FRANKIE MCNAIR AND ISAAC HAIGH - The Booth Variety Spectacular & Formal Apology Hour. ADELAIDE CABARET FESTIVAL 2026

 

 

Frankie McNair and Isaac Haigh The Booth Variety Spectacular & Formal Apology Hour

The Banquet Room. Adelaide Festival Centre. Adelaide Cabaret Festival. June 12-13 2026

Reviewed by Peter Wilkins

Having posed the question in my review of David Mills’s glamour & despair, I continue my search for a definition of cabaret with the riotously funny and absurdly ridiculous Booth Variety Spectacular & Formal Apology Hour. This silly spoof actually ran for an hour and a half of variety show send-up, commedia lazzi, guest spots and a fork that gets its prongs in a manic slather. Is it cabaret?  Maybe its satirical swipe at the 1969 Variety show tradition might amuse with a dollop of subversion where everything goes wrong – the type of comedy that sends an audience into paroxysms of laughter at the blooper, the disaster and the mishaps in the tradition of Australia's Funniest Home Videos and shows like The Play That Goes Wrong. The audience at Frankie McNair and Isaac Haigh’s alt-comedy spectacular lapped it up. Most of them would remember with nostalgic fondness shows like Adelaide Tonight, the Ernie Sigley Show or Graham Kennedy’s Melbourne Tonight with that failsafe comedy duo the straight man and the fall guy or the Barrel Girl. 

Reuben Kaye and FrankieMcNair

They were shows ripe for the send up and Frankie McNair and Isaac Haigh carry Don Scrimpy’s Scrimpy Television Production off with perfect abandonment. They are assisted by a manic floor manager, a Baby Lloyd-Webber with her one man composition of CAT, accompanied by a painfully woeful and far too long cat dance routine, a truculent contestant and a fork from a long running, lamented series. There is also an unexpected guest appearance by Adelaide Cabaret Festival Artistic Director Reuben Kaye, there to announce the next AD of the festival. And it is….Me Me Me he cries in adulation. It’s not the only thing we learn about Kaye. In the Formal Apology Question time we learn the shattering fact that he would rather be bitten by a dog than scratched by a cat. It is a segment in the show of momentous confessions.

Frankie McNair and Isaac Haigh

But the glue that holds this show together is the calibre of the two leads. Isaac Haigh in a black wig that makes him look like a young Bob Downes and with a voice that bathes the room in droll seduction is Mr. Smooth of the TV Studio. A lovelorn interloper, Haigh has the role of co- host down to a tee and I am catapulted back to the years when the mellifluous tones of the announer would transport me along the airwaves to the radio years and then into the black and white world of the early TV era.

As the neurotic, dangerously unpredictable co-host Tabitha Booth, Frankie McNair has fashioned a character that is part caricature and part perfect copy of the immortal Lucille Ball or Carol Burnett, the brilliant comediennes of the Golden Age of American comedy shows. In a carrot red wig and pink gown, McNair exudes the air of faded glory, desperately hanging on to the memory of the wonder years. McNair and Haigh play out their reincarnation of a bygone age of variety with a touch of pathos beneath the laughter and the burlesque. It is the final performance and like the Variety shows of the Sixties, we are unlikely to see the like again. We are sure to see McNair and Haigh again. They are a newly found gift to the Australian comedy scene

And is it cabaret? It’s a part of a broad church, played out in an intimate room with audience at tables and drinking wine. It is interactive with Kaye clambering through the audience and one of the company talking to people before an audience warm up. It’s not my cabaret, however much I enjoyed the performances of McNair and Haigh. For the packed audience on Saturday night, it was their taste of comedy in a cabaret setting  and risqué and ribald enough to qualify for their kind of thoroughly entertaining cabaret.