Reviews

If you are a lover of musicals and want to take the miserable out of Les Misérables or put the broad back in Broadway, this is the show that does it! Sadly, this was a once only performance for the Cabaret Festival, but should it tour; it is 100 delightful musical and acting minutes, where 50+ musicals and sundry other songs, are performed at breakneck speed and with judicious lyrical re-arranging. Well, actually minus overtures, sundry verses and with superimposed lyrics that are often hysterically witty and most commonly irreverent.

I struggle to think of another performer who injects political satire into a song any better than the multi-talented Paul McDermott. Coming to the Australian public’s attention in the late eighties as a member of comedy trio Doug Anthony Allstars, his quick wit and melodic voice continued during the nineties with the hit panel gameshow Good News Week.

Thank you Adelaide Cabaret Festival for this gem. An album launch for the always engaging and highly professional Emma Pask with her simply brilliant band.   However, to the coy and reserved Adelaide audiences - provide a little colour and noise when invited… and at a jazz music event!  It is a given that we holler and cheer and celebrate the verve of live music and the artists delivering it, having been denied this pleasure for the ‘pandemically’ compromised period we have been through.

Trying to modernise Ibsen’s great work is fraught with difficulties. The play ‘exploded like a bomb into contemporary life’, wrote an early biographer of the great writer. But what had seemed extraordinary and heart-stopping in 1879 – a wife leaving her husband and home without warning – is no longer extraordinary in 2022.