Perth International Cabaret Festival: closing weekend

Meow Meow, Gill Hicks and Gala

Perth International Cabaret Festival

His Majesty’s Theatre June 25-26, 2022

Meow Meow

In her Apocalypse Meow, the prima chanteuse Meow Meow describes herself as “a showgirl of gargantuan proportions”.

Never was a truer word spoken, but, as always with Mme Meow, it’s necessary to peel away her layers of intent; of course there’s the sheer presence of her, the big hair, the phenomenal décolletage, the lips, the eyes, the Rockette pins.

Then there’s her stance; hands on hips, all challenge and control – control, that is, until the lights, or the smoke machine don’t work, the flowers aren’t thrown, it all goes wrong – “I suppose I’ll have to do this myself” she snarls, a pussycat becoming a very pissed off tigress.

Its all an act – no, it's The Act – and a brilliant, insurrectionary one, and she injects snatches of it throughout her PICF show.
But for the most part she stripped the tomfoolery away and concentrated on the songs, curated with her usual immaculate taste and subversive purpose, from Laurie Anderson’s 'The Dream Before' (“history is an angel being blown back into the future”) to her mate Amanda Palmer’s murderous 'Miss Me', from Patti Griffin’s tender, lovely 'Kite Song' to the Brecht/Weill canonical 'Pirate Jenny' and 'Surabaya Johnny', but also Brecht and Hanns Eisler’s hauntingly prescient 'Deutsches Miserere'.

There were also original songs written for her with Megan Washington (‘Skeleton Key’) and in collaboration with Pink Martini’s Thomas Lauderdale (‘I Lost Myself’) and Iain Grandage(‘Tear Down the Stars”’)

Alone but for the immaculate accompaniment of Mark Jones (piano) and Dan Witton (bass), Meow Meow went much of the way to granting me a wish I made in a review a decade ago: “There are times when she should trust the songs and her singing of them instead of interrupting herself with comedy. I’d love her to just sing to me.”

 

Gill Hicks

On the night of Meow Meow the foyers of the Maj were abuzz with praise of Gill Hicks’s Still Alive (and Kicking), so, with some gentle prodding from PICF’s indefatigable Ali Welburn, I was back on Saturday afternoon for her show.

Why had I not always planned to see it? Hicks was a victim of the July 2005 London bombings, and lost both her legs in the explosion on board the train she was traveling in. I must confess this tragic story didn’t sound like the makings of a fun hour of cabaret.

How wrong can you be!

Still Alive (and Kicking) is, instead, a quietly glorious story, completely free of self-pity or bitterness, beautifully told and shot through with humour.

The image of Hicks being rushed to hospital without any sign of life for 30 minutes other than that she is talking non-stop, or insisting on going to the hospital morgue to say goodbye to her legs, are drilled into my memory.

There are images and characters just as human and memorable: Adrian, the man she never knew who saved her life as he lost his by being between her and the bomb blast; Matt, “the geezer” who guided her through her prosthetic rehab (“I can’t stop you from falling, but I can help you get up”); waving her prosthetic leg out the taxi window as she finally left hospital.

And there are songs, performed with a remarkable duo, Dylan Paul on double bass and Julian Ferraretto on violin and, or all things, saw.
Among her many achievements, Hicks is a stylish and engaging jazz singer, and the smooth arrangements of 'Stayin’ Alive' (accompanied by aforementioned saw), 'Summertime', 'Bye Bye Blackbird' and 'I’m Feeling Good' gave the standards a musical freshness as well as an urgent dimension.

And, as she says, “being alive is a damn good thing to have whilst you have it.”

 

Closing Night Gala

There are obvious joys in festival galas, and hidden ones too.

If you come to them cold, you get a snapshot of the highlights of the programme you didn’t see.

So, if that’s you, you got lucky, with festival director Michael Griffith’s snappy opening ('Another Opening, Another Show'), the esteemed Noongar artists Gina Williams and Guy Ghouse ('Moon River' – in Noongar and sing-a-long English – and the willy-wagtail song 'Djidi Dgidi') and double-barrelled showstoppers from the festival's headliners Paul Capsis and Meow Meow.

But if, like me, you’d seen many of the shows in the festival, there were other delights:

Libby Hammer and Ali Bodycoat were all wit and breeze in their festival hit Over the Rainbow, but whack them on the big Maj stage with a full band and they had the crowd roaring to their Kylie Minogue mash up and a barnstorming take on the legendary Streisand/Garland medley, 'Get Happy/Happy Days are Here Again'.

I was critical of Brigitte Hauser’s Maria, Marlene and Me that got bogged down in a clunky narrative which, I thought, threw her performance off kilter, but, at the gala and back in her natural environment, and with Rossini’s 'Una Voe Poco Fas' to work on, she really shone, letting both her pipes and physical comedy chops rip. More of the same, Brigitte!

While Gill Hicks was an impressive interpreter of the standard numbers in her Still Alive (and Kicking) earlier in the day, her one-song stand at the gala, 'Stayin’ Alive' went to another height on the big stage. Even leaving aside her extrordinary story she’s a compelling, complete artist.

 

And that was that. The second Perth International Cabaret Festival took itself downstairs for a few more songs and quite a few more drinks, the ghost light was switched on and all the songs, and all the laughter and applause were just echoes to add to the grand old theatre.

PICF is a great addition to Perth’s popular arts (the good news is that it’s back next year, and extended from two to three weeks), and, given the tough environment it was born into, everyone involved deserves a standing ovation.

 

Perth Festival: Kabarett Haus

Perth Concert Hall
21-23 February 2020

For three nights during the Perth festival the austere Perth Concert Hall became an enormous (albeit mirror-less) spiegeltent as three of the biggest stars of Cabaret Nuevo strutted their very considerable stuff to adoring sold-out crowds.

Fabulous concept - but how did they go, huh?   

Meow Meow
Pandemonium

Here’s a doozy of a question: “Who is the real Divine Miss MM?”

Is she the aggrieved, do-it-herself diva of her entrance sans flowers thrown from the audience, the assiduous trawler through the back catalogue of chanson réaliste and Weimar cabaret, the claws-barely-sheathed/bits-barely-contained mistress of human bondage with her obediently stroking boys?

Or is she the fragile, exposed girl in her slip, caught in the light of a torch she’s holding herself?

Of course she’s none of them (she’s actually the prodigiously talented WAAPA and Melbourne University law, fine arts and language graduate Melissa Madden Gray) and also all of them.

She’s a creation, like Barry Humphries’ Edna or Bette Midler’s Divine Miss Only One M, and the purpose of everything she does is to deconstruct the persona of the diva and the art and craft of cabaret.

Oh, and sure, Gray’s a dynamite performer, sexy as all get-out, crafty and learned, versatile and able to wring laughs, gasps and tears from the stoniest of audiences.

But, just maybe, she’s a little stuck in her creation. She’s inventive, makes great choices with her collaborators (Iain Grandage, who conducts WASO with humour and accuracy, Thomas M Lauderdale who is a peerless accompanist) and friends (two of whom, Amanda Palmer and Rufus Wainwright she wrangled into her Kabarett Haus series for the Perth Festival.

The trouble is, we’ve seen it all before.

That’s not a deal-breaker, but put the first time I saw her, in a fringe spiegeltent in 2012, alongside this time, in an arts festival concert hall eight years later, and not much in her manner, matter or method has evolved. It’s a truly great act, but it’s the same act, and that, to me at least, is a waste of her range, and the opportunities she has.

As I wrote the first time I reviewed her; “She's such a fine, emotionally intelligent singer, of her own songs and others', that one day it would be nice to see her throw away the lingerie and gagging and just do some tunes”.

Nothing’s changed.

Rufus Wainwright
Down Solo Wainwright

Rufus Wainwright has been famous since the instant of his birth (courtesy of his famous dad Louden’s Dilated to Meet You).

I’ve seen Rufus before, at his Judy Garland concert at the Hollywood Bowl in 2008, and then at his sombre 2010 Perth Festival performance where he was clearly deeply affected by the recent death of his mother, Kate McGarrigle.

The great news is how much his voice has matured in power and richness since those shows. In 2008 part of the fun was listening to him attempt material he admitted he wasn’t up to; in 2010 his vocal peculiarity (I described it, back then, as “a chainsaw wrapped in felt”) was a high hurdle to overcome.

His voice is still not my favourite instrument, but he’s grown and refined it as he has grown and refined, and it’s no longer an impediment to enjoyment of his outstanding material and stage presence.

Link here to my full review in Seesaw

Amanda Palmer
There will be no Intermission

(pic Nicole David)

 One of my tasks as a reviewer, unsurprisingly, is to let you know whether a show is worth the time and money you have to invest in it.

That means the hurdle for a four-hour forty-minute long solo show by an artist as confronting and iconoclastic as Amanda Palmer has to be set pretty fucking high.

The answer is complicated. If Ms Palmer is not your cup of tea, or you wander into her Perth Festival show unawares, a free ticket to a five-minute-long performance might be way too much. If, though you’re an Amandanista (like the 15,000-odd “patreons” who shell out an average, she says, of three bucks a month for her to do whatever she wants with) or someone who craves hard, sharp, take-no-prisoners performance, you’d probably be happy to sell your house and follow her everywhere.

There’s another complication. Some years back I saw Steve Earle in San Diego, and there was a shouting match in the audience between opposing sides of the issues he was raising. The main shout of the anti-Earles was “We came to hear you sing – not to hear your crappy commie politics”. You get the drift.

Now everyone in the Perth Concert Hall last Saturday night, I’m sure, was well prepared to hear Palmer’s opinions, but I suspect most would have thought she’d present them differently: “We came to hear you sing about your opinions – not to hear you talk about them”.

Look, it’s a fair point, and one I was forced to contemplate at the interval (there is one thankfully) after two hours and only five songs. I’m sure there were some waverers by then, wary of facing more of the same.

Whether it was what you came for or not, Palmer’s monologues, about abortion and miscarriage, friends, love, death, anger and redemption were to the point, skilfully structured and performed, passionate, often very funny, very often very sad. I’d written Hannah Gadsby in my notes long before Palmer acknowledged how inspired she’d been by the Australian humourist’s Nanette. 

And the songs, which came much more frequently after interval, were amazing. Her piano playing is orchestral, her voice operatic, her artistic stance phenomenal. She’s as spectacular a performing artist as rock has.

And her life story – or the part of it she wants to tell us about in this show, is worth telling, though it’s painful, and sad, and sometimes horrifying. It’s peopled with good folks and bad, the wise and the stupid, those who cared for her and those that didn’t give a rat’s arse.

A couple of things: the two Auslan interpreters (Christy Filipich and Danielle Pritchard) who worked in tandem throughout the show were OUTSTANDING! They’d obviously put huge work into their roles, often anticipating Palmer’s words before she spoke or sang them, and richly deserved the respect Palmer gave them, and the ovation from the audience at the bows.

And it's interesting that nearly all the shows that worked for me best in both festivals were autobiographical; David Colvin’s Thunderstruck and Jemma Kahn’s In bocca al lupo at Fringe World, Palmer and Phelim McDermott’s Tao of Glass at the Perth Festival.

Must be something in that.

Cabaret: Meow Meow

Astor Theatre

November 16, 2012

I had a diverting conversation with my wife on Friday night about the allure of the extraordinary Melissa Madden Gray, the artist known as Meow Meow.

She briefly wondered whether the boundlessly pneumatic cabaret artist appealed more to blokes. And as I helped Meow crowd surf over our heads while she sang Come Dance with Me, I confess I was reminded of Bob Menzies’ famous “I did but see her passing by …”

But Meow is much more clever than that. Her full-frontal attack on glamour, her insurgency in the war of the sexes never says “come hither”. “Come over here and do what you’re told” is more like it. Whatever empowerment is, that’s what Meow Meow is peddling. She’s got a joke about what boys like and guys want – and the women are in on it.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian