Feast is the word for Adelaide cabaret stars Michael Griffiths and Amelia Ryan.
While the annual Adelaide Feast Festival has served as a homing beacon for artists of all persuasions, the signal has been particularly strong for cabaret. With 'Livvie And Pete's Michael Griffiths recently winning a Helpmann Award and Amelia Ryan selling out solo shows at home and abroad, returning to the festival state has been a boon for both of their careers, as Michael explains.
“We’re both very proudly Adelaide based artists; in the show we tell the story about how we’ve moved to Adelaide and it’s changed our lives. We tell that story wherever we go: we’re Adelaide proud. Moving back to Adelaide has been the best thing for my career.”
The city is now a cabaret melting pot that has facilitated collaborations between the duo; Michael firstly acted as Amelia Ryan’s musical director on 'Lady Liberty' in Edinburgh, and now the two have joined forces to pay homage to the iconic Peter Allen and Olivia Newton-John. Amelia reflects upon the importance of forging fruitful creative alliances.
“I think you really need to pick your collaborators carefully; even though we come from quite different backgrounds in cabaret, we have very similar tastes aesthetically. We’ve been very lucky to find such a conducive creative partnership as well as a friendship.”
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For Michael, honesty and transparency are essential when jointly constructing a new work.
“The thing with Amelia and I is that we respect each other’s work but the other thing we realise is that you are going to have bad ideas and that’s fine; Amelia won’t hesitate in saying 'nup' [to a bad idea} and I’m the same; we can both say without any repercussion 'no, that’s shit'. It’s very easy to say yes to people, it’s much harder to say no. We’re in the lucky position that we can say no and it’s nothing personal; it was just a shit idea and we gave it a go.”
While the duo have produced acclaimed solo cabaret works, they have done in their inimitable styles; Amelia has utilised humour and parody to recount her own life story while Michael has created seamless biographical patchworks of famous artists, such as Madonna and Annie Lennox. With 'Livvie And Pete', there has been a cross-pollination of styles, as Michael recounts.
“I don’t think we intentionally planned to marry our styles; it wasn’t a kind of intellectual decision but we’ve sort of met in the middle.”
“We’ve wanted to try each other’s shoes on individually but now we’ve come together and she’s put mine on and I’ve put hers on... Heels.”
It is important to note that while Michael and Amelia celebrate the songs and lives of Allen and Newton-John, Michael emphasises that they do not transform into the artists on stage in a theatrical sense.
“There’s no impersonation in the show; there are roller skates, there are maracas, there’s cossies; we have fun with the characters but whenever we speak, it’s Michael and Amelia.”Amelia is perhaps the female cabaret version of Weird Al Yankovic, famed for humorously rewriting lyrics to serve her narrative purposes. There has been no such tinkering with the source material this time, apart from arranging many solo tracks as duets, as Michael explains.
“The only way we’ve made our marks on the songs is that we’ve made them duets. We have arranged, for instance, 'I Honestly Love You' and because Peter wrote it, it does lend itself perfectly to being a duet.”
The show recently received a warm reception when it made its debut in Ballarat; Feast is the next stop, with potentially an Adelaide Fringe destination in the future. Xanadu not miss this boy and girl from South Oz.
