01-07-2025
David Campbell, Virginia Gay, Natalie Abbott and Victoria Falconer on Australian cabaret
David Campbell inspired Virginia Gay to get into cabaret.
She was just 14 years old, and Campbell was teaching at her performing arts high school in Sydney's inner west.
"He was very young and very handsome," Gay recalls. "I developed a psychotic crush on him."
Still in her school uniform, she would travel to RSLs across Sydney to watch Campbell perform, sometimes carrying the gift of a bunch of gerberas in her arms.
"David Campbell is one of the best in the world at cabaret, even [in his early 20s]. He felt so close to us in age, so we were like, 'Ah, you're doing it!'" she says.
"And I remember thinking, 'I cannot get enough of this art form.'
"I loved that sense that, with no set at all and with just a little bit of subtle lighting, just David and a piano, he'd suddenly built a whole world."
This year, Gay asked Campbell — who is now a good friend who never brings up her teenage obsession — to be one of the headliners for Adelaide Cabaret Festival, her second and final as artistic director. It's a job Campbell held himself, 15 years ago, from 2009 to 2011.
Campbell exemplified one strand of Gay's 2025 program: a focus on legacy artists, alongside the likes of cabaret royalty Rizo and Carlotta.
The rest of last month's festival combined the "cutting edge" of contemporary cabaret — with local artists like Victoria Falconer and Reuben Kaye, who assumes the role of artistic director next year — and performers working across genres, including performance art, burlesque, drag, circus and comedy.
It also looked to the future of the form, with artists including Natalie Abbott (ABC TV's Aftertaste; Muriel's Wedding the Musical) and Seann Miley Moore (Hedwig and the Angry Inch) performing their debut shows.
Funnily, Campbell's first festival as artistic director was Gay's first as a performer, in Gentlemen Prefer Jokes, with Trevor Ashley and Courtney Act.
"I was like a demented nurse who also just got up and did her dance numbers, which was little more than a box step," she says, with a laugh.
Within three years, she was performing her debut solo show at the festival: Dirty Pretty Songs, following it up with Songs to Self-Destruct To.
Along with artists like Yve Blake, Eddie Perfect and Tim Minchin, Gay honed her creative voice through cabaret. It led her to making works of theatre like Cyrano, which she toured last year to Edinburgh Fringe.
"Sometimes people dismiss cabaret, and I think it is so vital," she says.
"There's a real immediacy in the authenticity of a totally unique, magical voice that is delivered very intimately and with a really strong connection to an audience.
"It is about what makes live theatre exciting, and it is unreplicatable."
While Gay is still a regular on stage and screen, she rarely performs cabaret anymore. Instead, taking on the top job at Adelaide Cabaret Festival has made her realise how much she enjoys creating space for other artists.
"Perhaps it's a kind of ego death, where I don't need to be the star," she says. "What I love is to make a space for other people to play in — both audience and performer."
David Campbell came to cabaret out of necessity. In the early 90s, he moved from Adelaide to Sydney to work as an actor, but a couple of years into his career, work started to dry up.
The son of Cold Chisel frontman Jimmy Barnes, Campbell had been reluctant to sing professionally because of the inevitable comparison to his father.
His then-manager encouraged him to do it anyway; to "do something different [to Barnes]", Campbell recalls.
That's when he started combining personal monologues with songs from musical theatre, performing them on stage in bars and cabaret venues to audiences of anywhere between 6 and 20 people.
"[My cabaret] started out very strict and clunky, and very angsty and emotional," Campbell says.
"I was so stressed by being on stage, being a people-pleaser and not wanting to do anything wrong."
At the time, the local cabaret scene was dominated by powerful women performers, including Nancye Hayes and Geraldine Turner.
"It was seen as a chanteuse-y world, and here I was, an upstart, trying to be like, well, maybe I could do that too," he says.
But it wasn't until Campbell moved to America in the late 90s that he truly found his cabaret voice.
"Going to the US was extremely freeing for me because they didn't know who I was, they didn't know who my dad was, so I could start again," he says.
"It was really a great safe place, without the eyes of our industry here in Australia looking at me going, 'Ah, he sucks. There were only 15 people in the audience, and he did a Jimmy Barnes joke.'"
In New York, he met performers — including White Christmas star Rosemary Clooney and Broadway legend Barbara Cook — who encouraged him to try new things, and taught him how to work a room.
"These people were themselves on stage," he says. "They were the song. You know, my dad does it: it's when the song and the singer become one. It's just this amazing thing.
"You do need runs on the board to do that. It doesn't just happen."
Now 30 years into his cabaret career, Campbell says he wants to be "reaching down" to support the next generation — just like Clooney, Hayes and more did for him.
During his tenure at Adelaide Cabaret Festival, he nurtured emerging cabaret artists, like Gay, Christie Whelan Browne and Hugh Sheridan. He also set up Class of Cabaret, an ongoing initiative of the festival, which mentors high school students.
"There might be some young David Campbell or Virginia Gay; nerdy kids that don't fit in with everybody else that want to do this," he says.
"To be able to say, 'Come in, this place is for you as well,' is really important."
Like Gay and Campbell, Victoria Falconer is a cabaret artist who wants to create space for others.
She's the co-artistic director of Hayes Theatre Co in Sydney, a small theatre dedicated to musicals, which in June hosted a winter cabaret season, including some of the artists from the Adelaide festival.
She's also the musical director for Hedwig and the Angry Inch, now in Melbourne for Rising, before touring to Sydney.
For Adelaide Cabaret Festival, Falconer curated a late-night salon, The Parlour — an opportunity to bring together performers from across Australian and international cabaret, including the local independent scene.
"It's the perfect level of controlled chaos, where I personally feel like I thrive," she says.
"Seeing the magic that happens when you bring everybody together is something special; that's what The Parlour is about."
But, like Campbell, Falconer had to leave Australia to forge a career in cabaret.
She moved to London in 2003, where she formed "risque cabaret character comedy" duo EastEnd Cabaret, with German performance artist Bernadette Byrne (aka Bernie Dieter), started playing the musical saw and experimented with androgyny on stage.
"I knew I wanted to make cabaret because I was obsessed with Marlene Dietrich and cabaret performers of the 30s," she says.
"When I first started performing with [Byrne], we thought that we were the only people doing what we were doing.
"Once we started putting it out there, other weirdos started finding us, finding each other, [and] creating [cabaret] nights."
It's a reflection of the DIY attitude of cabaret artists across the world — where performers stage their shows wherever they can, from dedicated theatres to queer and dive bars.
"Cabaret gets made, regardless of whether there's a stage or not," Falconer says.
"There's an inherent need to create new spaces where there weren't spaces before; to express beyond what a lot of mainstream genres can do; and to connect to audiences that maybe don't feel as comfortable or welcome in mainstream spaces.
Falconer stresses the depth of talent that exists now in the Australian — and especially the Adelaide — arts scene.
"When I moved back from London and lived here for a few years, I knew the arts scene here was fabulous," she says. "But I think it needs to be talked about more."
As for what's distinctive about Australian cabaret, Falconer describes it as "larrikinism that then gets draped in feathers and sequins".
Her role as host and curator of The Parlour is about outreach; finding performers who are already doing something like cabaret on Australian stages (and in the corners of bars).
"If I find them, I will put them on a cabaret stage, introduce them to a bunch of other people who are also doing weird stuff, and foster community that way."
One of the artists who performed their debut cabaret show at Adelaide Cabaret Festival was musical theatre and TV actor Natalie Abbott.
Her show Bad Hand was a meditation on grief, love and loss — through song. It was the product of a real tragedy: the sudden death of her partner.
In May last year, Abbott's boyfriend production runner Ryan Cuskelly, died after he was diagnosed with a severe and highly aggressive immune deficiency disorder and virus.
"When my partner passed away, I thought, 'I'm not going to ever perform again,'" Abbott says.
"I was going through a really nihilistic stage of my life … One day I woke up and I was like, 'Oh, nothing matters.'"
Perhaps unexpectedly, it was a feeling that propelled her forwards.
"Some people might think that [thinking nothing matters] is a sad realisation but it's actually very freeing."
In the past, Abbott had been overwhelmed by feelings of self-doubt. So, when Virginia Gay suggested Abbott make a cabaret show while she was deep in her "nihilistic phase", she thought, "Why not?"
"Because, in 100 years, no one's gonna remember if it was good or if it was bad," she says.
Abbott decided to play a collection of country songs on acoustic guitar about life and death.
"I have things to say now," she says. "[Writing this cabaret] I've been able to get a lot of my thoughts out there in a creative way. And I've been able to get back to my creative roots, and I've picked up my guitar again, and I'm singing songs that make me happy."
Bad Hand soon expanded from a "country cabaret" to something featuring all the styles of music she enjoys, from musical theatre and country to pop and Australian rock.
Think Rodgers and Hammerstein, but also Hunters & Collectors, with a little bit of Kasey Chambers and Tina Arena mixed in. And a song from the soundtrack to Twisters.
"The songs that are in my cabaret have been chosen for a particular reason: because they now have a very tremendous impact on me. And they have had an impact on me through this horrific year, and have helped me grieve," she says.
"You try to find meaning behind loss, because if it doesn't mean anything, then, what's it for?"
