A Festival of Fabulous Firsts: Adelaide Cabaret Festival 2015

Brimming with world firsts, a strong Australian flavour and a pinch of F-words, Barry Humphries’ 2015 Adelaide Cabaret Festival will be a smorgasbord of fabulous music, wit and comedy. Lesley Reed previews Humphries’ inaugural curation of an arts festival anywhere in the world.

Barry Humphries has laughed heartily at his own joke since his pot-stirring announcement that the first rule of his 2015 Adelaide Cabaret Festival program would be a ban on the F-word. Perhaps we should have guessed right away that he was simply being his cleverly cryptic and impish self.

“This game of cabaret has no rules,” he said more recently, “in fact cabaret loathes, abhors, excoriates, detests and ignores rules - as do I.”

Not surprisingly then, There Are No Rules is now the theme of this year’s Adelaide Cabaret Festival and wouldn’t you know it, Humphries has anointed it with a few F-words of his own: funny, frisky, fabulous, fantastic and of course, fedora.

For me, though, the word that seems to underpin Humphries’ 2015 Festival is ‘first’. Not only is this the first time the iconic artist has ever curated an arts event, his June 5-20 Adelaide Cabaret Festival is chock-full of firsts, with eighteen world premieres, six Australian premieres, fifteen Adelaide premieres and six Adelaide exclusives.

Humphries’ program says much about a man who brought us such Aussie superstars as Dame Edna Everage and Sir Les Patterson. There are of course superb overseas-based acts, but as one might expect there is an overwhelmingly Australian tone, particularly amongst its world premieres.

Christie Whelan Browne is one Aussie artist to have come up with a world-first show for Adelaide. She told me that Pure Blonde has evolved into a performance about actors in musical theatre.

“The characters are all at different stages of their careers,’ she said. “One just starting out and one giving their farewell speech to the industry. So I am drawing on myself to a certain point and on much that I have seen in my ten years of working in musicals. I love what Dean (Bryant, the Director) has done with the piecing together of this show.”

Famous for his shows featuring the songs of Madonna and Annie Lennox, Michael Griffiths explores the legendary and enduring songs of Cole Porter in his world premiere of Cole.

“It sounds like such a cliché,” he said, “but Cole Porter was always in trouble with censors and in many ways was far ahead of his time as an artist, and in the way he lived his life. It certainly makes for wonderful story telling. I've long admired Cole Porter but haven't sung his songs before. The music is far more chromatic and sophisticated compared to the recent pop songs in my previous cabarets.”

Tenor Daniel Koek is returning home after playing Jean Valjean in the West End production of Les Misérables and will premiere Daniel Koek: Bringing Him Home with His West End Story.

I suggested to Daniel it must be a daunting task to condense a decade of leading roles into one production.

“It is a bit,” he said. “I think when you’re telling your story through music it helps to choose songs that have touched or inspired you along the way, also, music that appeared at a certain time of your life, a crossroad or challenging path perhaps. You can introduce a whole lot of new music to an audience when telling your story, but at some point you have to add some tunes that make them smile and go ‘awww’.”

‘Aww’ or possibly ‘awesome’ will surely be words heard more than once in Adelaide as the world premieres continue. Barry Humphries has curated and will narrate one such show himself. Starring Teddy Tahu Rhodes and South Australian soprano Greta Bradman, Peter & Jack is a tribute to legendary Australian exponents of 20^th century song, Peter Dawson and Jack O’Hagan.

Other firsts include Meow Meow’s His Master’s Choice, Christa Hughes’ Oz Rockin’ the Ladies Lounge and The Front, which is a celebration of Aussie humour shining through the brutality of war.

Marney McQueen’s Hair to the Throne and John O’Hara’s Dedications also stand out in the tempting Australian mix of brand new shows, as do My Vagabond Boat, Opera Burlesque, 27 Club, Class of Cabaret and Brazil/Australia’s Jobim. Steve Sheehan and Norma Knight star in Tristan & Isolde and for the first time ever at the Adelaide Cabaret Festival the show also features a miniature horse.

The local and ‘first’ flavor of this year’s Cabaret Festival also includes Trevor Ashley’s I’m Everywoman and Eddie Perfect’s Songs from the Middle. Eddie hilariously and sometimes heartbreakingly explores what can be devastating in real life, such as not belonging, leaving home and how much it hurts to go back.

Every artistic venture worth its salt needs a wildcard and in this year’s Festival that card is Adelaide’s David Gauci. Well regarded by his home town theatre community for his music teaching and directorial support of young musical theatre talent, David has a first of his own - he performed in the inaugural Adelaide Cabaret Festival. His professional history outside of Adelaide stretches across a dozen years, most recently including understudying Edna in the Australian Premiere cast of Hairspray and as one of the Male Authority Figures, staged in Melbourne and Sydney and directed by David Atkins.

“The irony is that interstate audiences have heard me sing professionally,” David said of his Cabaret Festival world-first show It Was Worth The Weight, “but it’s never happened in Adelaide, my home town. It’s so much more exciting to do this show first in Adelaide - it’s been worth the wait.”

Sir Les Patterson was a controversial Aussie knight decades before Tony Abbott got in on the act and now Sir Les has been given the nod by his manager Barry Humphries to headline a season finale second to none; a world-first, no rules, open slobber… er, slather… celebration of cabaret, Love Songs for Sir Les.

Cabaret lovers, hold on to your fedoras. Once the curtain goes down for the last time on the 2015 Adelaide Cabaret Festival, whatever F-word Barry Humphries decides sums it up for him, you can be sure it will have been a fortnight of frolic; a fabulous and funny sensory explosion of firsts.

The 2015 Adelaide Cabaret Festival runs from June 5 to 20, 2015.

www.adelaidefestivalcentre.com.au/adelaide-cabaret-festival

Images (from top): Barry Humphries, Christie Whelan Browne, Daniel Koek (photographer: Leo Holden) and Marney McQueen.