Gyan and Leunig:
Billy the Rabbit
Dunstan Playhouse
June 10.

Point Blank
Dave Graney
JB Room
June 13

Sorry Seems to be the Hardest Word
Tina C and Auriel Andrew
Banquet Room
June 14

Shane Warne: The Musical
by Eddie Perfect
Dunstan Playhouse
June 17.

Adelaide Cabaret Festival 2007
Adelaide Festival Centre

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

It is wintertime and the living is again easy at the re-activated Festival Centre. Despite the nippy nights, devotees of the cabaret form – and its various mutations and look-alikes – are filling, not only the Playhouse and Space, but all the Centre’s nooks, crannies, foyers, stages and JB rooms that have been turned over to performance. Again, director Julia Holt has assembled a diverse program – to meet the tastes of the older audiences who so conspicuously and enthusiastically attend, as well to signal the new directions and old iconoclasm that the term cabaret also encompasses.

There have been murmurings in the recent past that the festival has become too much of a broad church and that this comedy, or that contemporary music performance, is beyond the Weimar or New York pale. But the tendency to err on the inclusive has proven not only human but on occasions, divine. Take the Sunday afternoon performance by Issa (formerly known as Jane Siberry) for example.

Or, on the first weekend of the festival, another first-name-only singer – Gyan, whose show Billy the Rabbit, based on the poems, prayers and ditties of Michael Leunig proved to be an unexpected delight. Unexpected, in that Leunig, for all his recent political ferocity, has a whimsicality which can be mistaken for fey. The wrong collaborator could well have tilted that delicate balance. Instead the robust, melodic versatility of Gyan, and a very capable band of musicians, makes for a lively mix.

While Gyan and her associates – including well-known violinist Cleis Pearce, Simon Greaves on guitar and James Cruickshank (on just about everything) -perform, the artist draws his inimitable, tendril figures of hope and melancholy on a sketchpad projected on to a large screen. The effect is almost inexplicably magical as Leunig, a skilled public presenter, paces his drawings in easy harmony with Gyan’s nicely chosen texts – of The Shadow Minister for Joy, Summer Palace, Precious Vote, Owed to Autumn and, of course, bedecked in actual leaves and flowers, Billy, the late lamented rabbit.

Also outside the square, but in a very different way, is Dave Graney. Formerly a Moodist, a Coral Snake and briefly a King of Pop, Graney, with collaborator and sweetheart, Clare Moore and nifty pianist Mark Fitzgibbon presents, in the tiny confines of the JB Room, Point Blank, an intimate performance without the aid of smoke, mirrors or electric wires, which is a foppish mile from the Lee Marvin inspired title. It is however, very identifiably the Dave Graney Show, complete with Lt Colonel Cavalry and Aristocratic Jive. Armed only with a plastic cutlass and occasionally a plastic figurine, Graney in his jauntily angled brimmed hat and signature jumpsuit, is at once pirate king, hipster and parochial kid from the border, weaving the elements of irony and cool that have forged his eccentric and heroic career. Some of it doesn’t work – My Schtick Weighs a Ton – while others – I Held the Cool Breeze and The Devil Drives – are one of a kind.

Last time Tina C (the blonde and ditzy country gal from Open Throat Holler, Tennessee) visited us, she was on an “anti-anti-American” crusade. She was running for President and we all had a good laugh at Yankee folly. This time, the talented UK performer, Christopher Green, has turned his ten-gallon bimbo back on us. Tina wants to know about race relations in Australia – the history and truth of first contact, the Stolen Generation, and the blood on our map. Dressed in dot-painted hot pants she announces solemnly that she acknowledges that she is on Joel Garner land. Then the diminutive Arunda woman, Auriel Andrew, stands up to put a few things straight and joins the show to sing Brownskin Baby.

Tina hits some raw nerves and asks some awkward questions with both a gentle humour and a persistence which is invigorating and timely. When she sings the Tracy Chapman song, Baby Can I Hold You – “Sorry is all that you can’t say “ -satire transmutes into a different kind of restorative comedy. Tina C may not have much in that wiggy little brain of hers, but she has heard of the word sorry.

Eddie Perfect has visited us twice before, once with Max Gillies, and then his own show, Drink Pepsi, Bitch. This time the Cabaret Festival has given a first ever tryout to Perfect’s latest project – Shane Warne: The Musical (The Workshop) – and it is an over-the-fence hit. The songs are fast and funny, but this well-wrought musical doesn’t set out to make of fool of Warnie, rather it is about Australian sport, the media, and the phenomenon of fame itself. It celebrates Warne’s extraordinary on-field spin and then the spin he put himself him with cricket authorities and his long suffering wife Simone (plaintively sung by Rosemarie Harris). Eddie Perfect sings the part of Shane with clever wit (“What an SM-mess I’m In”) and surprisingly memorable torch ballads (“Dancing with the Stars”) The band, led by Will Poskitt is great, the singers exceptional. If this version is only a round in the nets, it will be a winner when its fully match fit.

“Curly deliveries sure to trap” The Australian, June 19, 2007, p.12.