. Oddly enough, Gay declared that she was 19, and quickly reverted to a six year old with psychosis. Beautifully worked. Zemiro did some channelling of her ‘Fisk’ character, over-bearing and always right. The interplay between these two was delightful, as were Gay’s exchanges with her dead father. Equally entertaining is he partnership of grandfather Orya Golgowsky and frustrated grandchild Rob Johnson.
There are some very clever turns (the spooning song) and Falconer moved them along brilliantly, both anticipating and encouraging a bit of musical mayhem. This is a cast obviously experienced in improv, ready with their ‘Yes, And’, ready to move in from side of stage when a scene started to flounder, picking it up and moving it on.
With improv, the audience must be prepared to go along for the ride that the cast is taking them on; this night they certainly did. A welcome addition to the Cabaret lexicon.
Arna Eyers-White
When: 14 to 15 Jun
Where: The Banquet Room
Bookings: Closed