Peter Pan song from Princess Cabaret

Filmed at the 2008 Melbourne International Comedy Festival

Princess Cabaret - Fringe 2009
Live Review

Thank god for internet booking. Asking for a single ticket to a show called Princess Cabaret isn’t something a 41-year-old man really should be doing at the box office.

So maybe this show isn’t aimed at me: but while the idea is original – a series of sketches based around what happened to Disney heroines after the final reel – the execution was dated and the gags tiresome.

There’s a distinct feel of stage-school end-of-term revue about this, as seven obviously talented girls show that they can sing and dance and deliver lines with great projection and diction, if not a lot of naturalism.

But it’s the writing that really clunks. Innuendos about Ariel, the Little Mermaid, always been ‘wet’, Tinkerbell being bemused by tampons and a gag about diarrhoea – this is the level we are at, however pretty the singing.

The song Too Song lazily references every headline-grabbing tragedy of recent times as if that’s all you need do to be funny and edgy; one of the Princes talks in the urban street patois some young people do because… well it’s a funny accent, isn’t it?

There are a few good ideas: when Sleeping Beauty finally awakes, she has the outdated, racist views of the time when she fell into her slumber; while Jasmine, intelligent and ambitious, must hand over power of her Arabian nation to new husband Aladdin simply because he has the only qualification he needs to rule: a penis. But, like all the sketches, they never go beyond the superficial first idea.

While cabaret is increasingly become interesting again, the style of this performance is more rooted in the twee after-dinner cabaret of your average Seventies cruise ship, with very deliberate, very stagey performances, technically adept but rather distant.

This show, imported from Australia, seemed to go down well, though, with even the most trite line getting disproportionate rounds of applause, which suggests they must be doing something right.

But for my money, Princess Cabaret turns out to be as two-dimensional as the cartoons that inspired it.