It was a hard day’s night at the Q, Queanbeyan on Thursday September 15.
I was attempting to enjoy myself at the cabaret show “Get Back - The Lennon & McCartney Songbook” in which pianist Mark Jones and vocalists Melissa Langton and Libby O'Donovan and went to work on the songs of these celebrated singer-songwriters.
First there was their awkward patter. Delivering words at breakneck speed reminiscent of “I’ve been everywhere,” Donovan listed all the songs they weren’t going to sing, putting a damper on the occasion from very early in the show. Then there were their five favourite quotations from John Lennon, conveyed in a implausible tone of significance.
During a chat with the audience exchange, they reminisced about an performance in Mount Isa where a local yobbo, presumably a Beatles fan, had shouted out in dissatisfaction, “this is bullshit.” Apart from the uneasy feeling it gave me that Queanbeyan could then be their next target, I couldn’t help thinking he had a point.
But it was the musical treatments that eventually forced me out of the show. Jones’ arrangements sometimes bordered on jazz as he extemporised around tunes like “Blackbird.” Elsewhere he mocked country and western through, of all things, a hoedown version of “Ob-la-di, ob-la-da.”
A clever medley of lyrics relating to transport (“Ticket to Ride,” “Baby You Can Drive My Car”) was expertly handled by Donovan and Langton, who are both fine singers, but they never gave the audience a chance to settle into a song. There was, throughout, no inclination to leave a song well alone.
Jones as arranger underscored a medley based on “Eleanor Rigby” with a chorus of “So sad,” taken from another song, destroying all the laconic sterility of the original, where nobody, not even Father McKenzie, felt anything much at all.
I fully confess missing the familiar chords of Lennon and McCartney, and I acknowledge that their songs have been transposed into everything from sitar to Symphony.
In the end there wasn’t anything very much to help me make it through the night.
Helen Musa
