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| Dusty Limits. Photograph by Clive Holland |
Dusty Limits. Grin.
Written by
Dusty Limits. Musical Director and Composer. Michael Roulston. The Artspace.
Adelaide Festival Centre, Adelaide Cabaret Festival. June 16 and 17. 2017
Reviewed by Peter Wilkins
At a festival where many artists
are interpreting and singing the songs of others in the delivery of excellent
covers, it is refreshing and uniquely satisfying to see an artist, who performs
original material with wit, elan and a voice that that can range across three
octaves and carry an audience along with his song and his message.
Dusty Limits saunters casually
onto the tiny stage of the Artspace after a rousing introduction by his musical
director, composer and long-time friend Michael Roulston at the piano. I had seen him swaggering with a bottle in
hand during a Cole Porter number at The Backstage Club the night before. Grin
recalls the traditional art of cabaret, satirical and scathing in Dusty Limits’
satire soaked songs of wine, death and monkeys.
And children devoured by Satan in Goya’s demonic painting. At times dark
and foreboding in Nobody’s Fool; cynical
in Is It Too Late - To Abort Me or
devilishly satirical in Poor. Grin is a wry and pensive commentary on
life, its absurdity, its deceptive contradiction and bitter irony. Accompanied by the virtuoso playing of Michael
Roulston , Dusty Limits ‘ Grin smirks
at the Russian Oligarchs of NW3, smiles at the drunk and lonely, leers at life
and grimaces at the Edinburgh Fringe, “that graveyard of hope”. His is the art
of Swiftian satire (“not Tayler”), a giant of the cabaret , striding among the
Lilliputians of Life. The wry resignation of Porter, the political snipe of
Weil, the despondent air of desperation in Waits or the snappy mockery of
Coward all find voice in this beguiling one handed juggler of the cabaret.
Grin is cabaret with fangs, snapping at life like the vicious
terrier beneath the chair in Reunion, serving
up wit with bite, “the ball is in your Margaret Court.”,sighing with longing
while cruising Unter den Linden and slowly letting the grin recede with the
hope of making us smile.
The hour is over far too soon and
the Svengali of Cabaret leaves me not bewildered but beguiled by his art.
Dorian Black, the boy from Brisvegas, is Dusty Limits, the King of Cabaret. The Australian premiere is gone
and one can only hope for his return.
