★★★★★
Pietagogetter. The Garden of Unearthly Delights - Babylon. 25 Feb 2022
You haven’t really Fringed if you haven’t exposed yourself to Reuben Kaye. I lapped up his show last year and he’s returned with Reuben Kaye - The Bitch Is Back. But wait, there’s more! He also hosts The Kaye Hole… variety show at 11 pm on Friday and Saturday nights throughout the Fringe. When too much Fringe fun is barely enough, this is the place for indecent excess.
There is no question who is riding whom tonight; a hands-up poll reveals heterosexuals are in the minority, a revelation accompanied with squeals of delight. Dressing down in a tatty and tight black dress, Reuben resembles a disrobing porcupine due to spiky accoutrement, and he further accessorises with a microphone sprouting horsehair. Ships could navigate on his personal magnetism. Sporting a short drop fade crewcut and chiseled good looks, he is in perpetual motion. He sings with incredible power and you soar with him. Reuben et al are ably supported by musical director Shanon Whitlock on keys, Jarrad Payne playing drums, Dylan Marshall on guitar and Alana Dawes tickling the bass. But, as Reuben says, with watchability comes responsibility. He calls out social injustice and bad government with genuine concern and to much applause.
Bettie Bombshell is the first other to explore the stage. Wearing a teeny-weeny bit of black gothic, Betty tumbles and twists and the tassels go twirling to menacing music. Betty’s best assets are readily bankable. She menaces the audience with lascivious prowling. Burlesque at its best.
Dale Woodridgebrown is the sort of colourful cowboy you could easily saddle up to. Miming a gay fav, his virtuosity with rope wouldn’t earn first prize at the rodeo. But he can crack whip a rose bush into a bouquet, even using his butt as a vase.
Elke’s lithe frame belies the incredible strength required to throw oneself about on the trapeze and make it eye candy. Emily Chilvers follows another Reuben song with some deft rope work while elegantly stripping down to the sexy essentials.
Tina (the ex-diva) Del Twist hobbles on stage with a broken heel and an enormous bowl of wine. Appearing inebriated beyond redemption, she slays the audience with some un-operatic behaviour. The few voice samplers she manages to emit only teases us with anticipation of full throttle which was reached crooning the iconic White Rabbit with band.
Warning: Do not leave early! There’s more! I wish I could tell you what Tara Boom wore, and what she did, but this was the most audacious and surreal act of the night, and it’s best enjoyed with complete surprise. She brought down the house.
Subsequently, Reuben announced the show was over and it ended like a car accident. He attempted to reverse the screeching halt, but there needs to be a better plan.
The Kaye Hole… is 90 minutes of unrelenting, lewd and loudly extroverted entertainment hugely loved by those attending. Bravo!
There is every chance your show might have different guests performers depending on availability.
David Grybowski
When: 18 Feb to 19 Mar
Where: The Garden of Unearthly Delights - Babylon
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
★★★★★
Pietagogetter. Gluttony – Rymill Park – The Bally. 25 Feb 2022
Josh Glanc, the vendor at the game, calls out chips, potato cakes, dim sim, sausage rolls – he discovers the rhythm and turns it into a song. This is how the hour goes; the ordinary is topsy-turvied into the funny. Finally on stage, he sets up his table of prop curiosities and works his way through a comic agenda. Glanc’s a quadruple threat – actor, singer, dancer (well, he moves the hips pretty well), and plays guitar. And you are caught in his magnetic field watching with anticipation how he will transform the mundane into mirth.
His humour is zany, droll and absurd. It’s situational comedy, Glanc isn’t a gag artist or raconteur. Whether he takes on the personae of a truck driver or a woman or child, he performs who he is being, and can change that in a blink. You have to be different to win two Best Comedy weekly awards in former fringes.
Glanc finishes off with his most complete song and one everybody relates to – searching for the lost file on the computer. The frustration grows with each step in the process, the steam rises from the collar and the eyes widen with rage. A great ending to a great show! Bravo!
PS Bare hairy chest and Harley not included.
PPS This is his last weekend and the Bally is tiny. My Friday night show was a sell-out. Book ASAP.
David Grybowski
When: 18 to 27 Feb 2022
Where: Gluttony – Rymill Park – The Bally
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
★★★
Artbeat Cabaret. Diverse-City. 24 Feb 2022
Diverse-City is a wonderful all-gender-types-welcome cabaret venue with homemade meals, rainbow library and a teacup collection. Sarah and Sue are wonderful hosts absolutely dedicated to making this former union hall heritage building the best place to meet in the city. Many of their shows have dinner options, all through the year.
Songsmiths and guitar players Paul Roberts, Alan Hartley and Keith Preston are as rusted on to Adelaide as the Royal Show and have got the band together again to entertain in their easy-going style as in previous Fringes. Their songs both laud and lament our 3rd most livable city in the world. And this time, they are pretty disappointed by the way the city is changing – Trouble in Paradise – with a nostalgic focus on the way things were.
The three amigos are accompanied by percussionist Satomi Ohnishi, bass and accordion player Peter Franche, and keyboard player and sole female vocalist who we could hear a lot more of, Jamie Webster. Except for Jamie, they are all wearing vests, which takes you back. The folksy, ballady and rockabilly styles are played ordinarily well. Most songs have catchy choruses that are repeated so many times I was nearly singing along to songs I never heard before, which is a good feeling.
It's helpful to be of a similar age to the trio to appreciate the forensic dissection in their lengthy introductions and lyrics about things like John Bannon’s failed Bank SA and the closure of Holden which “felt the heat of the Rising Sun.” The parochial importance Adelaideans put on private schools (isn’t every city like that?) gets a good satirical serve. Paul Roberts sung us his whacky song of goldfish going out for a night, probably to do the Hindley Street Waltz he sung earlier.
The song that resonated most for me was Keith Preston’s observations of the destruction of Adelaide since John Rau gave the developers a free rein which is now official in the new planning code. “Last time I drove here, it was a heritage street. Now it’s a tower of glass and concrete” and “It’s become like the others, a city of towers.” Hear! Hear! Preston’s song of what you would see in a tour of Adelaide’s nationally listed parklands – hospital, hotel, sports stadium racetrack, private school sports facilities - was deliciously tongue-in-cheek. Indeed, we are at the crossroads as Alan Hartley observed in his closing song of turning our arts and heritage city into bland blocks of bad taste. Another Preston gem was “Colonel Light, he got it right” – a whimsy on our foundational urban design.
Adelaide began under the control of the South Australian Company and the songwriters offer that their progeny, some ironically named “Guardians,” are the movers and shakers behind the scenes, compelling us to ever-expanding growth at the expense of our livability. If so, they certainly have both sides of politics in their pocket because growth at all costs is government policy no matter who is in power.
While the concern and passion are palpable, the whole shebang lacks energy. The new songs sound like the old songs. The rambling, long and frequent introductions that are tag-teamed and read off cheat sheets are informative but prevent any sort of momentum occurring. It’s definitely thought-provoking but not terribly exciting.
David Grybowski
When: 24 Feb to 6 March
Where: Diverse-City
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
★★★★
Adelaide Fringe. Breakout. The Mill. 24 Feb 2022
Occasionally The Fringe throws up morsels of profound humanity.
Here comes Matthew Barker to champion the strange scattered and shattered world of those living in care with dementia.
His work, The Fishbowl, performed with Evie Leonard and directed by Stephanie Daughtry, presents a series of vignettes of the often chaotic world within “the fishbowl” of a care home. He plays it all disturbingly close to the bone since he has had a day job as a carer in just such a home, working with music as a tool of connection and release for dementia sufferers. So, one could call it almost docu-theatre, since its verite is first-hand.
However, there are about twenty characters, staff and patients, thrown into the mix of this show. There is even one audience member roped in to say lines - doing so very well on the night this critic attended.
Of course, the Breakout is a very intimate space and the action of the show itself spins in a contained round in the centre. The audience is provided with a laminated page of words for Loch Lomond which Barker uses as a demonstration of the significant connecting power found between dementia sufferers and singalongs. His own voice is so powerful and beautiful that, indeed, even the shyest of audience singers is emboldened to join in.
That powerful voice is a little too strong when the play’s dialogue calls for shouting. Some consider shouting to be a weakness onstage albeit in this instance it is showing just how intolerably violently some of those hapless Alzheimers patients are treated by poorly-paid and harried carers.
Barker pulls no punches when demonstrating how roughly old people often are handled and how indifferent some staff can be to the individuals in their care. He uses assorted tools from projections on suspended sheets to a wonderful soundscape of the layers and layers of prosaic sounds which background daily life.
The depiction of a dementia patient lost in real or imagined music is both moving and enlightening. Indeed, those words encapsulate the production: moving and enlightening.
There is nothing ordinary about Barker’s play - except that it observes that which has become very ordinary in the ever-more-common world of dementia.
That’s his “fish bowl” allusion - their no-privacy enclosed world staffed by observers. It is apposite.
While Barker can no more explain the epidemic phenomenon of dementia than can the medical world, his play studies its facets and illustrates compassionate ways to communicate with those beloved lost ones.
One gathers that it is a work with future plans. In this case, it is an important work which should be powerfully supported and, perchance, soon seen by every care worker in the world.
With, perhaps, a bit more singing from Barker. And a few grammatical amendments.
He has created memorable work about not remembering.
Samela Harris
When: 24 Feb to 6 Mar
Where: The Mill
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Adelaide Festival. Donmar Warehouse. Old Queen’s Theatre. 23 Feb 2022
Equipped with headphones and a few at a time, the masked and vax-checked audience is carefully guided into the half-light of the cavernous Old Queen’s. Collapsible wooden chairs are distanced back to back so people face in various directions. They are instructed to raise a hand if they have any problems.
A layout of light bars is the only set along with one wise piece of graffiti on the far wall: “If you can see, look; if you can look, observe”. The audience waits and soon is enveloped in a voyage of dark and light unlike anything in the real world. Through the headphones comes the beautiful voice of Juliet Stevenson at first describing the oddity of man suddenly going blind at the traffic lights. His wife takes him to the ophthalmologist whence others in the waiting room soon become infected with the same mysterious white blindness. Pretending also to be blind, the wife remains the only sighted person as gradually the entire city goes blind with a panic-stricken government locking away the infected under armed guard. And thus does she describe the contagion of blindness, as created by Jose Saramago in his Nobel Prize-winning novel.
It is not surprising that this production, adapted by playwright Simon Stephens and directed by Walter Meierjohann for the UK’s Donmar Warehouse, has been received with effusive acclaim around the world. It is immersive theatre at its sublime best. The technology by which Stevenson’s voice is delivered through the headphone is so acute that one actually believes she is breathing in one’s ear as she whispers the terrible truths of this other plague. From time to time, a great rumbling soundscape designed by Ben and Max Ringham oppresses the senses. One recoils in shock from occasional crackling flashes of blinding white light. Bodily defences alert, one is carried deep into Saramago’s fearful dystopia for 70 intense minutes. When, finally, one is released into the light and air of the outside world with a glimmer of hope, it is to emerge into our own ongoing plague and the worlds merge in a surreal after-wash sensation. And Adelaide’s clear blue sky is the most beautiful thing in the world.
Samela Harris
When: 23 Feb to 20 Mar
Where: Queens Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au