In 2017, after 11 cherished years, the ABC’s The Book Club ended, with host Jennifer Byrne saying she’d forgotten what it was like to read for pleasure. Cabaret Festival Artistic Director Virginia Gay fell in love with Byrne and panellist Marieke Hardy during the show’s decade and year run and brought the band back together for Between the Covers: an hour of book chats and song, that she hopes will become a yearly tradition. On this sold-out Sunday afternoon, where The Great Gatsby was the topic, it was clear that Byrne’s love of reading had returned, and audiences were lucky to be witnesses of both a renewal and the start of something special.
At this year’s Cabaret Festival Gala, Artistic Director Virginia Gay said she was given the choice between being hands-off or hands-on; she chose hands on. Indeed, it’s hard to see a show this year without seeing Gay, either on stage or in the audience. Importantly, though, in every instance, she is not there because she feels entitled to be but rather because it is a joy for her to be there; that joy radiates. It lifts the crowd and the fellow performers. So it is with Between the Covers; Gay loved The Book Club, was undoubtedly saddened to see it end, and saw the opportunity to bring it back on stage for an analysis of jazz era classic The Great Gatsby. A book club alone is not strictly cabaret, though, so Byrne, Gay and Hardy’s lively discussions segued into thematically appropriate jazz standards sung by Naarm/Melbourne diva, Mama Alto.
F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was the obvious cabaret-themed novel. Released in 1925, when cabaret was still young, it has birthed innumerable theme parties, club nights and venues; Adelaide, for example, even has The Gatsby Lounge. While, for most of June, our Festival Centre can look like Gatsby’s Long Island pad, as festival lovers whip out the sparkles from the closet, Between the Covers explored what lay beneath the sequins; what was going on inside the fascinator-adorned heads. Gay steered the conversation towards heady themes: greed, the state of the US, violence, racism, sex and misogyny and, for a lighter ending, the film adaptations. Unlike Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 adaptation, Between the Covers was not a car crash. Hardy and Byrne jousted like the old days, and Gay was a new sparring partner; Hardy skewered Gay for being an expert on the Luhrmann film despite only sitting through 20 minutes of it. It was like old times.
Unlike the ABC series, though, there were musical interludes, featuring Mama Alto, whose exquisite vocal control and agility added extra dazzle to an already revered format, on songs like Ain’t We Got Fun and Bye Bye Blackbird, which she duetted with Gay. Byrne lamented never having Mama Alto as a feature on the TV, such was the seamless integration and elevation. With Gay returning as Artistic Director again in 2025, though, there is now an opportunity to dive between the covers at least once more. It was such fun, though, that hopefully Adelaide Cabaret Festival will remain there for as long as young lovers.
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