Adelaide Festival. Her Majesty’s Theatre. 1 Mar 2026
Do not bring conventional expectations for the Parisian showgirl powerhouse Josephine Baker to the theatre with you if attending the Festival’s Perle Noir. Indeed, it is not Josephine Baker. It is "meditations for” her.
We will never truly know how put-upon she felt, nor how ugly she found her own racial appearance. Her Folies Bergere audiences found her beautiful, and she was a black superstar of her day, Tina Turneresque. Here, the “meditation” is internalised, and it is dark.
Baker’s immense success in Paris was in wild contrast to the penury and racism of her background in the American south. She fell into marriage aged twelve and again aged fifteen whence she gained the name Baker and a taste for vaudeville which eventually took her to Paris in “negro revue”. Therein, with a comic streak, quirky dance improvisation and fearlessly appearing bare-breasted in a banana tutu, she became a jewel of exoticism in a white world. She went on to use her showbiz fame to mask underground work for the French Resistance, and she was lauded for her work on and off the French stage.
In the US she also was to be feted as an icon, but for civil-rights justice and harmony, a passion she embodied by adopting a “rainbow” family of children from around the world.
She was a super special individual and a gorgeous torch singer into the bargain. Many are the books celebrating and analysing her extraordinary life.
In this production, an opera directed by the one-time Adelaide Festival director Peter Sellars with music from celebrated composer Tyshawn Sorey and poetry by Caribbean Claudia Rankine, Baker is portrayed in slow musical thought-scapes of her anguish, deconstructing the songs of her times to impose inner meanings. Blackbird opens the performance as a desperate and attenuated lament in which, eventually, a sliver of the original Bye Bye Blackbird tune is identifiable.
This is not an opera from which one comes out humming catchy tunes. One comes out with a sense of sorrow and guilt. As Baker wishes to be white and to enjoy the entitlements of Princess Grace, so we white audience members quietly wither in our comfortable seats within the privileges of our rich white festival. And, rightly, one contemplates all the injustices of a still-troubled and cruel world.
Meanwhile, one has relished the multiple layers of the opera’s star, American mezzo soprano Julia Bullock: the immense range of her glorious voice; her own pleasing resemblance to Josephine Baker; her audacious exaggerations of the Baker dance movements.
And then there is the staging, a daunting staircase up to a screen where she shadow plays against herself in what is quite an overall impressive lighting plot. Downstage, she crawls to the precipice to scream her grief and fury into the faces of the audience.
And, the band plays on. What musicians, led by the composer himself on piano and drums! Each instrumentalist a breathtaking virtuoso, each with moments in the sun as they power through phases of scored passages and raucous jazz improv.
This is anything but a fun night out and the audience response is mixed, some leaping to acclaim and some clapping limply. It is not theatre for everyone. It is highly esoteric and perhaps overthought. This critic was glad of the one and only happy musical moment but yearned for less relentless introspection and craved a little more of the infectious stage spirit which immortalised Josephine Baker.
Samela Harris
When: 1 to 4 Mar
Where: Her Majesty’s Theatre
Bookings: ticketek.com.au
