Kathy Najimy. Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Festival Theatre. 19 June 2014
In case we don't know who Kathy Najimy is, her mainstage Cabaret Festival show opens with video clips of her past triumphs. She has been in a lot of stuff. There are movies like Hocus Pocus and Sister Act and then there are stage shows and soapies and, well, a great big career of a steadily working Hollywood character actress. The clips go on and on. Even Najimy notes that the show is more or less over by the time she steps onstage.
But it's all in good spirit. She has been working on just how to put a personal cabaret show together and a lot of thought has gone into it. She rattles off the ideas of potential themes at machine gun speed - rags to riches, overcoming adversity, love or hate your mother... It's funny shtick. She works hard. She wins her audience.
Najimy is from San Diego but she is of Lebanese background. "Full blood", she used to brag as a child. Of course, like everyone, her family is dysfunctional. But it is not the theme of her show. In fact, there really isn't a theme as such. There are assorted issues, instead.
Weight is one. Najimy wears a particularly unflattering black outfit and reveals that, while her first experience of Diabetes Type II was caused by being overweight, its later onset as Type I was not. Now, here she is, an overweight actress with "skinny diabetes". Mary Tyler Moore has it, too, you know. And look how skinny she is. Najimy relishes the irony and it goes down.
Najimy also has spent a lot of her life as a cheerleader for gay issues. She may be happily, heterosexually married, but she brags a world of gay friends and deepest devotion to the causes of their rights. In character as her wonderful old auntie, she goes to town on the inequities of gay and transgender marriage. It's a bit too didactic and she may cut some of the repetition before she takes in on to New York. Then again, foyer talk reflected some of the punters liking the auntie character best of her act.
This critic best liked her Bette Midler stories. Heaven forfend, Kathy Najimy was not just a Midler fan, she was a stalker. She even dressed up as a bunny and delivered a faux bunnygram to get close enough to tell the star that she loved her. Years later, cast as Bette Midler's sister in Hocus Pocus, she did her best not to let her pinup know of this shameful past. Very funny.
Najimy does not sing, but she belted out a few rough bars of this and that which justified the marvellous Brian Nash onstage as musical director.
And, she does lift her skirt. It's a very quaint grand finale. But it is done as a gesture of absolute humility in the context of sweet kindness. And, for the audience, the night has been a big "Like".
Samela Harris
When: Closed
Where: Festival Theatre
Bookings: Closed
