Presented by the Adelaide Cabaret Festival
Reviewed Sat 26th June 2010
http://www.adelaidecabaretfestival.com
Venue: Artspace Gallery, Adelaide Festival Centre
Season: finished
Duration: 60mins
British cabaret performer, Sarah-Louise Young, brings three distinctly different characters to visit our Cabaret Festival, in an hilarious hour of monologues and music. She writes her own material, the songs in conjunction with pianist Michael Roulston, although the music for this show was recorded.
Sammy Mavis Jnr., a country and western, trailer trash, porn star, a redhead with ‘big hair’ wanders around the venue welcoming audience members and chatting to them as they settle. She begins by singing about her relationship with her British boyfriend in The Home Counties Way. Her observations on the cultural differences she has discovered in Australia generate plenty of laughs and progresses into a run down of her life, providing an introduction to a funny and very risqué song about her early life in the trailer park, her father’s warning to stay away from the boys, advice she did not take, and the games she and her girlfriends played with those boys. A list of the men in her life, also in song, shows that she is very ‘friendly’.
Loretta, the Leighton Buzzard librarian, is a victim of one of those dreadful talent shows. She is a dowdy and introverted loser who saw a chance to make a big change in herself, and took it. Filled with enthusiasm and hope, her dreams are crushed when she is eliminated. She begins by singing of her life in the sanctuary that is the library, safe and shielded from all harm, but with a desire to break free of the library and begin living. She found a book that gave her inspiration, reading extracts and following the lead of her literary mentor. She decided to enter Cabaret Idol, becoming a finalist and being locked in a house with the others, her first non-imaginary friends, sort of. She sends up the book brilliantly with a droll sense of humour and sings of her desire to win at all cost.
Two down, one to go. She was almost the most famous French chanteuse in history, but Édith Piaf got in first. Édith Giovanna Gassion was nicknamed La Môme Piaf (The Little Sparrow) by Louis Leplée and she adopted it as her stage name, Édith Piaf. Our last performer of the evening did not fare so well. Not only did Piaf gain all of the fame and glory but she also got the better nickname. Our angst-ridden performer was given the nickname, La Poule Plombée. She interprets this as ‘the frumpy pigeon’. No wonder she is bitter and suicidal, waving a carving knife about in the vicinity of her wrist as she enters. She complains in song of all of the French words the English have taken for their own, and the dreadful words the English have given to the world in exchange, a very poor cultural exchange indeed. This brought huge applause and her following monologue, with the occasional aside, kept the audience in fits of laughter.
Young’s characterisations are superb and her material is very well-written, with some equally fine writing in the songs. This is a highly polished show that was certainly a great finish to my time at the Cabaret Festival. Young has a new show that, with luck, we may get to see next year. Keep you fingers crossed for that one.
Reviewed by Barry Lenny, Arts Editor Glam Adelaide.
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