Somewhere over the rainbow
Photo by: Michelle Day
Somewhere over the Rainbow was the joke of the night on Saturday at the Adelaide Cabaret Festival.
A very popular Mark Nadler was doing his thing in the Piano Bar at the Festival Centre, "menacing the keyboards" in Broadway Hootenanny and introducing special guests. He explained that the night before after the "gala performance" one of his guests had sung Somewhere over the Rainbow and then maybe not aware of this 2012 artistic director Kate Ceberano dressed up to look like Princess Leia or maybe a Grecian goddess sang the same classic number from The Wizard of Oz.
So on Saturday night Nadler begged his guests to pick another tune.
"Even Olivia sang it during her show tonight," he said, referring of course to Our Livvie (or Olivia Newton John) and pointing out that being a pop singer she only sang the chorus and not the verses.
Nadler's guests were formidable - for example Simon Burke in town for a show and a bevy of women singers including a lesbian (as he put it) he'd seen in a Fringe Cabaret act called Libby O'Donovan. Sporting a white Mohawk she threw off her mock fur coat to reveal a tightly-fitting plastic nurse's uniform and sang about being on a slut walk for love.
And then came the Magnets, a British boy band, who are a six-man sound machine - making all their music with their mouths alone. After a couple of songs they burst forth with a jammed uptempo version, with the outrageous Nadler on the piano, of you guessed it - that rainbow song.
Meanwhile a very sparkly Olivia performed all the old favourites to an adoring audience- standing and clapping away with her and her American backing band and the Adelaide Art Orchestra. She can still "get physical" and shake her beautiful body better than people half her age. Must be all that tea she drinks on stage - no bourbon and coke for her.
The night before at the gala she'd done the final number - Xanadu - surrounded by drag queens covered in yellow feathers.
After the show it was a bit hard to tell who were the drags and who were Adelaide matrons decked out in their 70s sparkly numbers they obviously keep in the back of the cupboard for such occasions. The fashion was not the high point of the night. At one stage, I wondered if a wedding party had got lost and wandered into the bar. Some people seemed to be dressed in their bridesmaids outfits.
Changing the mood somewhat, for an hour on Saturday afternoon I was mesmerised by the performance of Ansuya Nathan, in her show Long Live the King, telling the story of her Indian parents' arrival in Adelaide on the day of the death of Elvis, her mother's idol. Weaving in and out of their past and 70s present, she told a moving tale that linked Elvis intimately with her mother. Both Ansuya's mother and Elvis's lost one of their twins at birth. And she can sing Elvis songs too. Beautiful.
For David Campbell this is his last cabaret festival as artistic director - he made the most of it by getting up on stage and singing You're the One that I Want with a leather-jacketed Olivia in her show.
Ceberano was asked on opening night what she plans to do for next year and she said she would just make sure she had good acts. Doesn't look like it will be hard.
Adelaide can be rather dreary at times - I know I have lived there and also spent two long weeks there last year - but during cabaret festival time it shines.