Beat's Guide To The 2015 Melbourne Cabaret Festival

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Beat’s Guide To The 2015 Melbourne Cabaret Festival

Read tells Beat that the call out for submissions for this year’s festival attracted over 150 applicants. “We can’t include every show,” he notes. “We select a diversity of acts to cover various Melbourne demographics – we have comedy, drag queens doing mash-up musicals, Jewish cabaret, jazz cabaret, and we’ve matched shows to the venues. This year’s venues include the Alex Theatre in St Kilda, Chapel off Chapel as well as The Butterfly Club and Melbourne’s permanent Melba Spiegeltent in Collingwood. The good thing is that the Spiegeltent is owned by Circus Oz, they have control over what they can do with it, and we can have more adventurous shows there, things with aerial acts, for example, that you can’t do in other venues. Smaller scale shows will go on at The Butterfly Club, slightly larger shows at Chapel off Chapel, which has been ‘reimaged’ as a traditional, intimate cabaret venue with table seating, and bigger shows like our opening gala will be at the new Alex Theatre with their large 500 seat theatre.”

Read describes the shows in this year’s cabaret festival as ‘all wonderful’. Has he noticed any themes or trends amongst the shows? “They draw on a wide range of inspiration and are reflective of what artists are working on, what they’re interested in. We have an up late at the Alex night where different performers will do different things each show and that’s where audiences, who might have already seen one full show, can kick back and relax and see something unexpected. Our opening gala this year at the Alex theatre is hosted by Rob Mills. His own show is called Rob Mills is Surprisingly Good because that’s how he’s always described in reviews. He’s been a professional performer for over a decade, his background is in musical comedy and this is the first time he’ll be performing as a cabaret performer. “

Read maintains he’s taken something of a risk with this year’s programming – almost all of the shows are by performers new to the cabaret festival. “Some faces have been in every cabaret festival in previous years, so we like to mix things up. We don’t want to run the risk of appearing to be stale, so we only invited performers who haven’t appeared before. We’ve got 30 brand new shows from all across Australia and we’re working with 100 performers we’ve never dealt with before. People have said it’s ‘brave and risky’ but it’s also really necessary. We want to hear people who’ve seen our shows say ‘well, I didn’t expect that!’ The shows are all so different so audiences will see that cabaret is not all about that LA lounge style of performance.”

What does Read say to people who reckon they ‘hate cabaret’? “My standard answer is that if you’re at all skeptical, come to the opening gala or one of the best of the fest nights, or come to the closing gala at the Circus Oz Spiegeltent in Collingwood. That way you get a taste from six, seven or eight acts in one day. You haven’t wasted a night.”

Read is still as excited by cabaret as he was in the days when he and his partner ran The Butterfly Club in South Melbourne, a venue they bought because they’d enjoyed going there and hadn’t wanted to see it close. “I wouldn’t do it if I wasn’t excited,” he adds. Does he miss The Butterfly Club? “It’s still the festival poster venue. We sold it two and a half years ago so we could concentrate on the cabaret festival. It was too difficult to focus on both; they were both growing, so we had to choose one or the other. After eight years it was time for us to move into a different role in cabaret.” A crowdfunding campaign a couple of years ago helped ensure the Cabaret Festival became firmly established in the Melbourne arts scene. “People can be really proud that they’re part of the success of the Cabaret Festival.”

BY LIZA DEZFOULI

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