Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Adelaide Festival Centre and Vitalstatistix. Space Theatre. 19 Jun 2019
While it may not have been Cher fan and cabaret creator Larissa McGowan’s goal to inspire me to review the pop icon, it was great fun, post-show, watching clips of Cher in her eponymous 1970s TV show, a moving and nostalgic rendition of I Got You Babe with hubby Sonny Bono (written by Sonny), and a generous Cher joining three tribute singers from the Broadway cast of The Cher Show in a sisterly If I Could Turn Back Time. Wow.
Brisbane-born Larissa McGowan won a swag of national awards for dance during her career with the Australian Dance Theatre in the 2000s. She subsequently choreographed with the ADT and has since been creating dance with numerous companies across the land.
Larissa’s opening act has her miming the hit If I Could Turn Back Time while dancing satirically, sometimes scurrilously and overall in an exaggerated agitated fashion sufficient to elicit a few laughs. One knew then this wasn’t your typical tribute act - if there was going to be any tribute at all. Yet there was; in fulfilling Cher’s reputation as a tough female accomplishment in a man’s world, through song selection and mimed scenes of some of her bolshie movie character creations – I’m thinking of the mother and principal interview scene about a special needs child. Larissa has great skill in conveying Cher’s enigmatic and understated persona which foiled with her theatrical flamboyance signaled by a blizzard of head pieces and costumes (set and costume design – Jonathan Oxlade and Renate Henschke).
There is the Cher that was and the Cher that is, and as the one hour show progresses, Larissa’s Cher becomes more fractionated and discombobulated, perhaps going through the pangs of plastic surgery disfiguration or ungraceful ageing. This is wonderfully manifested – maybe too early in the show during Gypsys, Tramps & Thieves – in a terrific bit of theatrical magic through an awesome, techno-perfect synchronisation of Larissa’s angular choreography, co-creator and sound designer Steve Mayhew’s resampled aural extravaganza, and Chris Petridis’s stark and colour contrasting lighting. To my ear, the entire show was dubbed, even when Larissa was voicing herself. As the hour’s end drew near, Cher as a singing force was no more, yet the obtuse and jerky choreography lost some of its impact, and the end came rather suddenly.
If you were looking for your plain vanilla tribute act, you probably misunderstood the program and could be disappointed. A more open-minded fan will revel in the multitudinous references to Cher’s songs and movies and be fascinated in Larissa’s and Mayhew’s interpretation of the fading but not fallen diva of pop in this world premiere.
David Grybowski
When: 19 to 20 Jun
Where: Space Theatre
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Cabaret Festival/Michael Nolan, Emilie Zoey Baker, Sean M Whelan. The Blue Room. 14 Jun 2019
Not a tribute show nor a cover band act playing the Blues Brothers soundtrack. No, this show is something greater than these obvious things.
Liner Notes Live: The Blues Brothers is a journey of reminisce, exploration and excavation of the influence this famous film/soundtrack has had on culture, as much as it has on the lives of five diverse Australian celebrities, ranging from a famed children’s author to a mighty drag queen.
It’s a massive experience. Host Michael Nolan sets the scene and atmosphere with a rousing intro performance singing “hardy, hardy ho!” The eight piece band, a loose and cruising smooth blues beast bubbling with hot energy, serves to reinforce the greatness of the songs, not pummel the audience with them. Nolan gives the overall history of this blues culture masterpiece then the magic begins.
From cowboy hatted Andy Griffiths’ extraordinary riff on the Blues Brothers as it should have been a western thing (a truly awesome take on it, cue paper cups chucked at him from front row,) to Maggie Beer’s quiet, emotive focus on the lesser, but loved voices and songs tucked into the edges of the film, comes a sense of the outer possibilities The Blues Brothers presented as a challenge to musical sensibilities.
Bring on the wonderfully suave, deeply erudite Dave Graney with that gravelly, warm textured voice of his. Graney offers a deep, profound spirited evocation of what the blues is, quoting three texts that leave the audience in no doubt about what the heart of this thing is, the power of soul, that empowered love and rebellion.
Who better to provide life examples of this spirit than the grand comic goddess of music, Julia Zemiro? Her Jailhouse Rock experience packs one hell of a punch, a fired up shining example of how a song stuffed up becomes a perfect expression of the actual spirit behind its creation. A call to arms celebrating the cool ‘stuff you’ attitude the Blues carries. A moment in her life that gave her a freedom she needed.
Freedom, heart and soul get a fiery showing thanks to Kween Kong’s literally hot-as-toast performance (cue support blues babes handing out pieces of toast,) giving full rein to the fierce, hot black blues vibe that really is the divine backbone of the soundtrack.
Omar Musa finishes the night by pulling back the speed of the evening, offering up a most beautiful piece of poetry spinning off the most lonely and heartfelt songs of the soundtrack, that imploring need of “someone to love me.”
This film, these songs were all about a call from God. But it’s much, much more than that. This was an evening like no other, making manifest just how extraordinarily significant and wide reaching its power really is, even today.
David O’Brien
When: 14 Jun
Where: The Blue Room
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Quartet Bar. 15 Jun 2019
Canada’s SoCALLED is famed for Jewish hip-hop. Going back to his roots, in collaboration with Adelaide’s Zephyr Quartet is easily one of the best things he could have ever chosen to do in his creative life.
SoCALLED brought to his rapt audience in the Quartet Bar a veritable wide history of Yiddish Theatre songs, Holiday songs, Klezmer and more.
The marriage of voice in performance with quartet arrangements is so profoundly affecting. Impassioned urgency, thrusting back and forth in voice and gesticulation is matched with vivid plucked strings and light bow strokes creating an added heart beat to the dramatic, emotional, yet clearly cerebral lyrics.
Never has this famed quartet been seen so in love with the music they were playing. Clearly it had much to do with the wonderful artist leading and guiding them. The material stretched from the early 20th Century, across two world wars to the present; always maintaining a zest for life, for robust self-reflection and cry to action in service of a people, a culture.
So much soul, so much love, so much sombre, heartfelt reflection in one evening always gilded with a tinge of happiness like sparkling gold.
David O’Brien
When: 15 to 16 Jun
Where: Quartet Bar
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Cabaret Festival. The Blue Room. 9 Jun 19
It’s not the famous movie. It’s a strange Melbourne confection of dark matter. Something spooky is going down, they say, having tip-toed into the room with their hooded heads illuminated by torchlight.
It’s the cabaret creep show, definitely R-rated with a wealth of profanity-adorned sexual and sinister content. It’s just a bit on the could-be-shocking side, but it takes more than weird psycho-pathology to shock an Adelaide audience. We simply like or don’t like. In the case of Suburban Gothic it comes right down the middle. At one moment from the three skilled entertainers, Mark Jones, Aurora Kurth, and Karlis Zaid, it is universal humour, as in the song about getting lost trying to visit friends in those confounded mazes of developer estates. Then, it is the overkill song about seven dildos at the side of the road which is having a go at consumer society and then ends up with a rather violent snipe at employers enjoying staff redundancy.
Perhaps the length of the songs is what drives them over the edge. It’s hard to find a snappy ending. The song about going down in an air crash is so ghastly, I would exhort flying-phobic people just to stay right away. It is a cruel song.
Albeit beautifully done, the dying disabled child number is tough and similarly, the domestic violence song. Brilliant but awful.
Piece de resistance is perhaps the flasher song which tries hard to give flashers some status as performance artistes and sends it all up deliciously. A winner. And thus, with these splendid performers and excellent backing, does this work directed by ex Tripod Steven Gates, make for 70 minutes of off-the-wall fearless weirdness.
Samela Harris
When: 9 to 10 Jun
Where: The Blue Room
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Cabaret Festival. The Blue Room. 8 Jun 2019
Well, darn it and heavens to Betsy, darlin', here comes Dolly Parton with a baritone voice.
This English-born Aussie Dolly Diamond fits absolutely none of the conventional Dolly Parton bills. So, Parton Me is a good title for the show.
This is one very big Dolly, squeezed absurdly into a tight yellow Dolly jumpsuit. This is a breathless, hoarse Dolly who whispers out Dolly lyrics and occasionally resorts to a beautiful baritone note or two. This also is a very funny Dolly with a good line of satiric patter and audience schtick.
Dolly Diamond is well known around the entertainment traps but this is her Adelaide Parton Me premiere and she attracted a house packed with Red Hat ladies and Dolly fans. Whether they expected what they got is another matter. Some looked a wee bit askance. But there was a lot of love in the air.
For this critic, a long-time Dolly fan who has actually pilgrimaged to Dollywood in Tennessee, it was a totally surreal Dolly experience with a very strong sense that of all people, it would be Dolly Parton herself who most would appreciate this gorgeous, brazen and totally dissimilar mimic.
Dolly Diamond, who has a writer called Michael Dalton, is just a downright feel-good, mischievous, out-there entertainer. Just a bit too generous for her own good. For part of the show, her two lovely backing singers are joined onstage by the huge Adelaide Gospel Chorus and, indeed, they adorn the stage as an upbeat life force. But handing over Dolly’s gospel solos to their leader, Charmaine Jones, for an elongated super-soaring virtuoso soul gospel rendition just takes the cabaret show right out of cabaret and into another zone. Would that Dolly D had kept the spotlight on herself. She’s worth it.
Samela Harris
When: 7 to 9 Jun
Where: The Blue Room
Bookings: Closed