Cabaret Fringe

Cabaret Fringe Festival Review: Girl on the Drink: the lager continues

Girl on the Drink

Taking you from party girl to alcoholic, “Girl of the Drink: the lager continues” will amuse and entertain, but more than anything, it will make you feel.

Girl on the DrinkPresented by Annie Siegmann
Reviewed: 20 June 2014

While I understand that theatre is not always carefree, happy-go-lucky and filled with warm fuzzies, I was not expecting to be beaten about the head with emotions on my Friday night.

Girl on the Drink: the lager continues is Annie Siegmann’s group therapy session. She tells tales of drinking games, odes to Sir David Attenborough, black outs, and the white noise and torment that a drinking problem in your twenties can be.

Girl on the Drink is not another twenty-something singing about the glories of tequila and dancing on tables. It is a sharp, complicated presentation of how easy it is to go from the fun party girl to the girl with the drinking problem.

With a combination of original songs and contemporary scores accompanied by Michael Ross on piano, Girl on the Drink starts off revelling in the fun times which alcohol can bring and punctuate, and then descends into a dark, twisted reality where all that counts is the next drink.

The melancholy becomes overwhelming, and at times you don’t know where to look. It was hard to stare at the petite girl on stage because the pain and truth of what she was saying and singing about was too raw. In some shows, when handling issues such as this, the performer will chose to give the audience a reprieve, maybe an intermission between sets, or a rendition of something a little happier, but not Siegmann. She unashamedly forces the audience to stare at the same bleak circumstances that she herself has been through, and I applaud her strength and courage to bare all so openly.

Siegmann bonded with the audience. She engaged and she charmed them, and this is what made the performance so powerful. While we may not feel sorry for her, we identify. We want to see her overcome her ordeal, and thankfully, we were allowed to see glimpses of her personality and recovery, which made the evening not too depressing.

Humour, comic timing and the use of songs by other artists made it possible to see the performance as something other than just one women’s struggle and as a universal issue which is effecting countless individuals, many of whom choose to ignore the problem, because ‘young people don’t get drinking problems’.

Annie is a very talented singer and a courageous individual who challenges her audience and rewards them with humour and a cathartic release of pent up emotion. Girl of the Drink: the lager continues will amuse and entertain, but more than anything, it will make you feel.

Reviewed by Jenna Woods
Twitter: @JennaSWoods

Venue: La Boheme, 36 Grote Street, Adelaide
Season: 20 – 28 June 2014
Disclaimer: 18+
Duration: 60mins
Tickets: $25.00 – $28.00
Bookings: Book through the Cabaret Fringe Festival online or tickets at the door if not sold out.

 

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