Written and
performed by Amelia Ryan.
Accompanied
on piano by John Martin.
Teatro
Vivaldi, Canberra, 14th May 2016.
Reviewed by
Bill Stephens.
Basing a
show around your own life story is a well-worn ploy for stand-up comedians.
It’s a somewhat more risky path for a cabaret artist however. Some are able to
source songs which express their feelings and approximate their experiences. Many
singer/songwriters discover how to successfully write affecting songs to describe
their emotions and perform them on stage. Amelia Ryan substitutes her own
lyrics for those of well-known songs for her autobiographical cabaret which she
has been presenting around Australia, in Edinburgh and New York since 2011.
Arriving on
stage, wrapped in a large towel, Ryan co-opts two audience members to hold each
end of the towel to provide a screen to mask her change into jeans and tee-shirt.
Referring to herself as the bimbo from Bombo (the town in which she grew up), she
performed a succession of songs for which she substituted her own lyrics to
tell the story of her life, or as she referred to it, “the mess that was my
20’s”.
It’s certainly
been an eventful life, growing up in a family that included a gay father, his
transgender partner and a mother whose noisy love-making she listened to
through the walls of their adjoining bedrooms
.
Mark
Knofler’s “Private Dancer” became the story of her experiences working as a
stripper, (or “crappy lappy”), to pay for her studies at the VCA. Rodgers and
Hammerstein’s “My Favourite Things” became “My Piece of Shit Car” to tell how
she crashed her brown Mazda 626. An
attack of Urinary Tract Infection while touring with Theatre in Education provided
the inspiration for “I Left My Mike On To Pee”.
Had her
lyrics been cleverly crafted, these songs might have been amusing. But for the
most part they were uninspired and clumsily shoe-horned into the tunes. Shrill
patter, delivered in a charmless stand-up style, and irrelevant, time-wasting
business coercing embarrassed audience “volunteers” on to the stage to become
unwilling props for a parodied version of Kander and Ebb’s “Cell Block Tango” proved
so distracting that many of the lyrics became unintelligible, making it difficult to care
about her predicaments.
Only a
couple of ballads occurring late in the program, hinted at why this show had
been successful in winning awards at the
2012 Sydney Fringe, the 2012 Australian Cabaret showcase, and the 2014 Fringe.
This review also appears in Australian Arts Review: www.artsreview.com.au
