Cabaret: #Val: A Glitery Ode to Queer Men and their Mums

John O’Hara
Accompanied by Andrew Kroenert
Downstairs at the Maj
13 – 15 September

John O’Hara. What a guy!
Raised on the Canning Highway Avenue of the Stars (Dave Faulkner at the Manning end, Dave Warner at the Bicton end), O’Hara schooled at Melville Primary and John Curtin College of the Arts, studied at WAAPA and has gone on to star on stage (Cats, Rocky Horror, Wicked, Priscilla) and cabaret, all over the place.
He’s back home, in more ways than one, with #Val: A Glittery Ode to Queer Men and their Mums, the story of his growing up, his coming out and the songs that helped him do both.
Those who’ve seen him on the Maj’s basement stage before, in Dedications (2015) or last year’s A Very Merry Christmas (there were plenty of comebackers in the audience – always a good sign) would have known they were in for a fine time in the company of a dead snappy performer.
I think they’d have also known they were in for more than that – because O’Hara’s cabarets are rare commodity in that glittery world. They are about things.
A fair swag of the songs of #Val are, in a sense, predictable. Gaga’s Born This Way, Scissor Sisters’ Let’s have a Kiki, an all-time gay anthemfest  (I Will survive, Raining Men, Strike A Pose, Dance With Somebody…), George Michael’s Freedom, even the Barbie theme song, Get Your Sparkle On (we did).
But it’s the songs we don’t expect, and the way he gets inside them that we’ve never heard before, that makes O’Hara such a compelling performer. Who’s gunna to do the little tearjerker Baby of Mine from Disney’s Dumbo, Cher’s gun-totin’ Turn Back Time, or, of all things, Farnsy’s You’re the Voice?
But he does, and owns them all big time.
And when everything he’s trying to do and say comes completely together (much credit due here to his accompanist – well they’re a duo, really, Andrew Kroenert), in heartbreaking, revelatory versions of TLC’s Don’t Go Chasing Waterfalls and Sia’s Titanium, it’s like you’ve never really known what they’re about until now.
That’s the strength, but also the one weakness, of #Val. The story of a gay boy growing up and into is skin, his relationships (with his fabulous mother, of course, his straight brother, his absent father) is funny, sweet and makes all the points it needs to.
The extrapolation into the history of the LGBIQ struggle way back to the Stonewall Uprising and the death of Marsha P Jackson is understandable and legitimate, but it confuses O’Hara’s narrative and dangles him on the crumbly edge of polemic.
But what the hey. That’s just me. John O’Hara, “Australia’s John O’Hara”, gives as good an hour as you’ll get to spend on this side of the footlights.
Don’t miss #Val. Don’t miss anything he does.

Cabaret: Chiquitita and Fernando (★★★½)

Adele Parkinson and Darren Mapes
Downstairs at the Maj
4 – 7 October
The cabaret season Downstairs at the Maj is a welcome, and underappreciated, respite from the serious stuff up on street level. While a fair bit of its programme can be formulaic, it has a habit of throwing up little gems, sometimes from unlikely places.
Adele Parkinson and Daren Mapes’s Chiquitita and Fernando is one of them.
It’s fairly obvious from the title what you’re in for: an hour and a bit of Abba and a few bits and pieces of Scandipop from Roxette and Ace of Base, among others.
What you mightn’t have expected is its tongue-in-cheek shenanigans and a wacky story laced with on-and-off stage mischiefs.

Cabaret: Cole ★★★½

by Anna Goldsworthy

Songs by Cole Porter

Performed by Michael Griffiths

Downstairs at the Maj

29 Sept – 1 Oct, 2016

Michael Griffiths is a frequent visitor to the Perth Fringe and the cabaret season Downstairs at the Maj. The 1999 WAAPA graduate has been partying like it’s that year ever since, with long stints in Jersey Boys, Priscilla Queen of the Desert, Shout!, We Will Rock You! and a string of highly successful one-man character shows under his belt.

This short season of his latest, Cole, is already sold out, testament to the loyal audience he has built up here.

Cole deserves its success. Griffiths is on very firm ground with the story and music of Cole Porter, much more so than he was in his Annie Lennox tribute, Sweet Dreams, where his interpretations, though fine enough, paled against her peerless original performances.

Cole Porter presents Griffiths with no such problems; though he was a crafty performer of his wonderful tunes, it’s the songs, not the singer, we are in awe of.

And so we should be. From Anything Goes to Night and Day, Griffiths takes us through the luxurious tangle of Porter’s ridiculously elegant, swelligant songbook; De-lovely, Paris in the Springtime, Let’s Fall in Love, I’ve Got You Under My Skin, What is This Thing Called Love?, Let’s Misbehave, a terrific Miss Otis Regrets, You’re the Top, Love for Sale and a great little sing-along to Another Opening of Another Show. (I list them all to demonstrate the enormous bang for your buck Porter and Griffiths deliver here).

There’s no attempt to shoe-horn the material into a chronology, and that’s a good thing. Griffiths as Porter sits at his piano and chats to us, in that strange, trans-Atlantic accent he concocted, about his charmed life, his understanding, loyal wife Linda, their wealth and profligacy, his homosexuality and the horse-riding accident in 1937 that left him crippled and in pain for the rest of his life.

What the show’s writer, Anna Goldsworthy, and Griffiths really give us, though, is a convincing study of a phenomenally intelligent boy in a bubble, perhaps the most culturally aware songwriter ever (or until Randy Newman at least), who could turn everything around him into a smile, a laugh or, even, a snigger (Porter delicately tip-toed through the minefield of the Hays Code in the ‘30s), while living a life the ordinary people who loved his work could hardly even dream of in those troubled times. Or these.

  

Why have I put Why here? Because I can, and you deserve it.

Cabaret: Tribute (★★★)

Written and performed by Ruth Wilkin
Downstairs at the Maj
22 – 24 September

Audiences want more, and performers need to give it to them. So it’s unsurprising that the stock-standard cabaret tribute show has been re-invented by artists who see its potential as a launch pad for something more complex, nuanced and satisfying.
We’ve seen that potential realised recently in a couple of shows in the cabaret room downstairs at the Maj; the writer Izaak Lim (with others) and director Michael Loney, after delivering attractive bio-tributes of Cole Porter and Dorothy Field, took the songs of Harold Arlen and fashioned them into Fancy Meeting You, an original romantic comedy musical, while John O’Hara and his writer/director collaborator Anthony Harkin’s Dedication used a suite of songs to drive the internal monologue of a late-night schmaltz jock.
Both shows became greater than the sum of their parts, and great successes, while more traditional tribute shows– there’s no need to name them, even though some of them are very well performed by very talented artists – increasingly seem less than the sum of theirs.
Ruth Wilkin has taken things a very long step further. 
She’s also devised a bio-tribute, only, in Tribute, she’s invented the star whose story she tells and whose hits she sings.

Cabaret: Nailed It! (★★★½)

Music and Lyrics by Loclan Mackenzie-Spencer and Andrew Spano
Performed by Andrew Spano
Accompanied by Rainer Napoli
Downstairs at the Maj
26 – 28 May 2016

This year’s cabaret season at The Maj gets in full swing with Nailed It!, Andrew Spano and Loclan Mackenzie-Spencer’s tantalizing collection of songs about love and other disasters.
The songwriting duo is steeped in style; there’s a lashing of Sondheim, lots of lounge, a bit of Bens Folds and even a taste of Tom Lehrer.And while love pokes its hydra-headed dilemmas into much of the material, the songs never wallow in it.
If Nailed It! is a sign of what’s in store Downstairs at the Maj this year, it’s a very good one.
The 2016 programme combines big names and famous subjects with some real dark horses, and in a town that’s short of good cabaret in the setting it’s meant for, that’s more than we can hope for. 

Read the complete review in The West Australian 

Amanda Harrison
Accompanied by Bev Kennedy
Downstairs at the Maj
21 - 23 August 2014
If you’re A Star, and used to performing on big stages in green make-up, the little cabaret downstairs at the Maj must be daunting.
To paraphrase the title of Amanda Harrison’s one-woman show, you’re right up close and very personal on that stage. If you wanted to be less naked, you’d take up stripping.
Harrison is first cab off the rank in a cabaret season at the Maj dominated by women, either as performers (including the not-to-be-missed Christa Hughes) or subject matter (Michael Griffiths’ take on Annie Lennox; the story of the lyricist Dorothy Fields). You could do much worse.

Link here to the complete review on The West Australian's website       

Cabaret: Christa Hughes

Neurotic Ladyland
Downstairs at the Maj

15 – 18 August, 2013

Christa Hughes, she with the voice that goes right up to her bum, returns to the basement cabaret at the Maj in great form.

Last time she was here was with her dad, the venerable boogie woogie pianist Dick Hughes, and a terrific set of dirty blues and drinking songs; this time around she’s brought the striking jazz pianist Leonie Cohen, drummer Jim Dunlop, a combustible collection of right-out-there songs and some truly gob-smacking costumes.

The result, Neurotic Ladyland, sometimes threatens to tip over the edge, but most of the risks Hughes takes pay off, and she’s always got that mighty voice of hers to straighten things up if they go haywire.

Cabaret: Two Weeks in Paris

Devised and performed by Analisa Bell

Musical director Mia Brine

With Rhoda Lopez and Laura Hopwood

Downstairs at the Maj

11 – 14 July 2012

You’ve got to hand it to Analisa Bell.

I doubt even her most ardent fans (and she seems to have plenty of them) would claim she’s got one of the great voices, or that the shows she puts together downstairs at the Maj have any particular insight or wit, but there’s something about her that wins you over.

Maybe it’s her utter lack of pretension, the obvious pleasure she gets in being able to do the things she does, her wide-eyed ordinariness, that does the trick. Maybe it’s also her canny instinct for her audience that you have to admire, even if you don’t share their enthusiasm.

But let’s be frank. This little show, inspired, it seems, by an unexceptional two weeks' holiday in Paris, is a barely sustainable vehicle for Bell, and nothing she does in performance lifts it above a sort of musical slide night.

Theatre: You've Got That Thing

Music and Lyrics by Cole Porter

Conceived and written by Nick MacLaine and Izaak Lim

Directed by Michael Loney

Musical director Tim Cunniffe

Performed by Will Groucutt, Analisa Bell and Pilar Mata Dupont

Downstairs at the Maj

10 – 13 August, 2011

A biographical pastiche of the songs and life of Cole Porter sounds easier to do than it is, and it's to the great credit of You’ve Got That Thing’s young writers Izaak Lim and Nick Maclaine that they have neatly side-step the traps in their path to deliver an elegant and surprisingly substantial entertainment.

The first wise decision they made was to keep Porter off stage. We learn about him through three of the people in his life; his wife Linda, his favourite performer Ethel Merman and an apocryphal boyfriend Edward, modelled perhaps on his long-time friend Ray Kelly, to whose children Porter left half his royalties.

It’s a nice touch, and a clever one. By not having to represent Porter himself, Lim and Maclaine are able to speculate and invent without the weight of verisimilitude demanded by baleful old pedants like me; so, for example, the famously convenient relationship between the Porters is drawn out in exchanges between Linda and Edward with a freedom that would have been awkward and artificial if we heard it from the couple themselves.

Their next winning decision was to enlist Michael Loney to shape the show. The lightly framed agility of Porter’s writing, and the comic timing that his music brings to even his more serious subjects, is meat and drink for Loney the actor, and as director he imparts that stagecraft to his cast to the show’s great benefit.

Comedy: Parodies Lost

Conceived and written by Nick MacLaine and Andrew Williams

Musical director Tim Cunniffe

Performed by Joshua Brant, Caitlin Cassidy, Izaak Lim and Andrew Williams

Downstairs at the Maj

29 June – 2 July, 2011

Parodies Lost is the brainchild of the same crew whose sell out season of Tomfoolery was one of the highlights of last year’s Downstairs at the Maj season.

I’m not going to reprise the accolades that show got in this paper, whose reviewer joined in the encore “because laughing for 90 minutes is not a feeling you want to end”, but there’s no denying this fresh-faced ensemble had another packed room eating out of their hands.

Parody is the parrot that perches on the shoulder of satire demanding crackers, and that’s the difference between the pointed originality of a Tom Lehrer and the more superficial amusement of this show.

Link here for the complete review in The West Australian.