Christine Weir and Godfrey Johnson’s Tainted Love is the perfect cabaret show for this tiny, new basement venue on the fringe of Green Point’s alternative ghetto; it feels like an underground club in Berlin during the Weimar Republic.
With songs such as Masochism Tango (Tom Lehrer), Hanky Panky (Stephen Sondheim), Tainted Love (Marc Almond) and Fuck you very much (Lilly Allen), they explore love in its kinkier dimensions, from playful sadomasochism (Have you waxed your crack? by Johnson and Weir) to Sapphic love (I Kissed a Girl by Katie Perry). It’s on the light and funny side, and you’d have to be quite a prude to be offended.
Choreographer Fiona du Plooy, who made an impression in the camp country and western cabaret Angels on Horseback last year, directs. The fingerprints of that show are evident here.
Johnson and Weir make a superb double act. They are top-drawer performers, with Weir’s exceptional vocal talents and Johnson’s (who sings too) musical versatility. On stage, they have natural comic reciprocity, their witty repartee carried with aplomb into the cheeky and sometimes tricky choreography.
One hopes this will be the start of wonderful duo and great things to come.
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Photo: Giovanni Sterelli
As desert encroaches on Cape Town, nuclear waste leaks into the surroundings, seeds die in the ground, water is rationed to the populace while the country’s military authorities hoard supplies. and taxi associations run the city – these are the final days before the environmental apocalypse of 2020.
Noah of Cape Town is one of the most original works you are likely to see. In South Africa’s first solely a cappella musical, Graham Weir’s inspired compositions and beautiful lyrics are given magnificent expression by Amanda Tiffin’s arrangements for 16 voices.
With fine performances from (among others) Christine Weir, Eben Genis, Nqobile Sipamla, Gys de Villiers and Anton Luitingh, the result is a moving theatrical experience that stands head and shoulders above the clichéd, formula-driven, tired sounds of musicals the world over.
Dicky Longhurst’s ingenious, mobile set of metal triangles that assemble and disassemble, functions almost as a metaphor for the a cappella nature of the whole creation.
The at times over-written dialogue however is not as strong as the music, and the under-developed book, with the introduction of last minute love plots, suffers credibility problems largely because the environmental message is confused with mumbo jumbo, off the wall, New Age conspiracy theories, though these are nicely spoofed in second half by an officially sanctioned psychic fraud.
Producer Simon Cooper is to be congratulated on his courage and vision to stage this ambitious and extraordinary work.
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