Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Festival Theatre. 25 Jun 2016
The first Cabaret Festival for Artistic Director’s Ali McGregor and Eddie Perfect closed in fine form with some lovely performances & covers of Australian songs by Festival artists.
The evening opens with a sultry and rousing performance of Can’t Get You Out Of My Head originally recorded by Kylie Minogue for her 2001 album Fever. McGregor oozes over the lyric with back up from Perfect and galah-esque dance provided by the cast of The Birds.
McGregor is clad in a shimmering outfit, reminiscent of the colours of a galah, whilst Perfect leaves nothing to the imagination in his singlet and stubbies; dressing his outfit up with the later addition of a white tux suit jacket.
Kate Ceberano and renown pianist Paul Grabowsky pair up for the second song of the evening. Ceberano wears a beautiful black evening gown and glows as she sings a gorgeous cover of the Divinyls’ I Touch Myself, a song she performed for breast cancer awareness; “I don’t want anybody else / When I think I about you I touch myself / I love myself, I want you to love me”. Ceberano continues to demonstrate why she is one of Australia’s greatest singers and performers.
Adelaide’s own Deborah Krizac takes to the stage next with a sweet rendition of Olivia Newton-John’s 1974 hit I Honestly Love You, ably backed by the onstage band for the evening ‘The Budgie Smugglers’ lead by Vanessa Scammell.
Writer of Keating! The Musical, Casey Bennetto is up next with a hilarious rendition of his own creation titled Show, Don’t Tell; “But if life were just a cabaret extended / Then what would be the point of cabaret? / The day is where our efforts are expended / The night is for escaping from the day..” a perfectly apt song choice for the evening.
Next into the fray is Australian, Carla Lippis backed by the Class of Cabaret Graduates spinning a sexy rhythm around Australian alternative rock band The Church’s Under The Milky Way. The Graduates - Naomi Crosby, Benji Riggs, Mellie Tantalos, Harry Nguyen and Jemma Allen – groove along with Lippis, creating delicious harmonies and rhythmic support.
The comedy lifts with McGregor’s return to the stage as she tells an amusing story of the best and worst cover songs of all time. The winner was of course, a cover of Leonard Cohen’s Halleluja by Jeff Buckley, but the loser is where McGregor sought to make amends - Celine Dion and Anastacia’s duet of the AC DC hit You Shook Me All Night Long.
Shunning The Budgie Smugglers, McGregor pulls out a Suzuki Omnichord from the 80s and takes back the AC DC hit singlehandedly, providing her own backing as well as the soaring lyric. She truly is a spectacular performer, even lending some seriously high pitched opera squeals to the number!
Host of the second week of the Backstage Club and Class of Cabaret mentor Libby O’Donovan takes to the piano next and tells a heart rending story about how music has the power to awaken memories from the darkest depths of patients with advanced dementia.
She goes on to sing a beautiful number titled Songs Remember Me; “I still know all the words to Danny Boy / And all at once I know just who I am / When they play Amazing Grace I am a young girl once again / In the church hall in my mother’s loving hand / Once again my yesterdays have clarity / Songs remember me…”. It is a wonderfully moving piece.
Dash Kruck returns the smiles to our faces with a politically reimagined version of John Paul Young’s Love Is In The Air with the lyrics changed to “The election's in the air”. The audience lap up both the energy and the humour, grooving in their seats and singing along. His performance manages to bring supporters from both camps together – particularly “those who believe in climate change, and those who don’t understand science!”
Australian singer and actress Naomi Price is up next with John Farnham’s Burn For You from the 90s album Chain Reaction. This Australian icon is always touching, and Price’s rendition is no exception; her voice has gorgeous timbre that sits beautifully on the lyric.
Eddie Perfect sits his lily-white legs at the grand piano with a rendition of best friend Casey Bennetto’s song about the well-known Aussie landmark, the Big Banana; Tom Burlinson – aka The Man from Snowy River – croons his way through the 1981 Billy Field hit, Bad Habits with a sexy sax solo in the break; and Yana Alana sets off into an Italian Aria before swiftly changing direction and ripping into Russell Morris’s The Real Thing clad in all the colours of the rainbow.
Sven Ratzke absolutely steals the stage, opening with a bit of stand-up about his stay in Adelaide that really gets the audience going before launching into David Bowie’s Lets Dance. But before you decry “that’s not an Aussie song”, McGregor joins Ratzke for a duet, overlaying a tribal harmonisation of Yothu Yindi’s Treaty, beautifully layered with the sounds of live didgeridoo from The Budgie Smugglers.
As the end of the evening approaches, McGregor and Perfect give a spoken tribute to Tim Minchin (who sadly couldn’t be present to perform), and announce that Matilda the Musical will be coming to Adelaide for an 8 week season as part of their 2017 Adelaide Cabaret Festival. With that, James Millar – currently performing as part of the Melbourne Matilda cast – takes the stage with When I Grow Up.
Fittingly the 2016 Adelaide Cabaret Festival Last Galah closes with a performance of Paul Kelly’s From Little Things Big Things Grow, with verses shared by each of the evening performers, before a rousing finish with the entire cast and backstage crew.
The Last Galah is a stylish and generous way to close The Adelaide Cabaret Festival, and gave many of the second week performers a chance to share their talents with Adelaide audiences in a collaborative event. Let’s hope the idea is reprised in years to come.
Paul Rodda
When: 25 Jun
Where: Festival Theatre
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Festival Centre. Artspace. 24 June 2016
Debora Krizak is certainly a hard worker. She was not-long-ago nominated for a Helpmann award for her role of Sheila in A Chorus Line, was in Opera Australia's Anything Goes last year, and co-wrote and starred in her ABBA bioshow, CABBARET, for the Sydney Theatre Cabaret Festival in 2014. But what really keeps her busy is her twins, born in 2008!
So Debora really knows what it takes to be a lady in show business - a funny lady - and therefore is eminently qualified to explore comediennes, and female comedic actors and singers in her new show, Laugh Be A Lady, in this world premiere production at the Adelaide Cabaret Festival.
On the set is a projected montage of cartoon renderings of the greats: Lucille Ball, Carol Burnett, Whoopi Goldberg, Phyllis Diller, Joan Rivers maybe, Lily Tomlin, I think, and of course, her in the middle, I guess. If only this show was five hours long so they all could have gotten the Krizak treatment! With her model's good looks - did I mention that she was in the Harris Scarfe catalogue - and was that before or after her Performing Arts degree at the University of Adelaide? Do you remember her in Chunky Custard?
The show opens with a gloriously ridiculous Christopher Hitchens explaining with a straight face in a filmed interview how women do not need to be funny for their role in mating, and that men must be; so women are genetically not predisposed to comedy. Ha ha ha! That got the ball rolling, and the next thing you know we see Krizak channeling legendary model-turned-comedic performer, Lucille Ball, in the latter's signature burlesque musical movie number, Jitterbug Bite. Krizak later rendered The Yelling Singer skit from The Carol Burnett Show. How about an outlandish Phyllis Diller, with her zinger lines and zany hair. And why is it, Krizak posits, that female comedians have to mask their beauty with silly voices or whacky hair-dos? Good questions aside, these impersonations were awesomely amusing. Krizak also tried her hand at stand-up, but looking drop-dead gorgeous in a chorus line corset most the show, I was faintly distracted. Homage is paid to American Betty White, the first woman to produce a sit-com. However, the show stoppers were her songs. Debora has an incredibly clear voice and is a terrific interpreter of lyrics. Accompanied by musical director Andrew Worboys, she can blast a room with the sweetest notes. After tragicomically playing a composite of her show biz comics in a chorus line character, reminiscent of Lucy Ricardo in one of the I Love Lucy episodes, her Send In The Clowns was the most poignant version of this song I have ever heard. But coming as it did at the end of her show, after all the terribly funny business, and personal banter about her life in the stage lights, and the nostalgia around these great women - after an hour of thorough and thoughtful amusement - I was putty in her hands. And the standing ovation she so deserved at her world premiere opening showed that I wasn't the only one who felt like this. Bravo!
David Grybowski
When: 24 to 25 June
Where: Artspace
Bookings: Closed
Sven Ratzke. A show with the music of David Bowie. Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Space Theatre. 22 Jun 2016
You'll have to skip reading this review and go straight to the box office; there were only 3 seats left as of Thursday morning for the remaining 3 shows, so get on your pogo stick.
In his return to the Adelaide Cabaret Festival, direct from Bendigo, Sven Ratzke is the eponymous Starman, the extra-terrestrial who was afraid to blow our minds in the David Bowie song. Starman opened with his band comprising bass guitar, drums and keyboard/effects in a startling outfit, looking like a black pitcher plant in ill-fitting tights. While all his costumes were exotic, they lacked the panache of Bowie's threads.
The Starman connected the Bowie songs with a wonderfully wandering and bizarre narrative; a peripatetic sojourn from earthly cities and distant stars. The songs and the prose had a distinctly celestial theme and Ratzke's nuclear-fueled rocket energy took us amongst the spheres. Ratzke and his musical director Charly Zastrau shone Bowie through a particular type of jazzy prism, where the familiar melodies mixed with fascinating arrangements. After the round of applause following a nostalgic number, the Starman temporarily transformed into an appreciative Sven the showman, which was very sweet. Sven harked back to his Dutch/German base with amusing mimicry. The Starman is a wonderful invention from a Bowie song and a touching homage to the great man.
P.S. In August, Sven is doing an incredible 27 shows at the Edinburgh Festival, so get in your spaceship and blast off with Starman.
David Grybowski
When: 22 to 25 June
Where: Space Theatre
Bookings: adelaidecabaretfestival.com.au
Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Lisa Fischer and Grand Baton. Dunstan Playhouse. 18 Jun 2016
Lisa Fischer has performed on the biggest stages in the world. She played to more than 500,000 people in Rio, and to sold-out stadiums from London to Berlin, the US to Australia. Since 1989 – along with keyboard player Chuck Leavell and bassist Darryl Jones – Fischer has been an indispensible part of The Rolling Stones touring band. Stones fans will never forget her show-stopping solo at the Adelaide Oval, reprising Merry Clayton’s legendary vocal riff in Gimme Shelter – and making it indelibly her own. Fischer was also a long time singer for Luther Vandross and accompanied Tina Turner and Sting.
We now know much more about Lisa Fischer – along with Merry Clayton, Darlene Love , Claudia Lennear and other rock vocalists – from Morgan Neville’s 2014 Oscar–winning documentary, 20 Feet from Stardom, a memorable, and provocative exploration of the role (and plight) of back-up singers who stand near the spotlight but never quite in it.
Lisa Fischer has always had a solo career – her first album, So Intense, was released back in 1991 - but it has had its interruptions. Scheduled to play last year’s Cabaret Festival, she then cancelled because of Stones concert commitments. At last, in 2016, Adelaide audiences have the chance to see her -
centre stage in all her brilliance.
And surely there is no better time. Touring with soul-psychedelic trio, Grand Baton, Fischer is undoubtedly at a career high point, with a cabaret scale show which is breathtaking in its intimacy and technical flair.
The Saturday night set in the Dunstan Playhouse begins with greetings and introductions. As the stage fills with a purple haze of downspots, Fischer makes immediate connection with the audience and identifies the band – Aidan Carroll on bass, drummer Thierry Arpino and musical director and multi-instrumentalist J.C. Maillard. Then she begins vocalising – humming, trilling, entwining her voice with Maillard’s acoustic guitar as they begin a ten minute exploration of Amy Grant’s Breath of Heaven (Mary’s Song). “I have travelled many moonless nights / I am waiting in that silent prayer. “ It has both a gospel gravity and a spiralling ethereal questioning as Fischer reveals both her strength and fragility.
Using dual microphones – one for reverb and echo effects, the other for her soaring multi-octave vocal excursions, - Fischer is a marvel of expression and control. From bell-like soprano to sultry contralto, it is claimed she spans a range from A2 to G6.
From drummer Arpino’s intro, using timpani mallets, and Carroll’s driving upright bass, Fischer leads into Eric Bibb’s blues classic, Don’t Ever Let Nobody Drag Your Spirit Down. J-C Maillard takes up his SazBass (an eight stringed electroacoustic instrument based on the Turkish baglama) to add some tasty syncopation as Fischer’s mercurial vocals redefine the blues for the 21st century.
Several mash-ups follow – Freedom, and Railroad Earth’s Bird in a House - featuring great drumming and Maillard, fleet-fingered on guitar and Rhodes keyboard. Then, the band goes full throttle into Led Zeppelin’s Rock and Roll. Fischer is in full belter mode and Maillard reaches for his fuzz pedal for some jazzy Hendrixisms - before segue-ing into Fischer’s own Grammy-winning soul ballad, How Can I Ease the Pain.
With her long association with Jagger and Richards, it is hardly surprising that Lisa Fischer has become an inventive interpreter of their songs. Miss You, Jagger’s pouty lament from Some Girls, is expertly extruded by Fischer into a performance that begins with a catchy groove from the band, bass and drum rippling, guitar riffing, and Maillard adding some Daft Punk beatboxing. Fischer’s majestic voice then soars once again, as the four musicians carry us through eleven minutes of jazz-rock virtuosity.
“I was born in a crossfire hurricane” drawls Fischer as the band sashay into Jumping Jack Flash, Thierry Arpino’s crisp drumming etching the beat with Carroll’s rich bass and Maillard playing his SazBass like an electric oud and adding multilayered dervish Qawwali vocals, as Jack becomes a very different kind of gas, gas, gas. Fischer glides and twirls as a song, thumped out on concert stages for forty years, transforms into a modal earth dance, an ecstatic celebration with a high priestess of song officiating.
The set closes with: “The lights are on/you’re not home”. You might as well face it – it’s Robert Palmer’s Addicted to Love. From a sweet, insinuating intro Fischer’s powerful vocal climbs again – stronger than Tina, more majestic than Adele. The trio -Maillard in full Fender whine, the rhythm section rock solid and increasingly urgent - carries her through surge after surge, wave after wave of rock and roll electricity.
And for an encore – beginning with Fischer’s sweet crooning over a trickling acoustic guitar: “Childhood living is easy to do / The things you wanted I bought them for you / Graceless lady you know who I am / You know I can’t let you slip through my hands“ Wild Horses. This time without Mick’s faux twang and nasal whine, but deconstructed and reassembled as a soul aria that envelopes us in sound and feeling; too lucid to be called bewitching, too open-hearted to be mesmerising.
Lisa Fischer is a superb artist and Grand Baton are perfect collaborators. The audience was on its feet for the final curtain. We all knew we had seen and heard something exceptional - and splendid. Wild horses couldn’t drag us away.
Murray Bramwell
When: 18 to 19 Jun
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Festival Centre. Festival Theatre Stage. 17 June 2016
This is a playful and delightful show by British singer, pianist and songwriter, Joe Stilgoe. Looking sharp in a three piece suit, he opened on the piano with a jaunty medley of movie tunes - it was great fun to silently recall the names of the films - and there was immediate engagement as he even gave you clues. Joe's excellent bandsmen on the bass and drums then accompanied him on a jazzy version of the music from the dance contest scene in Pulp Fiction, followed by a medley of cartoon music, which also got the jazz treatment. They deftly and comically juggled a number of sound effect instruments.
Joe has been playing piano since the age of 5 and was schooled by his father, Richard, who apparently was a British national treasure for his satirical songs on a Sunday radio program, and his mother, Annabel Hunt, an opera singer. Even Hal David's and Burt Bacharach's Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head, from Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid benefited from Joe's jazz treatment. Joe was the only one of the five kids who went into show business and he noted his strong recollection of the velvety seats of the local cinema that he so frequently attended.
A whacky medley of '80s movie music showed how a few bars - even a few notes - can open a floodgate of memories. Newly arranged songs from a few of his favourite movies were introduced with context on the film and an explanation of why Joe liked it. There was even a pretend contest of producers' theme songs, and The Advertiser's Patrick McDonald was the only one to get Warner Brothers'. Joe called him Warner Brothers after that.
The musicianship was impeccable and while so many of the songs were familiar, Joe and the band conveyed them in stimulating jazzy arrangements with high energy. Joe is a sweet personality and it was a pleasure to share with him, and the audience, his love of movies and their music.
David Grybowski
When: 17 to 19 June
Where: Festival Theatre Stage
Bookings: adelaidecabaretfestival.com.au