Cabaret: Christa Hughes

Beer Drinking Woman
Cabaret Soiree
Downstairs at the Maj
11 – 13 September

If I keep banging on about the glorious Christa Hughes, it might encourage more of you to savour her delicious and generous talents. And while her recent shows here were both stonkers, Beer Drinking Woman is her stonkiest, not least because it features many of her own funny, desperate songs.
Starting with her Cheap Thrills, an untidy taste of what’s to come, and the title track, a Memphis Slim blues from 1940 enlivened considerably by Hughes’s deeply impressive beer sculling and gargling expertise, the show range over the peaks and troughs of life on the bottle.
It's her last night in town tonight, and there are some tables left, I'm told. It will be a shame if you aren’t in them.  

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

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.

Music: Dick and Christa Hughes

21^st Century Blues

Downstairs at the Maj

22 – 25 June, 2011

 Boogie Woogie, the strong left hand of the blues, drives this fabulous journey by venerable jazzman Dick Hughes and his darling daughter Christa back to the boozy, sexy world of dives and speakeasies, shotgun shacks and sugar mamas.

The younger Hughes, she of Machine Gun Fellatio and Circus Oz fame, is every bit a 21^st Century girl, but she’s steeped in the music of Bessie Smith, Memphis Slim and Jelly Roll Morton and the other legends of early 20^th Century blues.

She sings the songs her daddy taught her with steamy authenticity and an outrageous inventiveness that dusts them off and drops them right back in the present.

Christa would be the star of any show she was in, and her old man is no slouch, either on the keys or when he fronts up to a vocal. Despite one of the autobiographies of his long, fecund life being titled Don’t You Sing!, he does a gruffly winning number on Morton’s Winin’ Boy and a lovely, affectionate duet with his daughter on Spencer William’s Everybody Loves My Baby.

Maybe his playing is a tad shaky on occasions ­– as he’d be the first to tell you, he’s no spring chicken these days – but it’s shot through with the spirit of the music, and that left hand of his is still good and strong when it counts.