What a joy it is when you find a tiny upstairs venue, above a restaurant where the tables are too close together but the food smells divine, where there’s a small stage with a fake baby grand, and you know the show is either going to be excruciatingly weird or wildly eclectic, or both.
Stockholm Syndrome is clearly one of Brisbane’s hidden treasures. I’ve no idea how long it has been sitting there on Sandgate Road, Albion, serving up delicious meals – and a pretty fine Cab Merlot – and running a regular concert season upstairs.
Dusty Limits, appearing here as part of the Brisbane Cabaret Festival, is clearly one of Brisbane’s lost treasures. This Brisbane boy is home for a short time, and I suggest you make the effort to catch him wherever in the world you can.
Now based in London, where he hosts the Café de Paris, he appeared at Stockholm Syndrome for one performance only of Post Mortem, and it’s classic cabaret: a mixture of songs from different genres, all given that cabaret twist that makes them dark and funny, macabre and joyous.
Accompanied (at unbelievably short notice) by Parmis Rose (of Silver Sircus), Dusty Limits deftly explores his melancholia (‘a rational response to the insanity of the universe’) via his own songs, and those of Tom Waits, Joni Mitchell, Stephen Sondheim and others. There is wit, wisdom and morbidity, all delivered a delicious dose of satirical doom.
Old songs are regenerated without recourse to an afterlife. Sondheim’s ‘Losing My Mind’ starts out sweetly, then reveals itself as a nihilistic, hilarious, painful descent into alcoholism. A parody on Natalie Imbruglia’s ‘Torn’ becomes ‘Bored’, and rips through the hypocrisy of denying same-sex couples the privilege of breaking up legally.
It’s one thing to have a superb voice, which Dusty Limits has. It’s quite something else to put it consistently to the service of songs that tell stories, with melodies that thrill, and lyrics that challenge and provoke. He is a wonderful cabaret artist, and a joy. He’s heading back to the UK at the end of this month for the Dublin Burlesque Festival.
Brisbane manages to produce great artists like Dusty Limits from time to time, but she has never yet learnt how to keep them.
Rating: 4.5 stars out of 5
Brisbane Cabaret Festival presents
Dusty Limits – Post Mortem
Stockholm Syndrome, Albion
8 November
Brisbane Cabaret Festival
25 October – 11 November
