What began as a monthly improv night in the basement of a 150 year-old hotel near
Kings Cross in 2017, has adapted into Musical Bang Bang: a gloriously unscripted
hour of sketches, song, and musical theatre that has wowed audience at the Hayes
Theatre and Melbourne International Comedy Festival. With much of the nation’s and
the world’s finest cabaret performers descending on Adelaide and congregating in the
piano bars and banquet rooms of the Festival Theatre, the cast for latest incarnation
of Bang Bang is fully loaded.
In Musical Bang Bang, the Bang Bang Rodeo! Improv Show and Adelaide Cabaret Festival
collide. Bang Bang Rodeo was a monthly improv night at the Old Fitz in Woolloomooloo
orchestrated by actor, writer and comedian Jane Watt, who most recently teamed with
Adelaide Fringe favourite Ange Lavoipierre at Melbourne International Comedy Festival in
Jazz or a Bucket of Blood. Since the rodeo ended, Bang Bang has found new broncos to
tame: at the Hayes Theatre, MICF, and now Cabaret Festival. For this ride, Jane brought
Old Fitz friends Rob Johnson and Orya Golgowsky, and has enlisted current Festival Artistic
Director Virginia Gay, former Artistic Director Julia Zemiro, Festival regular Victoria Falconer,
and Triple J Song Sequels star Tom Cardy.
Improvised theatre is a little like the circus: the adrenaline spike from the risk of a fall, and
the relief and joy when the landing is stuck is all part of the appeal, for the audience and the
performers. Bang Bang began with the easier tricks: short sketches prompted by iMovies
sound effects on shuffle, and the ubiquitous spontaneously composed song in response to
colourful responses by a Die Hard 2 loving member of the audience. The death-defying feat,
though, was a forty-minute improvised musical. On this night, the spontaneous new work
was a jazzy homage to childhood beauty pageants.
Bang Bang’s cast for Cabaret Festival have been walking the improv tight rope without a
safety net for years, or decades: their linguistic, lyrical and melodic somersaults were
dazzling; there were no belly flops or ruptured knees, no moments where words were lost or
silences remained unfilled. Sure, there were times where the rhymes were not completed or
the jokes did not hit, but these were few and far between, and were more than compensated
for by the on-the-spot strokes of genius. The action was skilfully soundtracked by Falconer
on the keys. Tom Cardy and Virginia Gay had the most impressive hits to misses ratio, but
the whole cast had their bullseyes. While, at times, the narrative did begin to veer off target,
the skilled eyes of Zemiro and Gay ensured the aim was corrected in time for the finale.
With its heavy reliance on audience interaction, Bang Bang is the essence of cabaret, with
each night never to be repeated.
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