The Australian Chamber Orchestra takes a walk through the Weimar Republic with a couple of sensationally sassy guides — cabaret star Meow Meow and the incomparable Barry Humphries.

Australia just can’t get enough of the death-defying hijinks of this bawdy circus-inspired act. An extended season at the Sydney Opera House has plenty of return business — even our critic.

Who hasn’t seen Finucane & Smith’s The Burlesque Hour? Now’s your chance to catch the international hit in Sydney, with new songs and sparkle.

Lotte Lenya? Of course. But Agnes Bernelle? Who is she? One of the Weimar Republic generation, she fled Berlin as a teenager and spent the war in London as an anti-Nazi propagandist with the British Special Operations Unit, famously convincing the commander of a German U-boat to surrender by broadcasting a made-up message to him, [...]

Catherine Alcorn has it easy. I mean, first and foremost, she’s bloody talented. She can sing. She can act. She has comic timing. And the confidence, the unmitigated chutzpah, to be Bette Midler. I thought only Bette had that. And she doesn’t need a writer. She just uses Bette’s material. Her songs. Her jokes. Her [...]

Lucy Maunder’s Songs In The Key Of Black is living proof you can have all the right ingredients, superlative talent in every corner, a note-perfect delivery (vocally and in every other sense) and still not quite sparkle. What this show lacks is a sense of spontaneity. So much so, I was almost hankering for a [...]

It’s hard to believe the prince of polyester has been reigning for a quarter-century. Then again, it’s probably going on 20 years since I first saw him, at North Ryde rissole. The most delirious thing about that performance was I’m sure many of the patrons thought he was just another polished club entertainer-in-earnest. It could’ve [...]

Anne Wilson premiered cabaret act What I Did For Love at the 2010 Sydney Fringe Festival. That was at Notes, a rather expansive, impersonal setting for an intimate show, so, dingy and dilapidated as Kings Cross’ El Rocco now is, it was arguably a more conducive space for such. Frankly, it still deserves better, but finding a [...]

It’s not as if there isn’t considerable and considerably impressive craft brought to bear in Yumi Umiumare’s critically-acclaimed solo work, EnTrance, which opened Performance Space’s new season at CarriageWorks last week. As far as I’m aware it’s Umiumare’s debut in Sydney. In Melbourne, she’s already been warmly embraced. The Age, for example, has waxed especially lyrically: [...]

For a cabaret artiste called Meow Meow, this is a performer who has always seemed more of a bird than a cat. She is flighty, constantly startled, her feathers always a little ruffled. The thrill of watching her in full flight — and it is indeed a thrilling spectacle — comes from knowing that she [...]