La Soirée – The Courier-Mail Spiegeltent

La Soirée – Brisbane Festival 2012

If you are looking for not just a good night, but a great night out, then go and book your tickets now for La Soirée in The Courier-Mail Spiegeltent at Southbank.

A mash-up of sideshow circus, cabaret, and burlesque, La Soirée is fun, naughty, amazing jaw-dropping stuff, and well, just a hoot really. With a small stage in the middle of a circus-ring tent it has the quaint feel of the travelling troubadours from eras past.

With humble beginnings in the 2004 Edinburgh Festival as La Clique, the high-class low-brow variety show won an Lawrence Olivier Award for Best Entertainment. I would have to agree.

Heralding the finest, weirdest, naughtiest, and sexiest acts from the international stage, the line-up of artistes change through-out the season, but for the opening night we were privileged to the following acts:

The English Gents (Hamish McCann and Denis Lock), complete with bowler hats, pin-striped suits, newspapers (and patriotic briefs), displayed feats of amazing strength and skill as a very refined balancing act.

Hamish McCann later entertained with a lovely Gene Kelly, Singing in the Rain tribute, complete with lamp-post, which quickly turned into the cleverest concept for a pole dance I’ve seen to date. His walking-on-air move was a high-light.

Denis Lock, also from the English Gents later performed a sumo-wrestling awe-inspiring balancing feat with a tower of chairs.

Amy G with her “ahem” musical ability is one of those type of gob-smacking, shockingly funny acts that ups the anti on the vaudevillian ping-pong ball act.

Nate Cooper then kept us on edge with his bumbling juggling act, wielding roller-skates and machetes. (This is one show where you definitely do not want to sit in the front row!)

Ursula Martinez heralding from Spain (via Croydon), then delighted us with her hanky-panky magic strip-tease and then later with a cheeky cabaret act, teaching us the most important Spanish words – the crude ones, while singing an ode to her mother.

Jess Love, a cute comedienne with a penchant for hoola-hoops. I challenge you to count how many hoops this girl can do. And of course, every circus show variety act needs a trapeze artist, which La Soiree duly noted with the addition of the tantalisingly talented Miss Flea (Felicia O’Brien).

Amongst the many highlights of the show is the prima donna chanteuse Meow Meow; glamorous, eccentric, virtuosic, unpredictable, irreverent and hilarious are just a few words that help to describe the indescribable. The audience participation barbie doll dancing chorus was quite amusing.

And now for the Pièce de résistance, the “Adonis in denim”. David O’mer (aka Bath Boy) is the sexiest thing in a bathtub. Berline born gymnast, David showed us how much fun bath-time can be as he performed aerial ballet soaked in hot, wet jeans. Here you have the hard choice of whether to sit in the front or not. On the down-side, you’ll be in the splash zone, but on the up-side you’ll get a great view of those glistening abs.

La Soirée in The Courier-Mail Spiegeltent runs for the length of the Brisbane Festival from 8 – 29 September. It’s general seating so my tip would be to get there early to get the views of all that eye candy.

The Spiegeltent also sports a beer garden outside so if you want to soak up the Brisbane Festival atmosphere without going to see the show, head on down to the Courier-Mail Spiegeltent at Southbank. Every night kicks off from 5pm with resident DJs and live music on weekends.  Just follow the sky of lanterns under the Brisbane Airport International Lantern Garden outside the QPAC centre.

Warning: This production contains nudity, coarse language, adult subject matter and loud music.