Irrational Thinking
Rumour Has It: Sixty Minutes Inside Adele is no joke, nor is it a mere jukebox musical. Creator/performer Naomi Price runs Paul Andrew through the thematic depths of the show and the power of music in general.
“Why a cabaret about Adele? I suppose for me personally her music speaks to me. Her songs have punctuated monumental moments in my life, and I can still remember where I was when I first heard them, and what was happening in my life. I connected with her raw emotion and her ability to so eloquently describe painful or difficult situations.“
Price is honest about her method. “I wish I could say that we spent a long time developing and considering our approach to this character, but essentially my co-devisor Adam and I sat down with a bottle of wine and I started to talk in this ridiculous and really broad Cockney accent. I would say the worst things I could think of on a wide variety of topics, and if Adam cried out loud with laughter, then those were the lines that ended up in the show. It was such a fun creative process in that regard. We realised early on that the show could very easily become a complete piss-take with a lot of cheap shots at obesity, at vocal nodules and at working-class mentality.” She adds the big “‘owever” in her best Cockney. “It was a dear colleague of us asked us a very important question: why? We realised that just singing her songs and making people laugh wouldn’t be nearly enough. It was then that we delved into the heart of the piece; we pored over biographies, we watched countless indepth interviews and eventually, truth-be-known, we came up with something quite depressing. I think the show as it stands now is a combination of the ridiculous, outlandish humour and moments of absolute poignant truth.”
We chat about heartache, about torch songs that capture the popular imagination, and what it is about music that provides us with consolation, when everything seems against us. “In fact one of the lines in the show concerns why music is so amazing – it can take us to a single breath, a place, a moment,” she explains. “That’s why, I believe, people connect so deeply with music, because we associate so much emotion and memory and experience with the songs we hear. And that’s not necessarily about raw emotion. That can be as a result of impacting lyrics, or a hypnotic musical riff, or shared experience. Music is divine. It transcends natural, rational thinking and transports us to other places or moods in an almost supernatural way. And then, sometimes, music is just bloody good fun.”
WHAT: Rumour Has It: Sixty Minutes Inside Adele
WHEN & WHERE: Friday 8 February to Saturday 9, Chapel Off Chapel (part of Stage Art Xposed), Melbourne VIC
WHEN & WHERE: Friday 8 February to Saturday 9, Chapel Off Chapel (part of Stage Art Xposed), Melbourne VIC
Paul Andrew
First Published - Inpress (Feb 6, 2013)
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