I think it was during the Adelaide Cabaret Festival in June this year that I decided that it was time I put myself on the line and come up with a new project. Cabaret Confessional is an idea that had been gestating for a while. I had wanted to try something new, and I suppose something I could call ‘my own’. The idea of doing it had been about for a long time, but I didn’t have the discipline to actually make it happen.
I decided to book dates for the show, and therefore give myself some sort of deadline to work to. My friend Paul at the bar La Boheme graciously offered me his venue and so I registered it with the Feast Festival and started telling people about it.
In July I was quite upbeat in telling people I was working on a show of my own, and told them all about the concept that it would focus on secrets and that I hoped to write a lot of the material myself. In August I was still quite gladly letting everyone I knew that I was going to write this show. As September rolled around and so did other time-consuming projects I started talking about Cabaret Confessional a little less, and when I did, I described it as the show “i really ought to get busy and write”. In October I didn’t really talk about it much at all. Since then it’s almost become the show that dare not speak its name.
I thought that the more I worked on it the clearer my focus would become in terms of what the show was about and would contain. I think the opposite has happened. A week and a bit away, it now feels like the scariest thing I’ve ever committed myself to professionally. My hopes for it are a lot less grand than they were when I began the process and at this stage I will be happy if I emerge from it without leaving my musical career lying behind me in tatters.
I have learned a lot from the process already (including that I should have given myself MUCH more time to put the show together) and I am sure that I’ll discover a lot more about the show and myself in the next three weeks.
The season begins Tuesday Nov 13, with performances Nov 14, 15, 20, 21 and 22 all at 6.30pm at La Boheme on Grote St, Adelaide.
Tags: Adelaide Cabaret Festival, Cabaret Confessional, Feast Festival, La Boheme Bar
