Brian D’arcy James. Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Dunstan Playhouse. 20 June 2014
Nicely coinciding with the aftermath of this year’s Tony Awards, Brian D’arcy James entered the stage of the Dunstan Playhouse to a small but appreciative mid-week audience.
Appearing on and off Broadway since the early 90s, his resume swells with impressive accolades including two Tony Award nominations, lead roles in Shrek The Musical and Next To Normal, and roles alongside the likes of Idina Menzel, Kristen Chenoweth and John Lithgow.
Given all this, one might be tempted to imagine him sweeping in to up-end his gunny-sack of Broadway classics. In contrast, ‘Under the Influence’ is an understated show brimming with enthusiasm for his roots and pop favourites. Featuring the likes of Billy Joel, Phil Collins and Sting, it’s a mixed bag of lesser known tracks that will either educate or impress.
James’s medley of ‘It Had to Be You’, ‘All of Me’ and ‘Isn't She Lovely’ played homage to song-writers from his hometown of Saginaw, Michigan, whilst his version of the classic 80s hit ‘Tempted’ was a fantastic reinvention.
It’s always a pleasure to see such a consummate performer paying tribute to their own musical influences, and James places himself on our level in exploring his heroes and first musical loves. It’s a fun and enjoyable show.
As you might expect, he saves the best for last and receives rapturous applause for his mix-up of ‘Who I’d Be’ from Shrek. This beautiful number really showcased his vocal talent and strength, but perhaps also highlighted what was missing from the show as a whole.
Whilst the songs are carefully chosen and clearly have strong personal meaning, it’s a low-key affair that doesn’t stretch his musical prowess enough. He purposefully adapts his style to mimic the artists he covers, and with great success, but we were all there to hear the artist himself. A bit more variation and complexity in the selections, and more of James in the music, would have taken the show to another level.
Nicole Russo
When: Closed
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: Closed
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
Cecilia Low. Cabaret Festival. Space Theatre. 19 June 2014.
A piercing shriek of gravel voice and Betty Davis is reborn on the Adelaide stage. One of the ironies of showbiz is that an elegant performer such as Cecilia Low shouldn't be embodying such a coarse, raw and raucous performer. But that's show biz. Low can do it and Low believes that the funk rock fusion queen deserves to be remembered.
The Cabaret Festival audience clearly agreed, responding to her performance with its own stridency of whistles and whoops and two songs' worth of dancing around their tables in The Space.
It is a well-conceived show, something of a rock spectacle. Low is backed by a fabulous band which recreates the Chambers Brothers and many of the musical characters of the 70s wherein Betty D's flame burned so fiercly.
She dated Eric Clapton, was friends with Jimi Hendrix, recorded with Sly, Santana and the Pointer Sisters and was married to Miles Davis. She wrote and arranged her own music. She had a screeching instrument of a voice like no other. One inwardly flinches at the vocal exertion it takes to emulate it. Brave Low. But she's not just a performer and trained singer. She's a BettyD fan.
Low has written the show as an homage as well as entertainment. In realising it, she is joined on stage by the sublime Eliza Wolfgramm and vividly backed by musical director Tony Kopa with an out-there 70s-style band featuring, among wonderful others, Phil Ceberano.
The show presents its very different format from the outset. As the audience settles into the room, Kopa, in a huge shock of Hendrix hair, warms the house up with music and a bit of atmospheric ham from the band.
Low struts in complemented by simultaneous video and her story begins. The video, both live and recorded, tries to give a 70s spirit and also a sense of an offstage world.
BettyD was known for her skimpy costumes and Low's fine, athletic figure showcases them well - tiny shorty shorts with long boots or black satin teddy and garter. She doesn't so much dance as gyrates her way through a myriad of highly sexual poses.
The life story emerges, sometimes in pure narrative breathily delivered to a kiss-close hand mike, sometimes as snippets between songs. Captions on the back projections add further context - and dates to identify where in the drug and sex-fuelled 70s we are.
There is a certain looseness to the production which gives it a sense of spontaneity. And there are a couple of dramatisations, one of which pits Low against Wolfgramm, like two cats brawling over a Tom. After all, there are no pretences of respectability in this show. It is rough and edgy and very loud indeed.
It is also a nicely-created time capsule which not only gives a memory trip for the oldies but a music history lesson to the youngies. It goes down wildly well with both.
Samela Harris
When: 19 to 20 June
Where: Space Theatre
Bookings: Closed
Cabaret Festival. Mark Nadler. Space Theatre. 18 June 2014
And the love affair goes on.
There has never been an international showbiz relationship quite like it - and the the New York entertainer heard the love loud and clear as The Space's full house leapt to its feet in a riot of acclaim for his performance. Of course, it had been as seamlessly enriching as have his others over the years. Mark Nadler is a class act. It takes a special sort of consummate pro to engender all this love from Adelaide's notoriously discerning audiences. The Adelaide Cabaret Festival is just not the same if Mark Nadler is not here.
This year he took his audience on a musical storytelling adventure back into the daring 20s when Cabaret was born of a wicked edge and prohibition had people drinking more than ever before. In narratives shimmering with wit and innuendo, he told of just how movie star Clara Bow spread her famous "It" around. He told of one of the world's first openly gay performers, Gene Malin, and of the irresistible Libby Holman whose super-hot sexy style was not what it seemed. Heavens, she was an early cougar, bisexual no less, who ended up murdering her husband. Juicy yarns indeed. Nadler threw in Mae West and, spicing things up a treat, a couple of evangelists, always good to include when the theme is vice and scandal.
Nadler comes as almost a new model of himself. He has become a skinny man. But the new bod is a fine clotheshorse and his superbly-tailored white evening jacket and slinky waistcoat looked extremely dashing.
With two token 20s-style backing musicians on stage, he made magic on the grand piano and sang 20s songs both renown and forgotten. Lots of Cole Porter, some Cab Calloway, Irving Berlin and, of course, Kurt Weill.
He used tricks of coy come-hither in songs such as 'Ain't Misbehaving', he held the audience in thrall with his meld of Gershwin-cum-Braham et all in Limehouse Nights and Blues, all about London's druggy 20s. He raised a steamy torch, he shook up the house, he pranced a bit, mingled a bit and he made a New York dry martini which is so dry that the vermouth is barely an idea.
His performance reached from soft suggestiveness to full-power Broadway belt-outs, from yarns and a few gags even to true confession of an incongruous little religious canker...
On which theme, at show's end, Nadler added the best of stage acknowledgements by naming each person associated with his production in The Space as candidates for the "down there" where the sins are bright. That is the wild "down there" on which the show's devilish underworld theme was based, one suggested by the 20s night club where patrons slid down a chute and into the arms of a huge black man who carried them to their seats.
It seems odd that there was only one day of performances from Mr Nadelaide for he could have filled that cabaret space over and over again. However, he's moved on to the late night fun and games in the piano bar where he and his rubber chickens may continue to be adored for the rest of the fest.
And, perchance more, Mr Humphries?
Samela Harris
When: Closed
Where: Space Theatre
Bookings: Closed
Colin Hay. Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Dunstan Playhouse. 13 June 2014.
With ‘Waiting for my Real Life’, Colin Hay is here to tell his story for himself. It is June and Friday 13th - an auspicious date in more ways than one. Forty seven years ago to the day, in 1967, Colin Hay aged fourteen, arrived in Melbourne with his family – emigrating from Kilwinning in Scotland.
On stage in “Mr Dunstan’s Playhouse”, dressed in a raffish red tartan jacket, his receding hair still spiked in punkish tufts, Hay is immediately engaging as, setting up a likeable riff on his acoustic guitar, he begins to bind his storytelling spell. With his tangy Scots accent he talks about his early experiences in Australia and his formative influences - first in his father’s music supplies shop in Scotland, then as he begins to build a reputation as composer and front man for Men at Work, one of this country’s most rapidly successful international acts.
Drawing from his eleven solo albums and the meteoric three recorded with Men at Work between 1981 and 1985, Hay, in grainy good voice sings the title song from ‘Wayfaring Sons’ (“Don’t go out in the night”) then a slower tempo, almost ballad version of ‘Who Can it Be Now?’ and his laid-back homage to the beach life – ‘Beautiful World’.
Of course, his waggish humour and sardonic take on the world steers his commentary from tales of a friend being chased by a shark as prelude to ‘Beautiful World’ to self-deprecating anecdotes of mistaken celebrity. Those “didn’t you used to be…?” encounters: In that band that recorded ‘YMCA’? In the ‘Flock of Seagulls’? In the group that sang ‘Turning Japanese’?
There are dozens of stories and they are fun to hear - the Aussie Scots outsider at the Grammys, momentarily meeting Little Richard, then later as a soloist, getting to know Zach Braff, the creator of the TV series Scrubs - in which Hay (an occasional film and TV actor) appeared several times - and director of the movie Garden State, with its highly successful soundtrack which included Hay’s song ‘I Just Don’t Think I’ll Ever Get Over You’.
Needless to say ‘Down Under’ is a mine of jokes and reminiscences – although the bitter “Kookaburra sings” copyright infringement case is not among them. “We wrote this song,” is his only comment, “whatever you might have read.” He has stories about performing at the Sydney 2000 Olympics, of playing solo in Brazil, where he has a strong following, of an international tour he had to cancel and all he had left was a box of t-shirts with his name misspelled – Colin Hat.
This was the first time I had seen Colin Hay play live, although his reputation as a raconteur has long preceded him. And it’s all true. He is a troubadour and storyteller who draws in an audience and conspires with them with wit and surprising candour. Hay talks about his battle with alcohol and how fellow heavy drinkers don’t want to take it seriously, he also talks fondly and reflectively about his parents and sings ‘There’s Water Over You’ as a tribute to his father.
From his 1994 album ‘Topanga’, he sings ‘Waiting For My Real Life Begin’, “Any minute now, my ship is coming in,” a meditation about expectations which he links to the strange phenomenon of rapid success and its equally rapid evaporation. It is hard-won wisdom and genially expressed. Colin Hay has found his real forte as a travelling singer holding an audience in the palm of his hand. Closing this excellent show, accompanied on his Gryphon 12 string, he sings ‘A Simple Song’ - and makes a very special talent look easy.
Murray Bramwell
When: Closed
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: Closed