The Hyde Park Spiegeltent has become a kind of spiritual home for Sydney Festival in recent years, offering everything from intimate gigs to gasp-inducing circuses. Each year, there’s at least one glitzy cabaret that sets up residence in the tent for a long run, and this year that show is Pigalle, a disco-circus fusion led by Australia’s queen of disco, Marcia Hines.
That might sound a little bit familiar. That’s because Hines and director Craig Ilott have been touring Velvet, another successful disco-circus fusion, for the last few years to great acclaim, including two seasons in Sydney. This is a sort-of sequel to Velvet, but it replaces the pulse of New York’s Studio 54 with the thrum of Paris’s nightlife district, Quartier Pigalle.
At least, that’s what the publicity material tells us. There’s not a huge deal that suggests Parisian attitude and glamour in the show itself, which seems determined to hit the same notes that made Velvet a success – and push things just a touch darker – without reinventing the wheel. But Velvet had a clarity, pace and spirit that Pigalle hasn’t found. At least not yet.
Velvet had just as many high-flying aerial acts, disco bangers and colourful characters, but it was driven by a narrative of a young man’s personal and sexual awakening through nightlife. It’s difficult to know exactly what Pigalle is about. Maybe it’s a similar idea, and it’s hanging off Bangarra dancer Waangenga Blanco’s journey through one night out. Exactly what that journey is is unclear, and his rubber-limbed contemporary dancing – as beautifully choreographed and finely wrought as it is – feels out of step with other elements of the production.
You don’t necessarily need a narrative arc in this sort of show if it’s able to land its punches in each moment. But for each act that genuinely soars in Pigalle, there’s one that’s dead on arrival. That’s either due to an uninspiring musical choice (three minutes is too many minutes of ‘Rubberband Man’ at the start of a show) or a disconnect from the show’s central theme. Or it’s due to the sound design, which doesn’t quite get the audience pumping and has the vocals far too low in the mix. 'Don't Leave Me This Way', 'You Got the Love' and 'You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real) should all lift the canvas roof off this tent.
And really, the audience is here to hear Marcia, and there were times when you could barely make out her voice on opening night. These sorts of kinks should already be ironed out when you’re charging audiences upwards of $70 a pop. You’d be better off getting tickets for later in the run, when these issues should be sorted.
It’s not all bad news though: Chaska Halliday and Zachary Webster are appropriately seductive as backing vocalists, and local singer iOTA is always an electrifying presence onstage, even if he seems a little unsure as to his purpose in this show.
But things really heat up when burlesque performer Kitty Bang Bang (aka Kathryn Louise McLoughlin) is onstage. Her striptease to ‘Knock on Wood’ is subversive and hilarious, and her fire act is genuinely thrilling, setting light to body parts most of us would keep well clear of open flames.
The show ends with a full-cast rendition of the Bee Gees classic ‘You Should Be Dancing’, designed to send you out into the night on a high, ready to dance and take in all that this city has to offer. But when you stumble out of the Spiegeltent and into the festival garden (it’s a “festival garden”, not a “festival village” this year), you might be wondering, “where?” This year, the corner of Hyde Park that’s formerly been the bustling hub of the festival – and a favourite hangout for people in their 20s and 30s – is a decidedly low-key affair. With a tiny footprint, limited food and beverage options and not a hint of a party, it’s not somewhere you can imagine spending languid, warm summer nights with friends. It’s a disappointing area to cut costs in a festival that’s meant to be a centrepiece of Sydney’s summer.
Check out our top 20 picks of the 2019 Sydney Festival program.