Raising ‘Ell!

This cabaret claims to chart a descent into Internet Hell.  The seven deadly sins in 2017 are now Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Tinder, Grindr and Youtube.   Ella Filar’s thesis is: “Are we real or VIRTUAL? Once we’ve been posted, pinged, tweeted and swiped right, left and right again…..”

Promising politically and socially charged “Kabarat with a ‘K’, Filar certainly delivers on a Weimar-esque look and feel to the show, with a slick series of what she terms "Klezma funk" songs.  Four singers (Linda Cookson, Bruce Langdon, Olivia Laskowski and Chris Molyneux) dressed all in white with rakish hats and pale faces, accompanied by a trio of saxophone, violin and keyboard echoed that European cabaret tradition, and rolled out a slew of sarcastic and often bitter songs as they prowled around the tiny stage, using every inch of it with professional aplomb.

A large LCD screen acted like a DVD menu between each song, choosing which particular social media platform to skewer next, and putting up a series of memes, while the singers drifted over to one side of the stage, seemingly absorbed by watching whatever pops up on their smartphones next.  It's a clever conceit, but conceptually the songs, the theme and the audio-visual content never quite married up for me, to give the show the punchiness I felt it could really achieve.

While entertaining, and certainly musically accomplished, this show had a couple of other technical issues that rather frustratingly stepped between the performers and their audience.  The singers were (as far as I could tell) unamplified and were competing with the instruments in such a cramped space.  So the lyrics of each song, which demanded careful attention, were often lost in the mix, either as performers turned away from the audience, or danced around, or even prowled up and down the aisle. Then, too, their diction was often compromised by the demands of the performance, as was the singer ensemble, with a number of ragged entries and cutoffs.  

Some of the songs were delightful, and truly tapped into Those People You Know Online, such as "Hello, Su.." where performative activism meets blatant narcissism; a cute duet between 'Donnie and Vlad" in "Hello Vlad", and the horrors of rampant capitalism in "Cash Cow".   But the other songs seemed less about people and the internet, and more about cutting commentary on people generally in the 21st century.  While "Posthuman Neo Feminazzi Tango" has all the right buzzwords in the title, it was more about the ageing woman than anything else.  I feel this show is still evolving, but it has an excellent outlook.

Alex Armstrong