“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."
Self-professed “curvy cabaret redhead” Naomi Price makes it perfectly clear at the outset; while she lapped up every nuance of Jersey Boys, she is not a great fan of the jukebox musical. “Rumour Has It is not a jukebox musical about Adele,” she asserts. “It's a cabaret… It's sixty minutes inside Adele”, she adds, “[and] is obviously partially named after one of her most well-known songs. My colleague Adam [Brunes] and I thought it was the ideal title for the show because we are deconstructing celebrity and rumours throughout the piece – so many Adele rumours. The other part of the title came from our slightly naughtier side, where we wanted to highlight that this is something of an exposé on her life, but that we want to do it in a cheeky way.
“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.”
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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