Adelaide Cabaret Festival
Adelaide Festival Centre
Until June 24.

Here’s to the Ladies
Christine Andreas
Festival Centre Stage
June 13.

Camille
La Fille du Cirque
Space
June 13.

Waterloo Sunset
Barb Jungr
Banquet Room
June 14.

Keating !
Casey Bennetto and the Drowsy Drivers
Space
June 15

Tina C in Manifesto
Christopher Green
Banquet Room
June 14. Tickets : $25- $30
Bookings BASS 131 246
Until June 24.

Murray Bramwell

It’s wintertime and the living is easy. The Adelaide Cabaret Festival heads into its final week and, despite some frosty June nights, is full of beans. Houses are packed and there is plenty on offer. Once again, the festival has attracted the lucrative grey dollar as early boomers and perky retirees revisit the lounge grooves of the late fifties and sixties, alongside some new and subversive inroads on the genre. This cabaret event is more a twilight than a late night affair, with shows starting early and most over by ten thirty, but this only seems to ensure that, in its sixth year, the festival has found its formula just as it has found its audience.

Among the pleasures in recent days, is Here’s to the Ladies, a bouquet of Broadway favourites presented by US soprano Christine Andreas. Accompanied suavely on piano by her husband, the composer Martin Silvestri, Andreas, in excellent voice, opens with a flawless reading of Fly Me to the Moon – and it is all up from there. Songs from the great – Merman, Gertrude Lawrence, Streisand, Helen Morgan – are included. But it is the bell-like voice of Julie Andrews, which Christine Andreas’s much resembles, that is most prominent. When she gets to My Fair Lady, the appreciative audience could have listened, if not danced, all night.

There is always a creative tension in the Cabaret Festival between the virtuoso Broadway stylists and grungy neo-Weimar acts like Camille. Part-French, part Irish, she is a gamey mix of bar-room Brel and the Pogues. In harridan scarlet and black, Camille, with a five piece band and a bottle of Yalumba, opens with Nick Cave’s sardonic God is in the House. Jacques Brel’s Amsterdam and Song for Old Lovers get some tough love, but Cave’s The Mercy Seat is the electrifying highlight as Camille moves from song to song like an open razor.

Barb Jungr is another excellent chanteuse whose second show, Waterloo Sunset, follows the first weekend’s Bob Dylan tribute set. With songs by Leon Russell, Elvis Costello, the Everly Brothers and, of course, the inestimable Ray Davies, it is still the Barb Dylan songs which stand out – most notably the slow ballad deconstruction of Like a Rolling Stone. Matthew Carey, at the piano, tags her inventive vocals with apparent ease as Jungr, with wit and intelligence, maps out some very original territory of her own.

Also a lady of the cabaret is Tina C (that’s for Tennessee, yo’all) the very altered ego of UK scriptwriter and character performer, Christopher Green, who has waxed and blushed to prepare Tina for her “anti-anti American tour”. This is a three flag circus of patriotic country music as Tina, in her camouflage mini skirt and Stetson, sings from her latest album, Scars and Stripes. I can smell the love in the room Adell-aide, she purrs, as she sets us straight – and very right – on Irack and much else. It is a one joke show with some familiar targets, but with her long legs and red, white and,often, blue satire, Tina carries it confrontingly in her stride.

Another colossus under scrutiny is “the Man, the ruler of the land”, the Placido Domingo of nineties politics – Keating ! In one fast hour, writer and director, Casey Bennetto and his band, the Drowsy Drivers, re-tell the rise and demise of Paul Keating (a needle-sharp Mike McLeish) as he meets his rivals – Hawke, Newson, Howard – and the ticking clocks of his impatient ambition. The music, spanning reggae, rap, soul and torch ballad, is far from drowsy and the lyrics – sharp, funny and for many, dreaming of a different light on the hill, unexpectedly poignant. Keating! as the publicity spiel reminds us, is a beautiful (and very inventive) set of numbers.

The Australian, June 19, 2006.