There’s been some wonderful stories and people turning up since we decided to bring back our eighties cabaret show Failing In Love Again. Like the small group of Melbourne women who travelled all the way from Melb to the Cellblock Concert, Girls In Our Town at Sedition Festival in Sydney last Sept. I could see them from the stage, half out of their seats, singing along to every word of every song Elizabeth Drake and I performed. It was thrilling to meet them afterwards and share the memories.
For years they’d been singing along to the cassette tape we recorded in 1980 at the ABC studios in Forbes St, Sydney for the Coming Out Show (thanks Roz Cheney!). Lucky, for without it we would have no record of it at all. I’ve heard from lots of people who told me their tape still worked, like one guy who had never seen the show but had the tape out in Central Australia where he worked on a remote community and used to run it regularly while they were making prints.
The Melb crew reminded me of how when we started performing the original musical at The Pram Factory with a band and five singers, word spread like wildfire and the Sydney Gay Community chartered a bus to bring people down to the show. How fabulous is that! The characters in the musical were: a gay man, a lesbian, a bisexual woman and a hetero couple. All were thwarted casualties of love, searching for answers with songs like: On The Beat, Gotta Get Outa The Ghetto, Rubbing Our Rubbers Together, My Mother Wore the Pants (it ruined my chance for romance). There were around 20 songs, some of which didn’t make it into the cabaret which currently sits at fourteen songs, including: Better Than Het, Sad Masochist, the Vibrator Song and of course the old favourite Monogamy Shbedogamy.
But one of the best stories turned up on FB recently when Kenneth Lyons replied to a post by Gail Austin of Curved Radio.
He wrote:
I love how memories of some performances never leave. A few of us went to see JC and ED up here (79/80? – Schonell Theatre Uni of Q?) and one of the songs was a helluva catchy number about ‘idiosyncrasies’ – the chorus is still in my head to this day! – “my idio idio idio idiosyncrasies are gonna be gonna be gonna be gonna be the death of me!” – so catchy in fact we kept singing it all the way home while raving about the show. We then hit up my parents bar at home and decided to mix a cocktail in the song and the night’s honour and called it an ‘Idiosyncrasy’! What was in it was a bit of this and that – it was fabulous and we could never repeat it again! 😂 One of our crew who went that night still remembers the it fabulous performance, that song and the post show cocktails knees up we had into the wee hours!
We hope to get the bar staff at Gingers Cabaret to create some new cocktail recipes when we perform two shows only on Feb 21 and 22. Arrive at 8pm for a good seat and a FILA cocktail. Show starts at 8.30 sharp and runs round 80 mins with interval. Stick around afterwards for a drink and a chat. We’d love to hear some more stories!
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