LIFE IN PLASTIC - Christie Whelan Browne - 2025 Sydney Festival

 

Writer & Director Sheridan Harbridge -  Musical Director Glenn Moorhouse

Musician:  Francesca Li Donni -  Lighting Design Trent Suidgeest

Wharf 1 Theatre , 14^th January 2014. Reviewed by BILL STEPHENS

 

It's not every night you attend a cabaret which ends with the leading lady dressed as a blue dinosaur kicking huge inflated penises into the blissed out audience, but that's what happens during the finale of Christie Whelan Browne's excoriatingly brilliant cabaret, "Life in Plastic", which was given a single sold-out performance in chandeliered glamour of the Sydney Theatre Company’s Wharf 1 Theatre as part of the 2025 Sydney Festival. 

The reason for the dinosaur costume is revealed early in the show and provides one of many hilarious highlights in a cabaret that is at times hysterically funny, deeply moving, brave, dangerous, but always riveting. 

Helpmann Award winning, Whelan Browne has starred in a succession of major musicals, plays, television dramas, soapies, and satirical shows, most recently, Shaun Micallef’s Mad as Hell. But for many it is for her appearances in a series of high-profile court cases resulting from her participation in the stage musical The Rocky Horror Show that she is best known.

However, "Life in Plastic" is not about her theatrical and television triumphs, nor about her court appearances, although the court appearances are cleverly acknowledged and dispensed with early in.  

Christie whelan Browne

Instead, Whelan Browne’s complex, life-long relationship with her body and beauty, represented by her on-stage Barbie Doll bestie, and her real-life battles with endometriosis and failure to conceive, that are the focuses of her show.  

Perhaps not the usual subjects for a light-hearted, entertaining evening of cabaret, but in the hands of Whelan Browne and those of her writer and director, Sheridan Harbridge, these topics, presented with such disarming candour and wit, become both fascinating and inspiring. 

 Whelan Browne doesn't shirk naming names. Her revelation of Rob Mills as her less than gallant first love drew audible gasps from her audience. The reason for the floating penises is explained in her references to her court cases.

Christie Whelan Browne in "Life in Plastic"

 

Her show begins with Whelan Browne costumed as her fifteen-year-old self. But as the show progresses, she affects a worldly, sophisticated exterior, raising some eyebrows by deliberately incorporating coarse language, the reason for which is revealed towards the end of her show. But whenever she talks about her husband, Rowan, himself a sought-after musical theatre leading man, or their three-year old son Duke, she melts noticeably and charmingly.  

Threaded through the show is a well-chosen repertoire of songs, given fresh new arrangements by Glenn Moorehouse, and performed on-stage, occasionally a little too-enthusiastically, by multi-instrumentalist, Francesca Li Donni. These include “Girls Just Want To Have Fun”(Robert Hazard), “I Was Born This Way (Lady Ga Ga), “Barbie Girl” (Aqua), “Natural Woman” (Aretha Franklin) and an outrageous ode to body hair which has to be seen to be  believed.

Christie Whelan Browne as a blue dinosaur.

Impeccably conceived and performed with a frankness that was at times almost unnerving and enhanced with a lucious lighting plot by Trent Suidgeest which highlights  every mood change, “Life in Plastic” is an extraordinary creation which offers an uncompromisingly frank and intimate insight into the thoughts and motivations of one of country’s most admired and accomplished leading ladies.   

 

                                                   Images by Neil Bennett

This review also published in AUSTRALIAN ARTS REVIEW. www.artsreview.com.au