Adelaide Cabaret Festival – RRAMP

Christine Johnston, best known as one of the three Kransky Sisters, brings her latest oddball venture, RRAMP, to the Adelaide Cabaret Festival.

Songs, dances, animation and more are all delivered with deadpan kookiness.

For 70 minutes Johnston sings skewed stories about chickens, tax receipts, scabs, kitchen utensils and her love of collecting and keeping things in jars (including skin from a suntan in 1978) in a wacky musical comedy.

The “band”, including Johnston, were all dressed in black and one gets the feeling that, as a performance art piece, it wouldn’t be out of place in the New York of Andy Warhol’s ‘Factory’ in the mid-1960s.

Johnston, in ankle length dress with her hair pulled back in a tight bun, recites linear love stories with a neurotic edge and a quirky base (which she tends to invert) while managing to look like a long dead Anglican schoolmistress – she even yodels like a corpse.

Her equally deadpan assistants Lisa O’Neill and Peter Nelson expand the range of the show with O’Neill impressing the audience with some perfectly peculiar dancing as Nelson shines on guitar, keyboards and trumpet. All three playing cowbells went over especially well with the audience.

While the show itself could be seen as anomaly of the Cabaret Festival, judging by the audience response alone it’s a clear success. But really, as Kate Ceberano says, Cabaret is an evolving art form, so bring on the weird and wacky!