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.

Cabaret: Gold-digger

Written and performed by Analisa Bell

Music by Tim Cunniffe and Analisa Bell

Accompanist Tim Cunniffe

with Laura Hopwood and Nicole La Bianca

Downstairs at the Maj

9, 10, 11 September 2010 

The Maj is alive with the machinations of carnivorous women this weekend. While Mrs Robinson ensnares her toy boy upstairs, downstairs a local predator has much older prey in her sights.

Analisa Bell, the writer and star of the one-act cabaret Gold-digger, is on familiar ground here, for we all have our opinions about a certain Filipina housemaid turned socialite whose marital adventures in the ’80s and ’90s titillated and scandalised Perth.

Because we all know, or think we know, Ms Bell’s Rose Portalou so well, it’s a tough gig to give a fresh new insight into her life and times in the pastiche of reminiscence, advice to the love-lorn and self-promotion in monologue and song that fills the hour we spend with her.

But the audience’s easy identification with the character served her well, especially early on when opening-night nerves got the better of her for a short time.

Happily, the audience was one of the stars of the show. I’ve got no doubt many cheering her on were fans Ms Bell has picked up in the decade of so since she graduated from WAAPA.

This is a good thing; we need performers with personal followings, and an “up”, boisterous crowd always helps fill the dips and lift the highlights.

The highlights of this show are original songs by Ms Bell and the admirable Tim Cunniffe, who is also her accompanist (and, briefly, the dying iron baron Sam Bancock). While there are unsurprising bowdlerisations of popular tunes like Big Spender and Don’t Cry for Me Argentina, originals like Confrontation (featuring an excoriating cameo by Bancock’s vengeful daughter Nina), the sad and hilarious Pethidine Poker, the uproarious Toothpaste Cha Cha and an instant standard in Enough is Never Enough propel the show and give Ms Bell’s bravura talents fullest scope.

There’s also some delicious choreography by Anna Tsirigotis featuring Laura Hopwood and Nicole La Bianca as a sexy pair of Rose’s poodles/handmaidens. Their foray into the audience, handing out lollipops for ladies to practise on during Rose’s sex education class, was especially delectable.

Gold-digger is still a work in progress (for which the Maj’s Brainbox Project deserves our thanks). I’m not sure if it can travel successfully to places where its subject matter is less known, but with more work, and especially more of its excellent original songs, it well deserves at least another, longer, Perth run.

An edited version of this review appeared in The West Australian 13.09.10 here.