Cherry

Cherry
Written & performed by Sarah Carroll. Midsumma Festival. The Butterfly Club – Downstairs. 8 – 11 February 2023

It’s billed as ‘a little bit of cabaret, a little bit of comedy, and a whole lot of Katy Perry.’  That’s more or less true, especially the last, but Cherry is really a narrative – as touching as it is funny – about a fangirl’s obsession with Katy Perry – the story of a fangirl who grows up and must let go and find herself. 

In 2008, 13-year-old Sarah sees Katy Perry on ABC’s Rage, singing ‘I Kissed a Girl’.  Something clicks, some need is met, and the obsession begins.  The obsession will persist into Sarah’s twenties.  It’s everything.  It’s posters on the bedroom walls, it’s every song, every album, every concert. One, in Sydney, is Katy Perry live, and Sarah goes with her Mum, and they have very expensive, very bad seats and afterwards Sarah can only fantasise about meeting her idol.  It’s comedy but it's sad and it all has the ring of truth.  There’s the likewise expensive Katy merch.  There’s all the ups and downs of Katy’s career.  And there’s the feel of belonging as one of the ‘Katy Kats’.  It’s almost as if Sarah lives only through Katy Perry, her own identity on hold, subsumed entirely – while, really, she’s working out who she is.

Sarah is a lonely only child in Sydney’s western suburbs.  Her parents are middle class – Mum gets PhD and Dad likes to cook.  They’re generous, indulgent - but preoccupied.  Sarah wonders, in hindsight, if Katy Perry was the ‘big sister’ she never had. 

Maybe it’s an attraction to Perry’s beauty and glamour (the show features a life size cardboard cut-out) and Sarah’s sexual and identity uncertainties.  Most certainly it’s the lyrics of Perry’s songs which address and express a teenage girl’s concerns, dreams, issues.  Watch any extravaganza Perry concert on YouTube and you’ll see that about 95% of the screaming ecstatic audience are girls.  Sexual?  Yes - or is it identification? 

But what is outstanding in Sarah Carroll’s telling of her story is her detailed creation of a 13-year-old girl with all the shyness and dreaminess, and sudden assertions, and fiddling nervously with her clothes.  A girl who’s teased and sneered at by the mean girls at school, but who can still be wistful about them.  And then we see Sarah get older; she wants to go to Hollywood but ends up in Vancouver… And we start to get the sense that the continuing obsession with Katy Perry is possibly blocking Sarah from coming out as herself – until she learns a new term (well, new to her): bisexual...

In all the whole show, Carroll is very ably assisted by her onstage panel operator for music and sound cues, plus leaf blower operator and all over soul sister who clearly enjoys Carroll’s talent and performance.  I’d like to give her credit, but I can’t find her name in the Midsumma program.   

No doubt this show is far more meaningful for Katy Perry fans – or at least those who have an intimate knowledge of every aspect of her career.  Some of the audience seemed to be as big fans as Carroll herself and uninhibitedly join her in the songs.  But there is still plenty to marvel at and enjoy in her amazing performance, in her powers of observation, in her singing, and in her ability to mock herself and to switch in a second from pathos to humour and back again. 

Michael Brindley

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