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
Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Catherine Alcorn. Dunstan Playhouse. 13 Jun 2024
From the moment Catherine Alcorn’s hugely bewigged head pokes through the curtains, you know you’re in for a fun night. What you don’t know is that The Divine Miss Bette quickly moves into a remarkably fine-honed theatrical experience that goes far beyond what one expects from a ‘tribute’ show.
There are two levels at work here: Alcorn has studied Bette Midler’s style and mannerisms and worked very hard at emulating them. She has the Midler mince and moue down pat, almost disturbingly so. But behind the spangles, eye flutters and vocal mannerisms, Catherine Alcorn is clearly at work, and every now and then she pops out to let you know that.
The show opens raucously with Friends (from Midler’s 1972 debut album ‘The Divine Miss M’) and in an indication that this will not be religiously Midler, the Staggering Harlettes, also big wigged and sequinned, vibe to The Who’s, Who Are You. Acknowledging her backup singers Misty (Kat Hoyos), Fisty (Chloe Marshall), and Vendetta (Karla Hillam) and band (Musical Director and piano, Benjamin Kiehne, Crick Boue on Bass, Sam Leske on electric and acoustic guitar with Ben Todd on drums), it’s straight into a boogie belter with Glen Miller’s In The Mood – you wait for it to segue into Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy but she stops short; and you know it’s a tease.
The band is restrained, as you know they must be. Even as the Harlettes are pulling moves from the Ike & Tina Review the band is cool, laidback, Sam Leske pulls a lick or two out of the Telecaster, changes guitars without being noticed, then polishes the 70s wah perfectly, but never raises a sweat. Clearly it is not in the bassist’s contract to raise a sweat either. Cool as cucumbers, he and drummer Todd.
Alcorn’s between song patter is what takes this show past tribute and into full music theatre. In her Divine Madness concert video, Midler pays homage to American vaudevillian Sophie Tucker and Alcorn happily intersperses songs with Sophie’s signature phrase “I’ll never forget it you know!” and tells some pretty blue jokes; Alcorn doesn’t resile from these, and they create some pretty funny engagement with the crowd.
In the main, this production is about Bathhouse Bette, the sassy, bawdy woman who played gay bathhouses in the ‘seventies, but every so often, the pensive, passionate Bette appears. Alcorn’s skills are such that the audience has barely finished chuckling at one of her bon mots when they are jolted into introspection with songs such John Prine’s, Hello In There or the Beatles’, In My Life.
The Harlettes take the spotlight for a moment and take on TLC’s, Waterfalls – not the most successful number of the evening, but entertaining nonetheless.
There’s a small break for a costume change; Bette and the Harlettes appear looking like red Christmas ornaments as they sashay across the stage. She baits her audience… most amusingly takes the piss out of The Rose – “I’m sick of singing this! You sing it!” and the audience dutifully does. At this stage they’d do anything for her. From A Distance becomes a serenade from the balcony, and Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy finally turns up, interspersed with a rousing rendition of Beyonce’s, Single Ladies.
The close encapsulates the spirit of the show; the curtain comes down, the band keeps playing, then Catherine Alcorn appears as herself, stunning in black. She gives a laden and wonderful speech about how she got here, and the entire audience considers they have just been told it took 12 long years for this show to be accepted into the Cabaret Festival fold. Madness. This show is as assured, as sassy, as capable and as technically adept as it is possible to be. It is also the very spirit of cabaret, and in closing with a beautiful rendition of Wind Beneath My Wings (as herself), Catherine Alcorn earns a standing ovation. It is fitting.
Arna Eyers-White
When: 13 to 15 Jun
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: Closed
Free Agents Youth Theatre. Goodwood Theatre and Studios. 13 June 2024
Underage conscription in WWI happened despite its illegality. Free Agents Youth Theatre’s Lambs delves into the how, why and at what cost.
Director/Writer Sean Riley’s production, developed over a two-year process with the cast has produced one of the richest, deeply considered and powerfully written hours of staged new theatre of 2024.
Lambs tackles that ‘one day of the year’ sociopolitical trope minus all the usual ANZAC mythology and virtue signalling, going directly to the realities at the core of 1900s Australia.
Australia is newly federated yet still colonial in heart and mind. England is still home. The Bush still heart of an agriculturally grounded society; yet it is a place to escape.
The world of Boys’ Own adventures and the ‘manly pursuit of honour’ fuels the extraordinary power of the production’s opening scene, encapsulating the spirit of the production’s intent as a whole.
“Once more unto the breach”, Shakespeare’s famed line from Henry The Fifth, utters Stanley Lamb (Eadan McGuiness) crouched on all fours in uniform as battle sound rages. A scene which quickly segues into a school group learning the play. A group eagerly discussing the oncoming potential of war. What is the breach? The trenches of France to come, unknown to teenage boys for whom war is a grand patriotic manly adventure.
It is Stanley and brothers Phillip (Hugo de Guzman) and Joseph (Jack Chadwick) whose fates illustrate choices made and the systems allowing them.
This smashing together of imagery and time in Riley’s writing and direction is a distinctive, deftly managed, powerful force of the production. Its narrative fuses present day bush town of St Judes and future trench warfare. Lambs traces the struggle between overt pro-war social attitudes, diminishing numbers of soldiers, and implicit but never spoken of acceptance of underage conscripts. It tears at family and community.
The work is at times chilling, heart-warming, and mournfully reflective, leaving you breathless often.
Riley’s cast is a powerful ensemble of extraordinary young actors, filling Riley’s intensely reflective, powerful and innocent characters’ dialogue and experiences with profoundly aware performances.
In their youth, even when playing roles older than themselves alongside those their own age, the cast absolutely accentuate the opportunistic barbarity of the desperate war times that accept child soldiers.
In partnership with Kim Liotta’s sparsely dressed set, Nic Mollison’s on point, scene defining light design, Eadan and Justin McGuiness of Little Fire Film’s mesmerising effective video design, and Composer Doctor Oscillator’s careful, mournful out of tune pianola score, Lambs is a complete world that could be a dream of the past, but is in fact emblematic of a lesser acknowledged truth of Australia’s WWI history.
David O’Brien
When: 13 to 15 June
Where: Goodwood Theatre and Studios
Bookings:Closed