Happy (belated) New Year!

We have so much almost-announce-able news that I’ve been holding off blogging til I can share it all. But time waits for no blog, so I’ll write a little update now and a bigger one later!

Firstly, we welcomed the BBC into our rehearsals last week for BBC World’s Fast Track special on the lead up to Mardi Gras! We sang a few of our new songs and I chatted to the interviewer about blackcat lounge and my views on last year’s Mardi Gras name change.

We are super excited about our Mardi Gras season with Maxine Kauter Band AND Brendan Maclean both launching new work! We love these kids (as I’m sure you know), so book tickets to their shows asap, before the VERY exciting billboard with our faces on it goes up at The Factory. No one will be able to resist our sexy gay faces, so get to it!

Soon, you’ll be hearing all about blackcat productions’ participation in Marrickville Council’s Open Marrickville Festival, which we were thrilled to receive a grant for. We’ve got exciting cabaret plans in the pipeline, so stay tuned!

Oh, and sales for our Lady Sings it Better Adelaide season are coming along nicely. Book for it, ok?

If you need any incentive, check out our new youtube montage, complete with Edinburgh footage…

Catch Hannah James at the Sydney International Women’s Jazz Festival

We are pretty excited to see that the Seymour Centre is home to the Sydney International Women’s Jazz Festival, but we’re VERY excited to tell you all to go see the Hannah James Trio perform at it.

It’s not rare to see Lady Sings it Better audiences craning their necks to see past our ridiculous tutus in order to watch Hannah James in action. We had the pleasure of seeing her perform her own compositions when she won the Jann Rutherford Award a couple of years ago and they are breathtakingly good.

Seriously. Don’t miss out. She’s performing 6pm on Saturday 17th November. Details here.

Check out the full Sydney International Women’s Jazz Festival here.

 

Maeve and Phoebe’s Edinburgh Fringe Picks #2

It’s been showpalooza for the past couple of weeks so we haven’t had time to blog. But here’s a selection of the best of some amazing stuff we’ve seen (in Maeve’s words, obviously, as will become evident as I gush about a variety of gorgeous women I’ve seen):

• Lady Rizo. Oh Lady Rizo. Stunning, hilarious, bizarre, a fabulous mix of odd and honest and glamourous and talented. Her Dolly Parton / Blondie mash up is inspired and the original songs stand strong among the fabulous covers. We can’t talk about the show without mentioning that I had the honour of being invited onto the stage (ok, so I enthusiastically volunteered), where I witnessed the Lady’s costume change, was interviewed about how I lost my virginity, enjoyed a spontaneous Ani DiFranco cover and generally had some of the best minutes of my Fringe behind a screen in front of a live audience. But while this was the fun part of the show, the real glory was in the beautiful arrangements and soulful performances, the comic timing and mischievous air to the whole affair.
• Frisky and Mannish: 27 Club. We managed to score some last minute tickets to Frisky and Mannish and we weren’t disappointed. They had some of the best on stage banter of all the cabaret we’ve seen and their songs were fabulous, creating a sound that felt like much more than just two voices and a piano. Totes have a crush on Frisky now too.
• A Donkey and a Parrot. In contrast with all the cabaret and comedy we’ve seen, Donkey and a Parrot is a sweet, generous piece of theatre which warmly invites you in to its world. A one woman show, Sarah Hamilton is gentle and wide-eyed without being saccharine. Also, she has the coolest set we’ve seen, a barrel packed with bells and whistles and hidey holes.
• Asher Treleaven. Ok, so I am really including this in honour of a select 6 minutes in the middle of Asher’s show in which he does the best and funniest diablo routine I’ve ever seen. The rest of the show is fine, but the diablo is glorious and worth your money.
• Bec Hill is More Afraid of You Than You Are of Her. Bec Hill’s brand of comedy is gentler, self-deprecating and pleasingly geeky, with pop up art flip books, fun props and a lovely awkward tone which endears you to her immediately. She was just what we needed on an exhausted Tuesday afternoon.
• The Showstoppers’ Improvised Musical. Tuesday afternoon was for fun, geeky comedy, but the night before kicked off with gins in hand at Showstoppers, which was clever, hilarious and musically pretty great. Loads of fun. Want to go again so we can see how much is improvised and how much rehearsed!
• Tom Thum. This guy is amazing, a fantastic beatboxer with a show that will blow you away. He is loaded with stars, all well deserved.
• Fork: Electro Vocal Circus. This one gets an honourable mention as it’s one of Phoebe’s top shows (she saw it twice) but not one of Maeve’s. Phoebe loves a cappella choirs and found this odd Finnish quartet’s use of electronic looping and effects fun and wonderful. While I was VERY taken with the use of capes and unitards (if Sarah has the best set, these guys have the best costumes), I thought the electronic effects actually took too much away from the vocals and I just felt like I was in a nightclub. A weird, funny nightclub in Finland is hardly something to be sniffed at though!

We’ve got a bunch to see before we finish up in less than a week (eep!) including Reginald D Hunter, Susan Calman, Kemble’s Riot, Mae Martin, SexyTime, Briefs and more. ARGH!

The countdown is on! Two weeks til take off…

This time two weeks from now, we’ll all be sleeping like babies, bags packed and ready to get to the airport at 5.30am for our flight to the UK. Right…? Let’s hope so.

We shouldn’t need to have last minute panics. We’ve paid our bills, we sent out the production schedule to the Lady team today, collateral printing will be ordered tomorrow and our farewell gigs are already sold out! But, anything is possible when you consider that both Phoebe and I have been kept up at night worrying about Really Important Things like what shoes to take, whether or not we need to purchase a first aid kit (Phoebe insists we do), pros/cons of purchasing toiletries at home or on arrival and whether or not bribing potential audience in box office queues with cupcakes will seem charming or desperate.

Plus, I decided that two weeks out was a good time to change the script and add in a new song. We work well under pressure, ok? And once you hear Jenni and Libby make sweet musical love to Otis Redding’s Try a Little Tenderness, you’ll know it was worth it. As an aside, Try a Little Tenderness was the closing song in the first show Phoebe and I ever worked on together, a production of Jim Cartwright’s Road at The Ponton Theatre in Bathurst in 2003! A little blackcat history for ya.

That’s it for tonight. I won’t regale you with the joys of scheduling, the fine art of writing pack lists during work meetings or the recipes I am compiling in my head for ‘healthy, wholesome food one can eat on the go’. We’ll save that for the next blog…

• Don’t forget you can still make a tax deductible donation to support our tour costs. Every $ counts and we hugely appreciate the support received thus far.
• Please also tell ANYONE you know living in the UK about our show, and encourage them to come to the Fringe and see us.

xxx Maeve and the blackcat team

blackcat lounge season highlights

Before time rushes away from me and our little cabaret season is but a distant memory, I thought I’d youtube-spam you with some of my favourite blackcat lounge moments.

The season had highs and lows, torrential rain and sunshine, tiny paper boats and pink balloons, big crowds and small. But one consistent wonder was the talent of the artists we assembled at The Sidetrack. I was thrilled to watch wonderful performance after wonderful performance.

Here are a few of my faves:

iOTA takes to the stage to sing unplugged with Brendan Maclean (read a wonderful review of the show by our photographer, Viv McGregor, here)

Maxine Kauter singing iOTA’s ‘Come back for me’ at HOMAGE:

Brett Every and Jeremy Brennan perform ‘The Night is Not Long Enough’:

Tom Sharah and his brother give Adele a run for her money:

Ali Hughes and Virginia Re sing ‘Northern Lights’ at Brett Every’s Leap Night: