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Entries in Sidonie Henbest (8)

Sunday
Aug012010

Cabaret Live! tonight - 1st August @ La Boheme (Adelaide) 

 

 

Adelaide’s monthly event for Cabaret performers…

” Like to sing like Liza, belt like Bernadette or croon like a cabaret star but the living room just wasn’t enough….?

What if you could just turn up and sing your Cabaret…Live, with a fabulous pianist and audience…?

Welcome to Cabaret Live - on the first Sunday of every month at La Boheme.

Yes, it’s all ages welcome (strict law enforced policy for under 18’s to exit the building before 9pm), so come down to La Boheme, sign your name away to the host to be in place to either have your first sing in public or test out some new material. A pianist will be there to play your music and music can be chosen from the wide variety of books on hand on the night.

 If you are not of the singing persuasion, then come on down to hear some of Adelaide’s wonderful performers, some seasoned and some just waiting to be cooked.

Each month has something different to make it special, 
get in early to get a table!

$7 entry on the door to help cover the pianist. 
Free Drink voucher for those who sing!


Hosted by Sidonie Henbest


Read Here why Cabaret Live has been called one of the best nights out in Adelaide!

 

Sunday 1st August @ 7.30pm (registration at 7.00pm sharp!)

Entry fee: $7 to help cover the pianist.

La Boheme

36 Grote Street Adelaide 

 

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Wednesday
May122010

At first glance: Cabaret Fringe Festival 2010

 

Today I’m in cabaret catch up mode. Not long to go before we go into cabaret overdrive in Adelaide, with not only the Adelaide Cabaret Festival, but also the Cabaret Fringe Festival which launched its 2010 program last Wednesday night.

 

In a memorable evening which featured cameos not only from selected performers but also a member of the invited media, Artistic Director Paul Boylon and Associate Director Sidonie Henbest announced the artists and shows that will be featured within the four week festival.

 

The CABARET Fringe Festival features a number of returning favourites from the Adelaide Fringe Festival earlier in the year including Georigie Aue’s A Norah Jones Tribute, local virtuoso Adam Page Solo, Nikki Aitken presenting Cabaret Alive and Kicking Season 2, Lisette and Her Faux Manouches and A Wink and a Smile Burlesque’s The Seduction Society.

 

Talented clown Hew Parham presents the premiere of his show Schmoove Operator - “a little romantic clown ditty about our battles with love and technology”

 

Ben Finn’s show One Night Only will feature some very special guests in a show described as “Live. By demand and by request!”

 

Catherine Campbell and I will be running the masterclass Words & Music with a select group of Adelaide’s emerging young performers. If you’re interested in what goes on ‘behind the scenes’ email here to reserve a seat.

 

Isabel Hertaeg returns to Adelaide with her provocative show La Petite Mort (The Orgasm) which has received great reviews from The Advertiser, The Age, The Scotsman and cabaretconfessional.com.

 

Hans, the alter ego of Adelaide’s Gossip Gay Matt Gilbertson, will return with his sellout show The Hans Seduction to play June 3-5 at The Highway, a new venue to the Cabaret Fringe this year.

 

Following the success of The Last of the Red Hot Mamas earlier this year, Sidonie Henbest has prepared a new set of songs titled Lady Sings the Blues featuring jazz classics and some more contemporary standards.

 

With one of my favourite show-titles of the season, Nikki Aitken teams up with Loki Rickus in Fiance-Gay, the story of how gay Guy and troubled Toula end up at the altar together.

 

Alliance Francaise presents Feu la mere de Madame (The mother of Madam is dead) a French comedy with English surtitles at Nexus Cabaret, another new venue for 2010.

 

The Cabaret Fringe Festival will open on June 1 with Royal Gala, a two hour tempter featuring performances by many of the Festival artists.

 

Pick up your own copy of the program at Bass Ticketing outlets around Adelaide, or keep your eye on www.cabaretfringefestival.com for the full program online.

 

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Wednesday
Apr282010

Cabaret Fringe Festival Launches 2010 Season May 5

As the other Cabaret Festival in Adelaide heads towards it’s tenth season, the Adelaide Cabaret Fringe Festival will launch the program for its third annual season on May 5.

Associate Director Sidonie Henbest will join the moustached man in the top hat, Artistic Director Paul Boylen for the event at La Boheme. The venue hosts cabaret all year round and has been crucial in providing a place for artists to develop new shows and a destination for cabaret audiences who are looking for creative, exciting, new performers and performances.

Adelaide is the capital of South Australia, the ‘Festival State’ and has an established tradition of successful Fringe Festivals. Frank Ford established a Fringe alternative to the Adelaide Festival of the Arts in 1960 which has grown to be the second largest Fringe festival after Edinburgh. The Adelaide Cabaret Fringe Festival similarly provides an alternative option for audiences who wish to support upcoming local cabaret artists and see some experimental new work.

Speaking ahead of the launch, Sidonie Henbest is excited about the size of this year’s program. There will be forty different acts across ten venues, some of which are presenting cabaret for the first time. These include The Light Hotel and the Whitmore Hotel in the CBD. HWY will host The Hans Seduction, bringing cabaret to the suburbs. Nexus, which presented an extensive cabaret program in the 2010 Adelaide Fringe will play host to a great lineup including the Adelaide premiere of Dr Sketchy’s which combines burlesque and life drawing!

Look for a full report on the Adelaide Cabaret Fringe Festival’s 2010 Season launch on the blog next week as well as daily what’s on updates during the festival. You might like to subscribe to our rss feed, follow us on twitter or be added to our email list for current cabaret news, interviews and reviews.

Monday
Feb222010

Review: Red Hot and sizzling mama brings the house down

 

Last of the Red Hot Mamas

February 20th 2010

La Boheme

By Lena Nobuhara

 

Every now and then, you see a show and literally FEEL the heart and soul the performers have poured into it. The songs stir up emotions that only you know where they came from. You are deeply moved. The show becomes very personal. And those moments stay with you for a long time.

Last of the Red Hot Mamas was one of such shows. It pays homage to the life of Sophie Tucker, a popular entertainer during the vaudeville era, whose career spanned six decades with a Russian Jew background.

Sidonie Henbest does an outstanding job of recreating the dynamic Tucker who was well ahead of her time. In fact, she IS Tucker on stage. She spent considerable amount of time and effort researching everything about Sophie Tucker. And she does live and breathe her. In her sparking black dress, Henbest opens the sold-out show with an appropriately sizzling number ‘Red Hot Mama’, and illustrates the fascinating character that is Sophie Tucker through her songs.

Henbest’s voice is rich, expressive and smooth. She communicates every nuance in songs, which make them sound raw and real. When she sings Spencer Williams’ ‘I Aint Got Nobody”and the smouldering rendition of the Gershwin brothers’ standard ‘ The Man I Love’, you can almost taste Tucker’s yearning for that special someone. The gut-wrenching Turner Layton’s ‘After You’ve Gone’ and Jack Yellen’s “If Your Tears Can’t Hold on to The Man You Love”, remind you of the day when your heart got broken into pieces.

The musical director Matthew Carey is in fine form on piano. According to the show notes, he transcribed the notes by listening to the scratchy originals, as sheet music for much of this material was no longer commercially available. Not only did he restore the songs to their former glory, he brings us enthralling and sassy arrangements as well as imaginative solos that would’ve made Ted Schapiro, Tucker’s long time pianist, proud. His performance, like Henbest’s, exudes emotion. Carey also banters with her without missing a beat and even duets with her when she sings “Life Upon The Wicked Stage”.

Henbest can do light just as well as she can do shade. She shares some of Tucker’s pearls of wisdom, such as “From birth to age 18, a girl needs good parents, from 18 to 35 she needs good looks, from 35 to 55 she needs a good personality, and from 55 on she needs cash” and “Laugh and the whole world laughs with you, weep and you sleep alone” with impeccable comic timing. “I’m Living Alone and I Like It” is a song I could’ve sworn was written for me, and I feel that much closer to Tucker for it.

“I Don’t Want To Get Thin” is the showstopper of the evening. It’s full of laugh-out-loud lyrics like “I’m fat, I know it and I intend to stay fat”, “If you wanna keep your husband straight, show him a lot of curves”, “All the married men who run after me have skinny wives at home”. Henbest delivers the song with uncanny storytelling ability and brings the house down.

Another Jack Yellen song “My Yiddishe Momme” shows Tucker’s tender side. When Henbest talks about the death of her own mother, I imagine her grief and sorrow, and wonder what I’d do if I ever went through such a significant loss.

“Some Of These Days” by Shelton Brooks, a century old song, hasn’t aged at all and I can’t help but to marvel at the timelessness of her material.

Tucker wasn’t afraid of expressing sexuality when it wasn’t socially acceptable and refused to conform to people’s expectations. This is a compelling story of an extraordinary woman who was bold, defiant and courageous that simply said, “I am what I am”, then wore her heart on her sleeve.

The care Henbest and Carey took to resurrect Tucker’s legendary life was palpable, and it makes the show that much more meaningful to the audience. This is one of the finest moments in cabaret that I’ve ever experienced. I invite others to see the show and be touched by the same magic as I was.

It’s a fitting tribute to the queen of vaudeville, and Henbest/Tucker is absolutely right; Red Hot Mamas never die, they just go up in smoke - Red Hot, indeed.

 

LAST OF THE RED HOT MAMAS

Venue: The Promethean

23-24 Feb, 2-3 March @ 9.30pm

A$25/C $20/FB $18/G $20

Venue: La Boheme

8 March @ 7.30pm

A$25/C $20/FB $18/G $20

Book at FringeTIX (1300-FRINGE) or click here.



 

 

Monday
Feb222010

Life Upon the Wicked Stage - Sidonie Henbest

 

Sidonie Henbest was first introduced to the music of Sophie Tucker when a colleague challenged her to perform one of the singer’s famous songs. 

“Catherine Campbell told me I was the only person she could imagine singing this song and selling it properly to the audience.”

Henbest, who can proudly boast curves ‘in all the best places’ wasn’t sure she was the right person to sing “I Don’t Want to Get Thin” until she came to discover the journey Sophie Tucker had taken before recording it.

Sophie was raised in Hartford, Connecticut, having been born off the back of a cart as her parents were fleeing Russia. Her parents settled in America and ran a rooming house with a restaurant. Many touring vaudevillians would stay there when they came through town.

Sophie would sing in the family restaurant for the patrons and when the seasoned performers who dined there said “when you’re ready to make it in the big smoke, look me up,” she took them at their word. 

She ran away at 17, having already been married and had a child. She left the baby with her own mother and moved to New York. She decided that if she didn’t get out then, she might never escape. Although she wired money to her family every week, Tucker vowed that she wouldn’t return to Hartford until she’d made it as a top-billing star.

Sophie didn’t have the conventional good looks of the day and was cast mainly in character roles in her early vaudeville career, often performing in ‘black face’. A few break out opportunities gave her the chance to establish herself as a star in her own right and perform lead roles and then with solo billing. Even as a headliner, people in the business would encourage her to slim down, but she celebrated her curves and made them an integral part of her image.

 

Sidonie, what was the first cabaret show you remember seeing? What was its affect on you?

I saw Sir Peter Ustinov in review at the Festival Centre in the 80s – he was a master raconteur.  He commanded that entire space like it was his living room.  More recently – I was transformed by seeing Julie Wilson perform live.  Again - an absolute master storyteller at work.  The effect that both these performers had on me was to show me what mastery of your art looks like and to illustrate that nothing is more important than connecting with your audience.

 

What artists inspire you?

I came to cabaret by way of jazz, so my first loves were Ella, Sarah, Nina & Billy.  In a modern context I am inspired by Cassandra Wilson, Lillias White, Julie Wilson, Ms Minnelli and Bath boy from La Clique (but that’s a different sort of inspiration…)

 

What have been the challenges in preparing The Last of the Red Hot Mamas?

There have been many…but that is probably a sign of a worthy subject!  

In deciding to revive a legend from a century ago, it had not occurred to me that most of the tin pan alley music was no longer in print.  Cue an ear-bending exercise in transcribing the original recordings for most of the songs in the show.  I hasten to add this was done by my MD…I just did the lyrics!

One of the other challenges for me as a performer was a lack of footage of Sophie Tucker, and none of her in her heyday. We are used to being able to connect to our subject through the medium of film and television, but I had to do it through her voice instead, and her words.  A dear friend of mine actually hunted down a signed copy of her autobiography for me…what a gift!

 

You are also co-director of the Adelaide Cabaret Fringe which was established two years ago and now runs alongside the Adelaide Cabaret Festival. How would you describe the state of cabaret in Adelaide at present and where would you like to see it in five years time?

Cabaret in Adelaide is very much alive and kicking!  I used to think international performers were just being ‘media savvy’ when they praised the scene here for its size, vision and commitment, but really when compared to most of the world, we are uniquely placed – in terms of the concentration of artists, opportunities and most importantly – audience.  The scene here is certainly more cohesive and available to the general public compared to say London, where I’ve lived most of my adult life.

If current trends in Cabaret, Burlesque and other live performance arts continue, then in five years I would expect to see an increase in venues in Adelaide with exclusively Cabaret programming.  We will also by then have another generation of performers treading the boards.  Previously, the art form has been lovingly maintained by the dedicated few.  In recent years we’ve seen a new wave of performers inspired by more modern Australian Cabaret artists such as Eddie Perfect, Casey Bennetto and David Campbell… and I’ve seen some of the kids coming up … WOW

With any rise in culture, I would expect to see this mirrored in the education system – both at a secondary and tertiary level.  In this case, I would expect to see Cabaret taken on by an institution such as AC Arts, as a course in its own right.

Off the back of all of this creative nurturing and growth I would expect to see Adelaide become an internationally recognized centre for the development of cabaret – both in terms of productions and the art form itself. Cabaret is pretty bendy – I think we can push it a lot further!

 

What is the role of the Adelaide Cabaret Fringe in achieving that ‘five year vision’?

I believe that the Cabaret Fringe Festival plays an instrumental role. By running an annual month-long festival that is open access, we have created an opportunity for artist and audience alike to foster new material, ideas and creativity.  It is also a celebration of a magical art form, which clearly speaks to the hearts and minds of the public.  

We must be clear that there is an equally important place for grass-roots and international in the same city – particularly when it comes to the arts.  I think people have allowed the idea of local or home-grown to mean sub-standard, thereby allowing it to be marginalized.  I know that this is simply not true – we have a wealth of truly talented and extraordinary people who call Adelaide home.  

I hope that in the next five years we can encourage our arts festivals to further support the development of local art, by more than just the few usual suspects.

 

Sidonie’s show The Last of the Red Hot Mamas opens on Tuesday Feb 23 at The Promethean and continues until Monday Mar 8 (with the final performance at La Boheme).

 

LAST OF THE RED HOT MAMAS

Venue: The Promethean

23-24 Feb, 2-3 March @ 9.30pm 

A$25/C $20/FB $18/G $20

Venue: La Boheme

8 March @ 7.30pm 

A$25/C $20/FB $18/G $20

Book at FringeTIX (1300-FRINGE) or click here.