Cabaret is often about exposing yourself – sometimes literally so, as in the case of British performance artist Ursula Martinez who, as part of a phenomenal evening called Variete during the opening weekend of this year’s Adelaide Cabaret Festival, makes a red handkerchief disappear and reappear out of various parts of her body until she’s completely naked and there’s only one more place for it to produced from, and she duly extracts it out of. The show was an indoor version of Australian impresario and musician David Bates’ travelling Spiegeltent cabaret shows that we’ve seen in Edinburgh under the name Le Clique, and is like nothing you’ve ever seen before.
Variete truly is the spice of life here. This is a cabaret, too, where a man inserts an entire fork up each nostril. Or another man does a handstand on another’s head. Another still does amazing things with a spinning diabalo. This is as far away from your songbook cabaret shows as it is possible to go, yet it is also, utterly, uniquely and indisputably, cabaret as well: a shared experience between performers and audience that’s about breaking down barriers between them and also celebrating their humanity (or maybe superhumanity).
At other times, of course, cabaret is about other intimate revelations. Philip Quast, an Australian actor who has long been resident in Britain, returned to the very stage where he began his professional acting career in the Adelaide Festival Centre’s Dunstan Playhouse, and he told us how he had appeared as Adam, in the nude, in a production of The Wakefield Mystery Plays. One woman in the audience, he remembered, screamed. (Whether in horror, admiration or fear he did not explain). A few days later he got his first fan letter: a woman wrote in to say how impressed she was by his performance, but felt it necessary to point out that Adam would not have been circumcised.
Quast was appearing as part of an exhilarating evening in the company of Jeremy Sams, director of The Sound of Music in the West End but whose career has also stretched from musical direction and translating plays and musicals to composing incidental music for plays and writing the book for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. I should declare an interest here: as Julia Holt, director of the Cabaret Festival, put it in a programme note, “I was lucky enough to be introduced to Jeremy Sams by British theatre critic Mark Shenton a couple of years ago.”
But the joy of a festival is that, having made the introduction, he was able to validate his presence here with a rich, broad introduction of his rich, broad career to the Australian theatre public in his first visit Down Under. And beyond this showcase evening, Jeremy has also shown still more facets to Adelaide in a public Q&A interview chaired by Julia yesterday, and also in a masterful Masterclass on writing for music theatre. I was particularly moved, during the Q&A, by Jeremy’s declaration of the appeal of theatre, and how we’re all pulled towards “this weird cult” for a reason – adding, cryptically and no doubt for my benefit, “even journalists” — and identified how it could be to do with the fact that many of us come from imperfect families, so we make a version of family life in a place where we can have more control over it and experience fewer surprises.
But the cabaret festival itself springs lots of surprises, and for Jeremy’s masterclass yesterday, he was joined by three up-and-coming writers of musicals, Eddie Perfect (whose new show Shane Warne – the Musical is being showcased at the Festival next weekend) and Matthew Robinson and Casey Bennetto (whose shows — Metrostreet and Keating, respectively — were seen at last year’s festival). Masterclasses are usually forums for teaching students; but here the joy and surprise was the sharing of one professional with others who are already establishing themselves as such. Jeremy has thought long and hard about the structure of musical theatre: about how the very fact that one chooses to write a musical at all dictates that certain structural decisions must inevitably follow. My eyes and ears were opened to new thoughts that will make me see musical theatre in a different way.
And another masterclass today in performance for musical theatre, this time held by Philip Quast, was a vibrant and charismatic lesson in taking a song, moment by moment, line by line, note by note, to discover what it is about and both the acting and emotional choices that have to be made along the way.
The cabaret festival also requires choices to be made: there’s simply too much to see, so you can’t see everything. But the joy of cabaret – already a sharing, caring sort of art – is that the show doesn’t end when the spotlight fades (there are no curtains). The conversations continue in the bar afterwards, and all around the festival centre. Also, all the visiting artists (and myself and New York cabaret writer James Gavin) are housed in the same hotel, five minutes from the Festival Centre. Unfortunately the foyer café is shut for refurbishment this year, so the daily impromptu morning breakfast rendezvous isn’t taking place. But today I made my own, meeting Jeremy in the foyer and going for breakfast instead at the hotel next door. We sat down at 10am and didn’t leave till they threw us out at 12noon to close for the day!
