BWW Reviews' Great Talent In Adelaide: Mark Nadler, Lisa Hunt, Gillian Cosgriff

The Adelaide Cabaret Festival brings a vast variety of entertainment to South Australia. For proof, just look beyond the main stages in the 2,000-seat Festival Theatre and the 600+ Dunstan Playhouse, the most traditional performing spaces in the Festival Centre.

In addition to the main stage performers - those like Olivia Newton-John and Chita Rivera, for example - there are established cabaret favorites and relative newcomers playing in smaller, cabaret-like apaces.

Falling ino the former category, Mark Nadler has earned a slew of awards - the greatest of which must be the fact that he was caricatured by Al Hirschfeld - and based on his Adelaide performance of Crazy 1961, a celebration of the year he, as well as Barack Obama, was born.

The show is a breathtaking mix of music and history. JFK's inauguration, the Bay of Pigs, the first plane hijacked to Cuba, the first Freedom Riders are all touched upon. Songs include numbers from Broadway hits (Once In A Lifetime), movie music (Cruella DeVil) and popular music (Crazy).

Nadler puts his own story in the context of the snngs and it is always, consistently interesting. One leaves the show wanting to see more. Nadler had played the first few days of the Festival in an open-to-all late-night venue and, judging from conversations overheard among the audience, the room was packed with people who came to this show after seeing his Broadway Hootenanny.

The show ends with a terrific medley of the 50 - yes! 50! - top hits of 1961 that is, as they say here in Oz, "heaps" of fun - and, the encore is the lovely Oscar-winner, Moon River.

Mark Nadler is an enormously talented man. It is a joy to watch him use that talent.

Lisa Hunt, whose show Forever Soul played opening weekend, has one of those voices that proves in the hands of the right singer soul and blues music are timeless. And Lisa Hunt is absolutely the right singer.

From the moment she came on the stage in the Festival Centre Ballroom she owned the night. Aretha, Dusty, the Tops - she sings them all and sings them all beautifully. Even her interaction with two women from the audience - the kind of thing that can throw the damper on even the most enthusiastic audience - was very well done.

Lisa Hunt is the kind of performer who may certainly deserve more fame than she has but who plays all over the world and, as a quick online search showed, does so to great acclaim. Catch her wherever you can.

Among the newcomers at the Adelaide Cabaret Festival is Gillian Cosgriff. Her show, Waitressing, And Other Things I Do Well, is an autobiographical journey through her post-university life, the possessor of an arts degree, as a waitress trying to make it in showbiz.

Cosgriff is a gifted songwriter whose songs are very witty and truthful, describing what it's like to waitress -very funny, but not a fun way of life - to dating. She riffs on auditioning and sings The Song Song, written by Simon Taylor, the only piece she didn't write herself.

Cosgriff has combined huge talent, great material and immense charm into a set piece that is wholly original and pure theater. She's one to look out for. Wherever we are, we'll be hearing a lot about her

For more information, visit http://www.adelaidecabaretfestival.com.au

Photos: Gillian Cosgriff, Mark Nadler, Lisa Hunt

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