Adelaide Cabaret Festival 2013
Martha Wainwright
Dunstan Playhouse
June 20.

What was it Tolstoy said about families? That all happy families are the same but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Not that the Wainwright -McGarrigle family was all that unhappy. Rather, they made unhappiness a favourite subject in their prolific and very memorable songs .

The McGarrigle Sisters – Anna and Kate – wrote plangent songs about hearts like wheels, and dancers with bruised knees. Similarly, …

Adelaide Cabaret Festival 2013

Cabaret Central

Que Reste-T’Il
Robyn Archer
with Michael Morley and George Butrumlis
Adelaide Festival Theatre Stage.
June 15.

Just when we were wondering what cabaret is any more, along comes Robyn Archer to give us a splendid master class. Archer has long been recognised internationally as one of the foremost interpreters of the music of the German Weimar period – most especially the works of Bertolt Brecht and his musical henchmen , Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler …

Adelaide Cabaret Festival 2013

Stockport to Memphis
Barb Jungr
(with Simon Wallace)
Dunstan Playhouse
June 9.

Barb Jungr’s latest Cabaret Festival show, Stockport to Memphis, is also the title of her latest (eighteenth !) record album and features a mix of contemporary classics and her own compositions. It is a Look Back in Jungr, perhaps.

The daughter of European émigré parents, Jungr was born in Rochdale in Lancashire and grew up in Stockport, a town ten miles south of Manchester. …