David Mills glamour+despair.
The Banquet Room. Adelaide
Cabaret Festival 2026. Adelaide Festival Centre. June 12 and 13. 2026
Reviewed by Peter Wilkins
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| David McEvoy at piano and David Mills |
Each year the perennial question arises. What is Cabaret? Is it entertainment in a small venue where people are seated at tables and eating and drinking during a performance. If so, then the intimate Banquet Room at the Adelaide Festival Theatre is the ideal venue. And how can you tell a cabaret performer? Is it a man in a suit, looking every bit the part of a public servant. Then New York cabaret comedy performer David Mills is every bit the cabaret performer. Is his show glamour +despair cabaret or stand up comedy. It’s both. It is the forked tongue of satire, the sting in the tail, rattling with snappy jibes at the American Dream, spitting out the gay man’s wit and scorching his one hour act with the flames of dire prophesy and a burning contempt for the coke addicts, the fentanyl dealers, gay conversion and political correctness. “I am an empath. I feel” Mills says as he turns his slick act on the audience, probing the sex lives, and the Well Woman medication for tiredness or the Wellman drug to boost vitality. The lady beside me is in hysterics. The master raconteur has his audience in his grasp. His humour lets loose the left field oddity of his city, the cataclysmic collapse of the greatest city in the world.
His comedy is laced with the bitter taste of premonition of an era of decay and a collapsing madhouse world. The middle aged comedian in a conventional suit rails against conformity and indifference. “Don’t be sensible “ he exhorts. This is the consummate stand up comedian, the oracle of his tribe, the satirist with the sting. But it is the cabaret artist who twists the tone with song. The ominous hiss of the snake between the verses of Tender Woman Let Me In is songwriter Oscar Brown’s warning to the world of the dangers that await those who allowed Trump in and threaten to let in Pauline Hanson. Mills is a storyteller, weaving a cautionary tale. Tom Waits’s Hooker in Minneapolis is sung to a hushed room and the violence and degradation of Odyssey’s version of Native New Yorker reminds us of an underbelly , scarred raw by the despairing and despondent. Mills delivers his message with chilling effect only to relieve the tension with a joke and a friendly farewell to his ideal Adelaide audience.
So, is this cabaret, a cabaret iconoclast in a plain suit on stage with his accomplished accompanist Dave McEvoy, spicing the laughter with tales of sexual behaviour and gay pride excess, cajoling audiences with cheeky interaction and turning laughter to contemplative silence? The choice of songs is purposeful and powerful and we are left to consider our place in a changing and challenging world. This is Mills the cabaret artist, part anarchist, part prophet leaving us to leave the Banquet Room with the impact of his show resting solidly on our conscience.
The show is going to the Hayes Theatre in Sydney. It is funny, witty, shocking and a perfect example of stand up comedy meets cabaret. Don’t miss it if you are able to catch a brief Sydney season.
Photos by Claudio Raschella
