London Cabaret Reviews - West End and Off-West End

Circus shows are ten a penny these days You can barely walk the streets of London without running into another set of acrobats, jugglers and scary clowns vying with each other to get your attention and hard earned cash. Down on the South Bank, the Underbelly festival has had a few circus shows during this year’s run and now another has rolled into the Spiegeltent. So the big question is, what does Black Cat: Bohemia have to give it that additional wow factor and make it stand above everyone else?

Well, the first thing it has is a truly magnificent compere in the shape of Miss Frisky (Laura Corcoran). Frisky by name and frisky by nature, Miss F is the perfect hostess. She could be described as a female drag queen, the costume and mannerisms are so reminiscent of the best drag performers you will see. Frisky ‘bantz’ with the audience, somehow being drawn to other theatrical types and wealthy men, all of whom can’t help but respond to her winning personality and charm. Not only that but Laura has an extremely good singing voice, which really comes into its own in powerful performances of Kate Bush’s “Wow” and Springsteen’s “Because the Night” all sung to the backing of the live band under the direction of James Keay.

On the acrobatic side of things, there was a bit of a problem as performer Leon Fagbemi was injured on his tumbling introduction. This might have been a problem but in the true spirit of ‘the show must go on’, there was some fast rearranging of the running order by Director Sean Kempton and the team while Miss Frisky’s ‘Knaves’ (Nicolas Jelmoni and LJ Marles) – a sort of acrobatic Chuckle Brothers – kept the programme going with their rather fine hula hoop work. I have to admit that had I not seen Leon’s accident happen, I wouldn’t necessarily have known anything was up, so seamlessly did everything progress.

As you would expect, the performers were amazing in their respective fields. The stunningly beautiful Jo Moss really knows his way around a hoop and his Vitruvian Man segment really had the wow factor as did the fire performing skills of Missy Fatale (Hayley Harvey-Gomez) which had grace, beauty and a real touch of fear to keep the audience engrossed.

Overall, Black Cat: Bohemia was definitely one of the best circus shows I’ve seen for a long time. Despite the posters, there was no sign of any clowns – which was a real plus for me and my mild case of Coulrophobia – just a really great cabaret mixed with wonderful acrobatics. Obviously, given the circumstances, I didn’t get to see the full show but what I did see was fun and entertaining, and well worth a trip to the South Bank.

Review by Terry Eastham

The Black Cat Cabaret has been captivating the city’s audiences with their dark and daring brand of cabaret entertainment for more than a decade. Black Cat: Bohemia is the company’s most ambitious show to date, and premières with the company’s first headline run at Underbelly Festival Southbank. Combining high skills acrobatic feats and spectacular ensemble work with comic turns and live music, the show’s 12-strong cast elevate cabaret and circus to new levels of jaw-dropping glamour. This is a thrilling theatrical experience not to be missed this ummer!

The show conjures up a smart, sexy and psychedelic vision of a circus troupe dedicated to the eternal Bohemian mission: to leave the world a more beautiful place through their art.

Echoing bohemias past from Montmartre to Weimar Berlin, from the Hotel Chelsea to the 80s Blitz Kids, their enclave of love and artistic obsession burns like a brightly colourful flame in the darkness. Yet all is not well in paradise. As the night unfolds, the company, led by their visionary emcee, begins to unravel. In the timeless spirit of cabaret, the show takes us on a journey from the sublime to the ridiculous and back. But one thing is clear – this party must go on!

Taking up a 6-week residency at Underbelly Festival Southbank’s glorious Paradiso Spiegeltent, Black Cat: Bohemia is the perfect place to celebrate the 250th Anniversary of the world’s first circus – where Philip Astley first created a rope ring just streets away in the marshland around Waterloo station. As the producer of the festival’s final headline show, The Black Cat Cabaret is flying the flag for London’s underground cabaret and circus scene amongst an array of international talent on offer throughout the program.

Black Cat: Bohemia
22 Aug – 30 Sep 2018
7.15pm (Tue to Sat) & 9.15pm (Sats only)
Presented by Underbelly and The Black Cat Cabaret
Underbelly Festival Southbank
Jubilee Gardens
London SE1 8XX

If you’ve followed Barry Humphries’ career this past half-century – and be honest, possums, most of you have – you won’t be entirely surprised by his idea of compiling and hosting an evening of music and song from the Weimar years.

If you weren’t aware of quite how strong this preoccupation has been in the course of his life’s eight and a half decades, this is probably because he was busy upstaging himself with his own menagerie of grotesques, Dame Edna Everage and Sir Les Patterson being the most prominent.

Look a little closer and his fixation with the produce of Berlin’s interwar culture is quite consistent with him – outwardly decadent but inwardly disciplined, socially transgressive but emotionally scrupulous, sometimes complex in form but plain in meaning. There is another, perhaps crucial point of identification; much of the music is doused with a defiant hedonism in the face of depressive forces, just as Humphries’ own much earlier years fell, by his own admission, into an alcoholocaust which might well have exterminated him. This stuff is serious.

The evening, naturally, is frequently a hell of a laugh, what else did you expect? But it also springs from the strange, poignant and particular tale of a boy growing up in suburban Melbourne, the very seedbed of Dame Edna,
during and after the (second) war. Here the young Humphries, trawling through the city’s second-hand bookshops, discovered a pile of sheet music published in Vienna in the 1920s. Most of the composers’ names were obscure, but their publishers was not. This was the esteemed Universal Edition in Vienna.

There was a single stamped name, presumably that of the music’s rescuer, one Richard Beyer, on the sheets. As Humphries explains to his packed Barbican audience, he started wondering why someone would bother to put all this stuff into a suitcase and schlep it across the world to Australia. Years later, when he was in Los Angeles visiting a recreation of Hitler’s exhibition of so-called degenerate art, he put this to his companion, David Hockney, whose simple reply was that “somebody loved them.”

Humphries goes on to recall how, in Vienna in the early 1960s, he searched in vain for recordings of work by the composers he had discovered. Even the best of the record shops had never heard of them. “Hitler, it seemed, had done a very good job in suppressing a whole generation of music makers whose exciting work is still in the category of unfamiliar repertoire.”

This context gives the evening a strong sense of redemption as the superb Aurora Orchestra plays the work of such “Weimar” composers as Misha Spoliansky, Wilhelm Grosz and Ernst Toch; also Hans Eisler, Paul Hindemith, Kurt Weill and Max Brand, the last of whom later became, with Robert Moog, an early pioneer of electronic music.

As the music plays, Humphries, in his role as Conferencier, sits back in his stage-side armchair, listening on an elaborately retro phonograph to this elegantly mongrel music, jagged and mellifluous all at once. Then he is on his feet, duetting more than passably with the evening’s star singer, the cabaret artiste Meow Meow. He even dances with her, moving across the stage like a slow vertical fish in his red velvet jacket, and not seeming to care too much what people think of him. He was always good at that.

This is an evening full of musical exiles retracted, of cultural transports reversed. Humphries, of course, was part of that migration of Australians fifty-odd years ago which was to include the author and academic Germaine Greer, the poet and broadcaster Clive James and the late historian Robert Hughes, whose controversial 1986 book The Fatal Shore told the story of penal journeys in the opposite direction.

Humphries was the oldest of the four, the first to England. He was also the one most adept at concealing the intellectual beneath the comic. In fact, the two were working together all along, and this evening is further celebration of that fact, as well as of Weimar’s many-bodied music.

Review by Alan Franks

Barry Humphries is our masterfully seasoned emcee and cabaret diva Meow Meow our chanteuse in this risqué, sophisticated and seductive tribute to the jazz-infused music of the Weimar Republic.

Some describe it as cabaret’s golden age: the remarkable period in 1920s and 30s’ Berlin when hedonistic partying and social revolution turned nightclubs into hotbeds of decadent entertainment. Reawakening that spirit, our hosts acquaint us with the oft-forgotten composers of the time, many Jewish, whose art would be condemned as ‘degenerate’ by the Nazis, dancing as it did on the edge of a precipice.

Best known as Dame Edna Everage, Humphries shares his personal passion for a period that has long fascinated him, his witty anecdotes and irreverent asides providing interludes to a treasure trove of songs and instrumentals. Meow Meow gives us Kurt Weill standards alongside rarities from Friedrich Hollaender, Ernst Krenek and Erwin Schulhoff, both world-renowned Australian artists are accompanied by London’s trailblazing Aurora Orchestra.

Barry Humphries’ Weimar Cabaret
Booking to Sunday 29th July 2018
Barbican Theatre
Barbican Centre
Silk Street
London EC2Y 8DS

Of all the iconic divas that have graced the stage and recording studios, Barbra Streisand is probably one of, if not the most famous. With a career spanning over five decades, she has recorded nearly 40 albums, appeared in 18 films, won 8 Grammys and 3 Academy Awards. I could go on listing Streisand’s achievements but there are only so many hours in the day. This is one special lady and it takes a very talented performer to do justice to Streisand’s wide-ranging back catalogue and make them their own.

Luckily such a performer exists in the shape of Liza Pulman and I was lucky enough to get a taster of her show Liza Pulman Sings Streisand this week. The show isn’t a biographical documentary about Streisand’s life, nor is it Pulman doing an impression of the singer. It is a wonderful cabaret performance of some of Streisand’s songs. Some are instantly recognisable – ‘Don’t Rain on My Parade’, ‘Memories’, ‘Evergreen’ etc – whilst others may be less well known. For example ‘Miss Marmelstein’, which was Streisand’s solo number in her first musical ‘I Can Get It For You Wholesale’, and the wonderfully titled ‘Sam, You Made The Pants Too Long’. To be honest, familiarity with the songs is really unimportant – except for me not being able to sing along – because it is the skill and dexterity of the performance that matters.

Pulman obviously loves and admires Streisand and not only performs some fantastic musical numbers but, accompanied by her wonderful band, the Stardust Ensemble, under the control of MD, arranger, pianist and accordion player Joseph Atkins – produces a truly fine night of cabaret.

Pulman has a lovely personality and connects with her audience the moment she steps onto the stage. Although the show isn’t a full-blown biography, she does give background information on some of the songs and aspects of Streisand’s life so I ended up learning some interesting facts about the icon as well as hearing the wonderful music. I particularly liked the fact that Liza and Joseph weren’t just going for reproducing the Barbra Streisand sound – let’s be honest who could? Instead, they put their own spin on the songs so that it felt like Liza Pulman and Barbra Streisand were sharing them with each other. The highlight for me? Well, there were so many to choose from but I have to say ‘Don’t Rain on My Parade’ and the jaw-droppingly awesome performance of ‘Happy Days Are Here Again’ which is not only one of my all time favourite songs but also brought the entire audience to their feet at the end.

I saw a slightly abridged showcase with twenty-one songs and enjoyed every minute. Liza Pulman and the Stardust Ensemble are performing the full Liza Pulman Sings Streisand show all over the country this year and my advice is, get your tickets booked, I promise you won’t be disappointed.

Review by Terry Eastham

Liza Pulman, the acclaimed singer and comedienne and one-third of the satirical comedy trio Fascinating Aida, returns to Crazy Coqs with her sell-out show Liza Pulman Sings Streisand.

With musical director Joseph Atkins, Pulman celebrates the songs of the great Barbra Streisand, bringing not just her exceptional voice, but her storytelling and her own personal slant on Streisand’s life and music to the stage.

Pulman squeezes history, humour and her amazing six-piece band onto a stage the size of an iphone!

LIZA PULMAN SINGS STREISAND
plays at Crazy Coqs
26 – 27 March & 23 – 24 April 2018
https://www.brasseriezedel.com/live-at-zedel/programme

Royal Hippodrome Theatre, East Sussex
Sunday, 15 Apr 2018 at 7:00 PM

A happier, more enthusiastic Britney audience would be extremely hard to find as we stream into Andrew Lloyd Webber’s gorgeous The Other Palace Theatre in anticipation of our evening at Britney Spears: The Cabaret.

A solitary grand piano is set on stage underneath a tumbling waterfall chandelier; we settle into the intimately-packed cabaret seats, the majority of us clutching the night’s special offering, the Britney Fizz – pink prosecco. Britney’s back catalogue plays over the speakers, and we’re all grooving in our seats before the show has even begun. Our accompanist Mathew Frank, dapper in black tie, arranges himself at the piano and the first few chords of an imaginatively reworked ‘Circus’ ring out – the stunning Christie Whelan Browne seductively descends the auditorium stairs, and the show is under way.

From the second she takes the stage, Whelan Browne is just divine – she is a hilarious, witty and effervescent caricature, with an accurate Louisiana accent, and she has all the Britney mannerisms down to a T. Giggling her way through her opening dialogue about being good old Britney from the South, we’re quick to realise that we shouldn’t be fooled – this is very much a Britney Spears for the audience who have grown up with her through the years.

Britney’s wild stories and hilariously accurate vocal nuances all fit seamlessly into the story arc of the cabaret. We are taken on a ride from the nostalgic highs of ‘Baby One More Time,’ (reworked to make us really listen to the lyrics), ‘Womanizer’ (turned into an angry man rant), ‘Piece Of Me,’ (turned into an anecdotal monologue) ‘Toxic’ (sitting in the story so that it’s aimed at Justin Timberlake) and ‘Slave 4 U’ (performed with tap-dance shoes and a cane…!). We are then drawn right into the more emotional moments, such as when ‘Britney’ talks about her children, her conservatorship, her relationship breakdowns… and the fact that this woman has essentially been a music industry ‘product’ from her teenage years to the present day.

Dean Bryant wrote and directed the show and must be given real credit for his sharp imagination and insightful direction; the collaboration between him, Whelan Browne and Mathew Frank is sublime. Through the magically reworked music to the brilliant anecdotes (which are all entirely true to life), they take us on an uproarious, observant and at times really touching journey through Britney Spears’ extensive catalogue of extremely iconic and cleverly constructed pop songs. Whatever your opinion of Britney Spears is, as a cultural icon or a person, as a pop star she really can do no wrong when it comes to being a true mainstay of our generational music landscape, and the show totally makes her story come to life. Britney Spears: The Cabaret is an absolute must-see.

Review by Louise Czupich

Britney Spears: The Cabaret arrives at The Other Palace this September after sell-out seasons in Australia.

Not so much a cabaret as a cry for help, star of Australian stage and screen, Christie Whelan Browne, reprises her critically acclaimed performance in this hilariously funny and strangely touching satirical look at the perils of fame.

Christie has wowed audiences in Company, Born Yesterday, The Producers, Xanadu as well as playing opposite Geoffrey Rush in A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum, The Importance Of Being Earnest and The Drowsy Chaperone.

‘Whelan Browne delivers with laser precision, switching in a nano-second from dumb broad to sweet innocent without you seeing it coming. Brilliant!’ The Australian

Written by award-winning Australian writer/director Dean Bryant with musical direction by Mathew Frank.

The Other Palace
12 Palace Street, London, SW1E 5JA
Booking to 9th September 2017

After sell-out seasons in Australia, Britney Spears: The Cabaret arrives in London for one week only this Summer, playing in the Theatre at The Other Palace from Tuesday 5 to Saturday 9 September 2017.

Not so much a cabaret as a cry for help, Britney Spears: The Cabaret charts the rise and fall of the true Princess of Pop, and takes a satirical look at the perils of fame. Transforming her greatest hits into cabaret standards, and weaving them into the fabric of her life story, Britney Spears: The Cabaret is at turns site-splittingly funny and strangely touching.

Star of Australian stage and screen Christie Whelan Browne reprises her critically acclaimed performance as Britney. Her stage work in Australia includes Company, The Producers, Xanadu, The Drowsy Chaperone (Helpmann Award Nomination) and playing opposite Geoffrey Rush in A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum. Later this year Christie will star in the world premiere stage adaptation of Muriel’s Wedding: The Musical for Sydney Theatre Company.

Britney Spears: The Cabaret is written and directed by Dean Bryant, whose directing work in Australia includes Sweet Charity (Hayes Theatre Company, Helpmann Award for Best Director of a Musical), and Skylight and Next to Normal (Melbourne Theatre Company). Writing credits include Prodigal (Off Broadway) and Liza (on an E) (Vaudeville Theatre, West End). Musical direction and arrangements are by Mathew Frank.

Recommended for ages 15+

LISTINGS
TUESDAY 5 – SATURDAY 9 SEPTEMBER 2017
THE OTHER PALACE
12 Palace Street, London, SW1E 5JA
Press Night: Wednesday 6 September, 8.00pm