One of Adelaide’s favourite homegrown cabaret talents, FRANKLY, is delighted to be returning to Adelaide Cabaret Fringe Festival with her hit show, 'DOOM BOX'.
The Adelaide Cabaret Fringe Festival holds a personal connection to FRANKLY – it's also where she had her cabaret debut.
“Adelaide Cabaret Fringe Festival was my very first season. . . And it was a really lovely experience for me. I fell in love with cabaret and it just kind of all springboarded from there,” FRANKLY explains. “I think there’s a real sense of home with Adelaide Cabaret Fringe Festival which is why I continuously come back here, and I also love Adelaide. It’s my hometown, and I love the community of a small festival. Every time I come back, it’s very supportive and homely, and the people are great.”
“I like to contribute to the culture of cabaret in Adelaide.”
FRANKLY credits the festival’s commitment to nurturing and showcasing local talent and its emphasis on community, as part of its continued success.
“The festival is a lovely way to access people in your community. Normal, everyday people telling their stories which is what cabaret is all about. It’s about taking up your own space. Some people use that to talk about life experiences that they’ve overcome or deep-dive between a weird connection – for example, between Roger Rabbit and The Beatles, but that’s still fascinating. I want to know how someone else’s brain works.”
Image © Alexis D. Lea Photography
“People come because it is a window to what other people are going through, and it helps you to understand your own feelings, when you hear other people talk about theirs and it gives you an insight. You can go and see so many things, and it’s so local with 95 per cent of the programme being South Australians – or those that are coming from interstate are Adelaide expats – so it’s a real community hub and that’s what people love about it.”
Early in her career, FRANKLY established herself as working on predominately intense and emotionally heavy shows, but decided on a change in direction with 'DOOM BOX', which, despite the misleading title, FRANKLY would describe as “a straight-up comedy show”.
“I was writing shows about domestic violence and feminism and mental health, and I would have these incredible exchanges with people after the show, but that was also a double-edged sword. . . As much as I loved people trusting and sharing their experiences with me and telling me about it, it was also deeply exhausting as an artist having to take on not only my own emotions about being that vulnerable all the time, but also the emotional weight of how I know it affects the community so badly. It was very heavy.”
“I wrote 'DOOM BOX' as a break for myself where I wanted to just have a fun show. I challenged the idea of 'do I have to write something dark or something political in order to feel I deserve a platform?’. . . And I thought, that’s kind of true, we allow lots of people to just be silly for the sake of it, so why don't we allow women to do that just as much.”
FRANKLY describes the experience of writing 'DOOM BOX', where she embraced her inner clown, as both cathartic and liberating: “We are just going to have meaningless fun for an hour and we are going to forget about what else is going on this week, and I feel that is also just as powerful.”
The Adelaide talent describes 'DOOM BOX' as having three styles of cabaret songs, from classic, long-form, cabaret narrative pieces to 30-second satire pieces and “fun pop bops” which boast all the qualities of a hit pop song, but, as she describes, with “insane lyrics”.
“That was kind of the brief I gave myself on this project. Write a body of music that was catchy and has all of the qualities of a pop song. It's fun, it's catchy and gets stuck in your head but all of the lyrics are just insane.”
FRANKLY’s efforts were rewarded with rave reviews and a prestigious Green Room Award nomination for Outstanding Original Songs. But a year on, FRANKLY says Adelaide Cabaret Fringe Festival will be the last time she will be performing 'DOOM BOX' for the foreseeable future: “It seems fitting to perform it one more time in Adelaide."
Following Adelaide Cabaret Fringe Festival, FRANKLY will be getting to work on another comedy show, and while she remains tight-lipped on what that will be about, she does allude to being inspired by her constant travels as an artist. “I’m undecided about whether I want to write another episodic show or not, but I do have an obsession with country road houses and maybe writing a country road house musical.”
While that might sound like an unusual topic for inspiration, FRANKLY assures that’s the point of what she does. “I want people to have fun. The world has been very weird and uneasy – having a good time is honestly so healing. Another big part of what I do is when people see a show and go ‘I can’t believe you could do that?’ and I go ‘you can do that too, everyone can do that’. I want people to come and watch people do weird things and give them permission to do something new. Seeing someone taking risks and them then being inspired to take risks.”
'DOOM BOX' plays The Monocle @ The Howling Owl 27-31 May. Adelaide Cabaret Fringe Festival is on 24 May-2 June.
