Cole

First performed at last year's Adelaide Cabaret Festival and now in Melbourne for Midsumma, Cole is a cabaret show on the life and songs of Cole Porter as performed by singer-pianist Michael Griffiths. The clever script by Anna Goldsworthy weaves together a generous selection of timeless Porter tunes with anecdotes taken from his personal life, peppered with plenty of those bon mots he was known for knocking off.

Clearly a seasoned performer with plenty of innate musicality, Mr Griffiths performed the songs with a better voice than Mr Porter ever possessed, though his approach to both vocal and instrumental phrasing was very (for want of a better word) straight. This traditionalist approach evoked the 1920s and 1930s and indeed Mr Griffiths often sounded more like Hugh Laurie doing Bertie Wooster than he did Mr Porter, who despite the popular misconception of him as an English toff was of course American. Mr Griffiths gave us an arch Englishman with a gay drawl, a voice which bore little resemblance to Mr Porter's, and in an accent which he found difficult to sustain.

This decision to have Mr Griffiths perform as Mr Porter, rather than recount his life in the third person, was the show's central weakness. His musical talents notwithstanding, Mr Griffiths did not imbue the spoken dialogue with the melancholy implicit in much of the writing. Particularly ill-judged was the inclusion of a section where Mr Griffiths, illuminated in spotlight on a darkened stage to highlight the moment, recounted the horrific accident in which his horse rolled on him and crushed his legs - the emotion necessary to make this moment resonate for the audience was just not there.

In contrast to the above, at the end of the show Mr Griffiths broke character to speak to us before performing a short encore. As himself, he was warm, engaging and far more relaxed than he had been while playing Porter - which made me wish he had tackled the whole show in this manner.

Alex Paige