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.

Music: Rufus Wainwright

Perth Concert Hall

October 18, 2010

The Boy Stripped Bare
Rufus Wainwright has lived his life in the spotlight since his arrival back in 1973 was announced by his famous dad, Loudon, in songs like Dilated to Meet You, and the (as it turned out) ironically titled Rufus is a Tit Man.
The famous baby has grown into a famous man, and a prodigious talent.

He came to Perth on Monday night in the midst of a period of great personal highs and lows: the international popularity of his re-creations of Judy Garland's legendary 1961 concerts, the debut of his opera, Prima Donna, and his growing celebrity, all overshadowed by the illness and death, in January this year, of his beloved mother, the tender, luminous singer and songwriter, Kate McGarrigle.
In the first part of his Perth Concert Hall solo show, Wainwright performed the whole of his recent album, All Days are Nights: Songs for Lulu, as a song cycle (“no applause until Rufus has left the stage, please”).

It's a format that has worked well for other ambitious artists, in particular Brian Wilson on his Pet Sounds and Smile tours, and it certainly satisfied this adoring audience.
Songs for Lulu is demanding music, and Wainwright played it for all it was worth.

He was dressed in an operatic cape with a five-metre train and backed by gigantic close-up images of an eye, opening, closing and, eventually dropping a single, enormous tear.

Pausing from the keyboard only to sip water, he worked through songs of deep loss, love, freedom and family, and when they worked (“Martha”, the glorious, spare “Zebulon”) it was a transfixing experience.

Sometimes, though, it was not so successful, in particular his awkward arrangement of Shakespeare’s 43^rd, 20^th and 10th sonnets, and then, stripped of an orchestral backing or his playful starriness, you have to confront The Rufus Wainwright Issue: that voice of his.

When he performed Garland’s repertoire, his vocal limitations were part of the fun (“I can’t reach these notes, but we’ll all have fun watching me try!”), but in this setting, and though everything was well within his range, that voice, like a chainsaw wrapped in felt, could really throw you.

It was a lot easier to take in the second half, when beautifully crafted songs like Beauty Mark, Memphis Skyline (his lovely tribute to Jeff Buckley), The Art Teacher, Cigarettes and Chocolate and, finally, his mother’s sweet and touching Walking Song, swept the audience away.

No song swept more thoroughly, though, than his version of that strange re-telling of Old Testament stories and perverse sexual longings by an ascetic, mordant Jewish Canadian Buddhist poet that has become the crowd-pleasing showstopper par excellence for artists as varied as John Cale, k.d. lang, Jeff Buckley, Wainwright and every second American Idol contestant. Dear God, will no one ever rescue Leonard Cohen from Hallelujah?

An edited version of this review appeared in The West Australian 20.10.10 look 

Set list: If you haven't come across it yet, setlist.fm gives you the running sheet and links to videos of artists' shows; this one is from Rufus Wainwright's concert in Osaka only a fortnight or so ago setlist here. It's not identical to his Perth show, but pretty close. Check it out! 

Music: Every mother's son

When Rufus Wainwright came to town for PIAF 2008, the great disappointment was the cancellation of his opening act; his mother and aunt, the evanescent Kate and Anna McGarrigle. Little did we know Kate was suffering the effects of the cancer to which she succumbed in January this year. This time it was Rufus who cancelled Australian dates, to be with her in the last days.
Rufus returns to the Perth Concert Hall on the back of his recently-released All Days are Nights: Songs for Lulu, an elegiac collection of songs in which the spirit of Kate is always present.

As well as Rufus, Kate and Anna's work, the Wainwright and McGarrigle clan's phenomenal collection of varied and engrossing music over nearly 40 years includes the arch observations of (sometimes estranged) dad Loudon Wainwright III and the insinuating voice of sister Martha. Coming up fast behind them is Rufus and Martha's half-sister Lucy, daughter of Loudon and Suzzy Roche who, along with her sisters Magge and Terri... and so on!
A couple of years back Lesley and I saw Rufus's massive star turn in front of 15,000 at the Hollywood Bowl, recreating Judy Garland's famous 1961 concert. The following night we caught his sister's captivating performance, from almost within touching distance, at a tiny cafe down the road from the Bowl. On both occasions their mother, looking diminished but obviously proud of her son's success and her daughter's talent, joined them for a couple of numbers. It was a privilege, after all these years, to see a woman we're admired so much for so long in two such different circumstances. We miss her.

Here's a lovely appreciation of Kate from The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg, from which you can launch into other fine pieces.