….and not just at the Lyric, Shaftesbury Avenue, though that song from that show has also given the genre its biggest cliché, one that both defines it and yet is also something that it struggles to escape from. For the essence of cabaret is both that it is about life and that it is alive; but is there life in cabaret?
As I’ve worried away at here before, there isn’t much of a life to it in London and New York nowadays, though various “new cabaret” outlets are emerging that reconnects cabaret with burlesque, vaudeville and variety, in which cabaret has become an umbrella for intimate, live performance that simply isn’t categorisable elsewhere. (Time Out London intriguingly dub their section “Social Club”, though the New York edition long ago ditched their dedicated “cabaret” listing section and incorporate the listings into the music section instead). But halfway across the world, in Adelaide, Australia, there’s an annual attempt to bring the world of cabaret to both a teaming and diverse life that suggests there is an ongoing future to cabaret. And it has taken a festival of vision and dedication to prove that if you build it, they will come.
At last night’s opening of this year’s festival, it was revealed that the box office take for last year exceeded that of the Melbourne International Arts Festival; proof, indeed, that a niche festival can make a bigger economic mark than one with more global ambitions. 84 shows sold out last year. This year’s programme has some 450 artists giving 178 performances of 68 shows in the next fortnight. And forging the kind of artistic connections that a festival can specialise in, last night’s opener brought one local cultural institution, the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, into the cabaret fold with a programme of big band swing that celebrated Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra to get things off to a popular, old-fashioned start, many of them in their original Nelson Riddle arrangements. With most cabaret, you are lucky to get a piano and double bass accompaniment; here, the songs were spectacularly served with six double basses amongst a full orchestra heavy on strings and brass under the baton of British conductor John Wilson.
But while at least not distracting from the spectacle of that orchestra, the songs were less illuminatingly served by British singer Gary Williams, who merely offered an object lesson in the bland leading the band. It’s the kind of smooth but superficial and soulless delivery that gives cabaret a bad name.
For more intensity and integrity, I went next door to the Banquet Room to hear German singer Eva Meier perform a programme of European chanson. Here’s an artist who properly connects with her repertoire. And that’s at the heart and art of cabaret.
