Review: Naomi Price rides her Wrecking Ball into QLD’s Top 50 Best & Brightest.

Nominated this week in the Courier Mail’s Qweekend magazine in the Top 50 Best & Brightest in Queensland for 2014, Naomi Price has a lot to sing about.

The cabaret star earlier this year won a Matilda Award for Best Musical or Cabaret and a Groundling Award for Best Musical Production in her co-devised show (with Adam Brunes), Rumour Has It: Sixty Minutes Inside Adele.

And now Price exchanges a fat suit and London potty mouth, to a Nashville twang and a rigorous gym twerkout for her new cabaret parody show of Miley Cyrus in Wrecking Ball, currently playing at the Judith Wright Centre.

Interestingly, the show was not set on some big concert stage, nite club (or the gutter outside), but in Nashville where Miley has come to pay her respects at the funeral of an old frenemy … Hannah Montana. Superbly constructed, the cabaret gave a new understanding of the little twerk gone mad, as she shed the layers of a Disney invented character that the rest of the world expects Miley Cyrus to wear forever. She’s being wearing somebody else’s clothes and ideals, including the juggernaut weight of Disney on her shoulders for so long, no wonder she ends up naked on a wrecking ball.

Although I’m not a fan of Miley’s antics (but quietly, some of her song rock!), Price managed to interweave a sympathetic story that extracted tears from an audience of Miley fence sitters (and even haters). But for the record, I would rather watch Naomi Price’s cabaret Wrecking Ball than a Miley Cyrus concert. Price’s ability to tell a great story, with tongue in cheek (or in Miley’s case, waaaay outside her mouth and down her chest), supported by a great rockin band; this is a highly entertaining night at the theatre, no matter what side of the Miley fence you sit on.

Mixing bubblegum pop, bluegrass, and country, the set-list includes some of Miley’s most famous numbers including ‘The Climb’, ‘Party in the U.S.A.’, and of course ‘Wrecking Ball’, but also managed to squeeze in a few cheeky numbers from her one-hit-wonder dad with ‘Achy Breaky Heart’, and God Mother, Dolly Parton’s ‘9 to 5’.

The 65 minute show featuring Naomi Price with Mik Easterman, Rachel Everett-Jones, Michael Manikus, Jason McGregor and Chris Pearson, Wrecking Ball is recommended for mature audiences 15 years and over, and contains coarse language and adult themes.

PS. There are no naked ‘Wrecking Ball’ re-enactents in this production …. sorry fellas.

No plans for tonight? Go and see the closing night performance of the little red company’s Wrecking Ball at the Judith Wright Centre. For more information, see their website: Wrecking Ball at the Judith Wright Centre