The Maj’s cabaret season returns for its 2012 outing this month. One show that got OUTinPerth’s attention was the gender bending proposition of Guy / Doll. Where the boys are set to sings songs traditionally performed by female singers and the girls get access to the tunes normally reserved for the men.
Graeme Watson caught up with Nick Maclaine, one of the team who devised the show and performer Julia Jenkins who will be taking on some of the manlier songs in the program.
Nick Maclaine explained how the idea came about, ‘It’s been devised by myself, Andrew Williams and Izaak Lim. Andrew, Isaac and I have worked together on a couple of Maj projects which have been quite varied actually. We did a Tom Lehrer tribute, a night of parody songs and comedy songs and we did a tribute to Cole Porter. They’re all quite different.
‘So were thinking of what we wanted to do this year, and we’ve long had this idea that something we love when we go see cabaret shows is the guys doing crossovers, singing songs that are meant for girls, and vice versa. It’s a really cool thing.
‘We started thinking about different songs and what changing the gender of the singer does to the context of the song and how you can have a lot of fun with that.
For seasoned cabaret performer Jenkins playing with gender roles is one of the things she loves most about the flexibility of the cabaret format, ‘One the things I love most about doing cabaret and doing my own shows is that I do tend to choose a lot of guys songs and sing David Bowie and Lou Reed. For me the glory of cabaret is that you can get away with anything really.
Choosing which songs to include in the show was a challenge though, Maclaine laughs when he confesses that the first list of songs the team came up with ran at over two and half hours, way too much for the proposed ninety minute long show.
As the cast have just begun rehearsals the final list is still in a state of flux and Maclaine jokes that only something from Wicked and something from Phantom of the Opera are guaranteed to make it to the final show since they are on the show’s promotional poster. Maclaine describes the selection of tunes as a real mix of styles, ‘It’s probably about seventy percent music theatre in favour to thirty percent pop. We love pop and while the musical theatre stuff has kind of been done before we want to play the game with pop as well. It’ll be things like, Michael Jackson, there’s stuff from Wicked that we love, some jazzier standards, Rogers and Hammerstein and really a change of context…Playing havoc with people’s expectations of the songs in a way that’s fun.’
Jenkins is also enthusiastic about collaborating with the other cast members, joining her on stage will be David Bowyer, Corinne Cowling and Will O’Mahony, ‘I’m really excited about doing this show because for so long I’ve been creating my own shows and working on my own. So to be able to work with, not only people, but new people. That is going to be amazing because I love that sort of collaboration that goes on in the rehearsal process. But I get really excited about the cabaret season at The Maj, I absolutely love it.’
Guy / Doll is downstairs at The Maj from June 27 to June 30. Tickets can be purchased from BOCS.
Graeme Watson
