The Spiegeltent Comes To Town

I always look forward to the Famous Spiegeltent’s annual season in Melbourne.

It brings back happy memories of holidays with my mother’s family in Wagga Wagga in the 1950s and being taken to afternoon performances when Sorlie’s Travelling Tent Show came to town.  Unreliable as childhood memories can be, this was probably my first taste of professional live entertainment.

Sorlie’s Tent Show toured the country towns of NSW and Queensland for around 30 years, with a break during the Second World War, and finally stopped when TV and the licensed clubs stole the audiences.

Sorlie's Travelling Tent Show at Broken Hill 

By day, Sorlie’s provided wholesome entertainment for the kids with pantomimes of the “yes you did - no I didn’t” variety and then at night, they threw the switch to vaudeville for the adult audiences.  It was then that the troupe of assorted singers, dancers, comedians, magicians, jugglers and acrobats, all strutted their occasionally naughty but mostly nice stuff for the appreciative grown-ups.

Like most kids growing up in the 1950s, I also eagerly looked forward to the circus coming to town.  The big three that I recall regularly visiting Ballarat were Wirth’s, Bullen’s and Ashton’s.

I also had a fondness for the tent shows that toured the agricultural show circuit, such as Australia’s own singing cowboy - Smokey Dawson, Jimmy Sharman’s Boxing Troupe and Chad Morgan - the ‘Sheik of Scrubby Creek’.

I liked the seedy and slightly dangerous atmosphere of Side Show Alley. Here there seemed to be lots of people of the type your mum wouldn’t want you to know. Which reminds me of when, as a young teenager with a couple of mates at the Ballarat Show, I saw a  ‘strip tease’ show featuring Vanessa the Undresser. The fact that we relative youngsters gained admission should suggest the stripping was really just g-rated gyrating. But it did give us something to brag about at school.

By the mid-1960s all that remained to populate the remaining tent shows were washed up rockers and singers who no longer made the cut on Brian Henderson’s Bandstand.

There is nothing however washed up about the acts included in this years Melbourne Spiegel Season and so last Saturday I had my first taste of the Famous Spiegeltent for 2012. We opted for live music in the afternoon and then contemporary circus/cabaret at night.

First up was Gospel Shakedown – part of the Saturday Sessions of ‘Music from Around the Globe’ sponsored by Multicultural Arts Victoria. Now this really appealed to me. It summoned up images of the southern gospel music that inspired the young Elvis in Tupelo, Mississippi on his way to becoming the King of Rock and Roll. That was my mistake.

Two acts were on the bill – the Jerusalem Gospel Band and Gospel Sundays.

The first was a Melbourne based group, all of whom came originally from Central Africa. Their song and dance routine, set to contemporary African rhythms and beats, was lively, engaging and even at times raunchy. They certainly knew how to shake their booties and could have taught Elvis the Pelvis a few new moves. For me they were more Ladysmith Black Mambazo than gospel but, who cared, they were having fun. Immensely enjoyable and the audience responded warmly.

Gospel Sundays looked promising when they arrived on stage. Three good-looking young singers and a backing band of keyboard, drums and lead and base guitar. What I wasn’t prepared for, and I suspect most of the audience were with me on this, was almost an hour of “gospel” music of the happy clappy, high on Jesus trippy type. This wasn’t a concert, it was a revivalist meeting.  They were missionaries for Jesus. We weren’t there to be entertained, but to be saved by these young Hillsong warriors.

These were incredibly talented musicians and singers with powerhouse voices. I would have loved to hear them take on some of the secular R&B repertoire that had its roots in southern gospel. But sadly for us that isn’t their calling and as their musical attempts to save us became more obvious, audience members were seen to be shuffling uncomfortably in their seats. What I wanted was for them to use their awesome talent to sing songs about love and loss, pain and suffering and maybe even sex and death. What we got was a syrupy confection of halleluiahs and praise the lord. But they were enjoying themselves.

However, if it’s sex and death that you’re after, the Saturday night show delivered. ‘Les 7 Doigts de la Main’  is a contemporary circus company from Canada. The Spiegel Season Program describes their show  - La Vie – as being “about insanity, sorrow, bad behaviour, airplane accidents and romantic love gone terribly wrong – but it’s funny, joyful, and very sexy. La Vie takes place in a purgatory of the imagination, where the sinners try to tumble, juggle, climb, fly, sing or joke their way out of hell.".

This was adults only entertainment served up by strong cast of multi-talented performers – most having learnt their craft in that incredible crucible of the circus arts that is Montreal.

This was a show in the best traditions of the Famous Spiegeltent’s Melbourne seasons. Think of perennial crowd pleaser - La Clique or last years award winning tour de force from IOTA – Smoke & Mirrors.  La Vie is modern circus at its best – edgy, exciting, amusing, surprising and sometimes disturbing, and the well-honed skills of the performers never failed to inspire awe.

Presided over by a somewhat menacing master of ceremonies – the modern day take on the ringmaster of old - La Vie is a far cry from the circuses of my childhood memories.  The line between circus and cabaret is well and truly blurred. This circus has its roots in 1920s Berlin.  Divine decadence!

My 2012 Melbourne Spiegel Season is off to a fabulous start.