Melbourne comedy festival review by Steve Bennett

Reuben Kaye is everything a cabaret act should be: camp, catty and conceited – a flamboyant package of sparkles and spite. His blurb says he’s ‘weaponised narcissism’ and he’s got that right. He knows exactly what he is, but that does include warning the audience: ’If you’re looking for substance, you’re going to be disappointed.’

Not entirely true. There’s a core to this, a story of defiance after being attacked by the school bully for being gay, out of which Kaye drains every melodramatic last drop, even if it’s a grinding gear change from the spangly cabaret vibe.

The Australian son of a German ballet dancer and a Russian artist who’s spent the last six years in London, Kaye is undeniably a great over-the-top performer, fuelled by a superiority complex that makes Donald Trump look demure.

 However the show he’s produced is a mixed bag. He’s great teasing, cajoling and flirting with the audience, or revelling in the witty wordplay of which he’s inordinately proud. But he’s also not averse to deploying a lot of cliched cabaret lines, which is a bit rich for someone who sneered that his repertoire won’t include a version of Radiohead’s Creep, that staple of self-conscious angst.

We do, however, get the usual slowed-down trick applied to different songs – Sharp Dressed Man, Wuthering Heights and Down Under – as he seeks tenderness and meaning in pop. The technique suffers diminishing returns, even though the Men At Work classic is his best.

Similarly, the stop-starting of his cover of Celine Dion’s It’s All Coming Back To Me Now goes from cute to irritating very quickly; and once you’ve called a ‘final number’, the audience expects to go home – but Kaye detains them with encores and extra blather as  his hack comment of this being like a hostage situation starts to ring true.

Review date: 13 Apr 2016
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett