JB Room, 10–13 June

Avigail Herman has amassed a solid following in Adelaide, having contributed to a good many Cabaret Festivals now, in parts large and small, and the hard-core booked early to guarantee they’d get a seat in the intimate environs of the tiny JB Room for Fingerprints.

A musical bower-bird, she lines her nest with anything that appeals, and the result is a delicious mixture of familiar and not-so-familiar songs, and strung together with a well-honed patter and the ever-present rock-solid support of her long-time music director Peter Bailey at the piano. 

Her performance of Amanda McBroom’s poignant “Errol Flynn” brought back memories of McBroom’s own rendition.  Everyone cracked a smile in Gershwin’s ‘By Strauss’ and laughed outright at Christine Lavin’s witty “Good Thing He Can’t Read My Mind” with its lyric gymnastics.

Herman was involved in an Australian production of Janet Hood’s impossibly-titled song cycle Elegies for Angels, Punks and Raging Queens, and gave a heart-felt rendition of the moving “My Brother Lived in San Francisco”, as of Jason Robert Brown’s “Stars and the Moon” and especially in Maria Friedman’s “In the Sky”.

Barbra Streisand seems to be a recurring theme this year, and much of Herman’s reputation as a performer is built on her Streisand show, so it was a pleasure to hear “Papa, Can You Hear Me” from the otherwise dreaded Yentl.

But Herman has other strings to her bow, and indeed much of her life as a singer has been spent crooning out the jingles without which television and radio would not be quite the same.  You simply wouldn’t believe what she has made us buy over the years. You name it, she sang it!  And if you ever needed reminding of the power of advertising, I have to admit it was good to hear some of those tunes again.

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