2024 Adelaide Cabaret Festival Review – Johanna Allen: Pop Culture Vulture

While, in most cabaret shows, the work’s core concept, its narrative thread, is conveyed generallythrough the patter between songs, and throughthe song selections, Johanna Allen’s Pop Culture message is conveyed in all ways available: through the vocal techniques utilised, through pianist and collaborator Mark Simeon Ferguson’s compositions, and through the blending of theatrical performance styles.

In homegrown Cabaret Festival favourite and national star of the stage Johanna Allen’s new work, Pop Culture Vulture, there is Tay-Tay and Katie Perry, Hammerstein and Handel, exploration of life beside the ocean with South Pacific and beneath with the Little Mermaid,  homages to Aussie pop icons like Kylie and Farnham and rockers Jet and Powderfinger, with all sung interchangeably operatically, with musical theatricality, contemporarily, or jazzily.

Johanna compares herself to the ibis, a suburban snack scavenger affectionately known as the bin chicken. Like the ibis, Johanna’s remarkable adaptability and resilience has emerged out of necessity. You can’t survive as an ibis without dumpster diving. While, in Europe, an operatically trained singer can make a career by specialising in a niche, in a narrowly defined vocal fach, faching doesn’t work in Australia; there’s just not enough work to be only a Mozart tenor or a Wagnerian soprano. If you only perform on this continent, you have to do it all- opera, cabaret, musical theatre, jazz- and Johanna does.

Within a one-hour set, Johanna skilfully glides between comical versions of love-gone wrong tunes like Swift’s ‘My Next Mistake’ and heartbreaking versions of Handel’s ‘O Dolce Mia Speranza’, where she holds the microphone down low, allowing her operatic soprano to soar, before ending the aria with mash up of John Farnham’s ‘Burn For You’. Kylie’s ‘Confide In Me’, on the other hand, began as cabaret and ended in coloratura. Through the entire display of prowess, Johanna never displays arrogance or ostentation; she remains the girl who talked with her Eastern suburbs classmates about who they “got on” with at the school formal while dancing to Powerfinger’s ‘Burn Your Name’. Every time Johanna returns to Cabaret Festival, she performs in a bigger venue: last time it was the Banquet Room, this time it was the Dunstan Playhouse. Johanna Allen and Adelaide crowds are really getting on. Even while clashing with PattI LuPone, Johanna attracted a near-capacity crowd, with many giving a standing ovation at the end. Winner winner bin chicken dinner.