Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Festival Theatre.
Oh, my. Our Cabaret Festival supremo has revealed himself to a packed Festival Theatre audience before leaving town. Alan Cumming has lots of adoring fans. But, even they, one ponders, may have had cause for a rethink after his headline CabFest finale show.
In his quirky short-pants suit, of which he is inordinately proud, he bounces out in big white sneakers bragging about having his clothes “tailored” and sets the spirit of the show. It is pretty much a brag-fest. Being only Wiki-familiar with his extensive career one had looked forward to finding out what the acclaim was all about. What is revealed amounts to a couple of decent songs and a lot of vanity patter.
Cumming’s brags about his dancing skill and an important upcoming dance show, but this song-and-dance man does not dance for us. Instead he tells us how marvellous he is and how many big name stars think he is fabulous. He is Sean Connery’s "Little Prince", you know.
As one who lived and worked in the media in Scotland, it is wonderful to revel in the sweet comfort of his accent. But what was he saying? That he masturbates every day and recommends everyone else does, too?
The script for the monologue feels as if it were something knocked up after a few too many wines up in Quarantine. It is not a winner in style or content. It is delivered with a few songs and a lot of quaint fussing with the hair. Cumming’s says he is trying to give it balance by talking about death. His touching account of the death of his dog is the high spot of the show.
But it’s all just a digression from the theme of what a big star he is. Oh yes, and he has a bar in New York City just around the corner from his home. He recommends having your own bar in NYC; a great place to take one’s guests and leave them when he is tired of them. Hilarious.
He has had more marriages and relationships than most. Gay and straight. So many that he can’t remember. In fact, as he so delicately puts it, so many that he has been known to have difficulty recognising those who have had Alan Cumming’s penis inside them!
Oh, my. Too much information, Mr Cumming.
One can only ponder how that sort of braggadocio would go down if the performer was female, or even straight male…
’Twas a strangely disappointing end to an otherwise wonderful Adelaide Cabaret Festival.
Samela Harris
When: Closed
Where: Festival Theatre
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Dunstan Playhouse. 25 Jun 2021
From the get go, you know you are in the presence of a trio of accomplished songstresses. These women aren’t just singin’, they’re livin’ these female anthems of celebration. Conceived and directed by Trevor Ashley, Australian drag queen and all-round fun guy performance artist with a Helpmann Award nomination, we are treated to panoply of legendary pop tunes sung and/or written by women, reimagined by three self-made women with rich and varied resumes.
Tania Doko, of Bachelor Girls fame, reminded me both of Tina Turner and Dolly Parton, even though their songs were absent. Her Divinyls’ I Touch Myself was performed with as much raunchiness as she dared. Stevie Nicks’ Sisters Are Doin’ It For Themselves was her personal favourite, but her Madonna song was relatively ordinary. Emma Pask was discovered by James Morrison when she was 16 and her career careens between jazz and Latin. She loves Latin so much she married one. Although her jazz and Latin renditions in this show weren’t particularly authentic, everything Pask does is impressive and powerful. Prinnie Stevens taps her cultural roots bigtime with a moving Billy Holiday number and by channeling Aretha Franklin’s Respect with singalong verisimilitude. But this is what you expect from someone who performed a slice of Michael Jackson in the tribute show Thriller Live. The best songs got the best out of each singer. The trio saved the eponymous number for last and although Helen Reddy’s hit got a lot of air play last year due to her passing, it’s as durable as gold and still rousing and relevant.
This is a much different show – a smaller show - than the six-singer version done in the Sydney Opera House in 2018, with a somewhat different song list, although the mainly female band is a constant. But even with half the body count, there must have been just as much energy and fun in the current offering as the audience loved it and begged an encore.
David Grybowski
When: 25 to 26 Jun
Where: Festival Theatre
Bookings: bass.net.au
Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Festival Theatre. 24 June 2021
Liza, Michael, and Joel would be unimpressed that their world-famous Cabaret attracted only about 300 people in the 2000-seat Festival Theatre during the world-famous Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Unless you were always a fan of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, it was this movie that brought cabaret and its Weimar Republic treatment out of the shadows of nascent Nazis and chiaroscuro lighting. The movie is largely based on the 1966 Kander and Ebb Broadway musical, but there is much different in the sub-plots compared to the film. (Footnote: I saw an amateur production of the musical in Jerusalem in 2018. It was queer to see Jews playing the Nazis, as well as everything else.) The film won the most Academy awards ever, without winning Best Picture. Liza Minnelli got the Best Actress statue for her first singing role on screen and Joel Grey won Best Supporting Actor for his incredible Emcee. Joel Grey reprised the role he created on Broadway and his performance is as iconic as Tim Curry’s Dr Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. You can’t imagine anyone doing it anyway different. Have a look at a recent picture of Joel Grey on Wikipedia – he looks like a very happy banker, now living out his 90s in Cleveland.
In the giant Festival Centre, the screen was not big, and the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra was not playing the score, so you get what you pay for ($25). What was more than I paid for was a jolly good introduction by Weimar cabaret specialist and Helpmann Award nominee Kim David Smith and his piano accompanist. Kim David Smith is also starring in his own Adelaide Cabaret Festival show, Mostly Marlene, direct from its world premiere in New York at guess where – Club Cumming. He bubbles like champagne just poured into a cold flute and mixes professional singing and personal comment miscibly like tonic and gin. Bravo!
Liza Minnelli plays the volatile showgirl, Sally Bowles, dreaming of her big break, against Michael York’s intellectual plodder. They are exact opposites in Myers-Briggs Type Indicator code, Sally’s ESFP vs Brian Roberts’s INTJ. Thrilling and exciting in the short term (ie, the course of the movie) but can’t last (ie the end of the movie). Director Bob Fosse loved close-ups and the camera loves Liza. Not nearly as appealing in the close-up department was Joel Grey’s gaping yap filled with yellow teeth. Michael York was a boring actor playing a boring character, so no Academy Award for him. Most of his career was yet to happen and he is now an OBE.
The film is 50 years old next year and Liza is 76. If you missed this screening, I’m sure you’ll see Cabaret somewhere next year, and it’s worth every minute, because you really do “leave your troubles outside.” “In here, life is beautiful.”
David Grybowski
When: 24 June
Where: Festival Theatre
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Cabaret Festival. The Space. 24 Jun 2021
The poet who never lived simply cannot die. He continues to puzzle, disturb, and stir the creative juices. Following Stephen Orr’s extraordinary re-imagining of the Malley saga in his recently-published Wakefield Press Book, Sincerely Ethel Malley, Adelaide songwriter Max Savage emerges with an Ern-Malley cabaret show. Well, it is named as Ern: Australia’s Greatest Hoax and Savage avows a lifelong fascination with the Malley poems. He has said of his production, a result of the 2021 Frank Ford Commission, that it is a fresh take, his own take on the 1940s attempted duping of modernist poet and Angry Penguins editor Max Harris and with it an attack on the then burgeoning modernist movement in Australia (read more at ernmalley.net). And so it is. Audaciously so.
One must listen carefully for the threads linking to the hoax and they seem to come at the end of the concert, a concert which stands on its own as something loud and wild and different and often thrilling.
Max Savage is possessed of a dense and interesting gravelly voice, sometimes Dylan-esque and sometimes Tom Waits-like. His hands shiver and jerk beside him like a demonic Joe Cocker. There’s a bottle of red wine beside him on the stage and his throat is regularly lubricated as the show progresses.
The music is a rough amalgam of blues, folkrock, jazz, and electronic buzzsaw.
Savage’s brother, Ross McHenry is his collaborator on the music, much of which is riffed impro by a bunch of the city’s very best musicians.
Like all jam, it has its moments of high brilliance and its downs of self-indulgence. Sometimes the clarinet’s stridency is too persistent, cutting through the air; but, is it saying something? Is it telling of the pain inflicted by a malicious hoax? Perhaps. Ow.
The audience can only listen, wonder, and make individual interpretations. Perchance, many know little of the literary hoax, despite the display in the foyer. Many of them are well into the red wine, making trips out of the theatre to replenish their glasses, as if it was a pub gig.
Savage conducts the band between verses, prowling into the midst of the musicians, shouting and screaming, his mouth agape like an angry animal, or perhaps a giant Pacman, chomping at the smoky air. He revs the musicians into crescendos.
He is truly an original. What’s more, he is a good poet. His lyrics are profound and beautiful, often reiterated like verbal Philip Glass notes.
Of all the songs, his Ode to Kintore Avenue is closest to a tuneful evergreen with its ambling good rhythm. It is a poignant reflection on the boys who did not come home from World War II, notably, the two young Angry Penguins poets D.B. “Sam” Kerr and Paul Pfeiffer.
He does not use any lines from the Ern Malley poems.
In fact, he defies their content with strong references to God and salvation. Ern Malley was Godless.
Savage does, however, oft reference soldiers, reminding us that McAuley and Stewart, the hoaxer poets, were said to have been in their barracks, two bored young soldiers on a quest of malice when the hoax was perpetrated.
Savage gives them a serve, describing their hatred as “original sin”.
In an inspired nod to the Angry Penguins magazine wherein the Ern Malley poems were published, Savage has invited artist Josh Baldwin to create a large-scale work live on stage as an evolving backdrop to his performance. Angry Penguins celebrated the Modernist artists alongside the Modernist poets and novelists of the day, so this living aesthetic is an extremely enlightened inclusion.
Furthermore, it is just beautiful. There are two performances of Ern in The Space and therefore two artworks will result. On opening night, Baldwin creates a sweeping landscape. Vivid blues shimmer as distant mountains and foreground rivers. An arid expanse of undulating ochre land is gradually dotted with stark little tree motifs and then, in an Olsen-esque gesture, a couple of lines of thrown paint streak across the canvas. Eventually, as the concert draws to a close, with signals between the singer and the painter, a horse and rider are added to the vista - and it is Don Quixote! It deserves a standing ovation in its own right.
Savage and the band do, in fact, receive a loud ovation for the show, albeit also a stream of people quietly wandering off into the winter’s night wondering what had just happened.
What it was all about - a Max Savaging, a new era hoax, or just a flight of Ernest imaginings?
Samela Harris
When: Closed
Where: The Space
Bookings: Closed
NOTE: Samela Harris, is daughter of Max Harris, the poet and Angry Penguins editor who was target of the Ern Malley hoax.
Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Dunstan Theatre. 19 June 2021
Vince Jones blows a few notes on one of the horns he is accomplished in before the audience is even ready, but that is it for the horn-blowing. Maybe this was his whimsical protest against RocKwiz’s Brian Nankervis - who wrote the show - for not having any Vince Jones horn-blowing in it. Jones, of course, is a respected elder of Australia’s jazz scene and an activist in environmental and human freedom issues, so a show featuring protest songs written by somebody else would seem like a good fit, but it really isn’t.
This world premiere does get off to a good start, though. Jones senses a song, and where there is a match with his jazz oeuvre and style, one feels his feeling for the material. The opening number, Strange Fruit famously recorded by Billie Holiday, is a triumph of empathy. Jones eschews showmanship - his style of performance with hands behind his back manifests his desire to let the music and treatment speak for itself. Jones’s creative juices are flowing amply whenever the original song was of a jazz nature or was about a specific human tragedy or unfairness – songs like Kev Carmody’s Thou Shalt Not Steal and Archie Roach’s Took The Children Away. His passion and identification with his own culture’s issues in John Schumann’s I Was Only 19 had me in tears. The two songs about getting into the head of the US President – including Pink’s Dear Mr President - did not resonate for their cliché and cynical narrative. A few fossils are trotted out, Blowin’ In The Wind, If I Had A Hammer and even John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Imagine presumably to appeal to the audience that has aged with Jones. These were very much less successful because they are not specific or jazz. Jones looks like he’d rather vote Liberal than sing If I Had A Hammer, and consequently it is mundane and boring, and anyways, I don’t think his style could improve on some of the masterful covers, let alone the originals. Jones refers constantly to a tablet for song text, which is pretty distracting – and even with the words in front of him, there are many near-flubs. The accompanying musicians under the direction of Matt McMahon are wonderful.
Which brings me to the point, I didn’t get the sense this was Jones’s show. It was written by Nankervis who explained the theme and then introduced many of the songs. While this covers for Jones’s lack of articulation in the narrative department, the intros vary from too much information to fascination, and seem like interruptions rather than part of the flow. It looks very much like Nankervis’s journey, but Jones was the wrong vehicle, even as sweet as ever he was.
David Grybowski
When: 19 to 20 Jun
Where: Dunstan Theatre
Bookings: Closed