What is French for ‘oh dear’?

Last year, production company Strut & Fret brought the cabaret and circus show Limbo to Christchurch as the headline act of the freshly renamed Bread & Circus festival.  

It was a slick and sexy show packed with fire breathing, a live band and breathtaking aerial circus skills.

So, I went in with high expectations this year for their new show Blanc de Blanc, a French-themed cabaret show inspired by the many attractions of champagne. [More] 

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Running themes of champagne, high spirits and a hyped-up party atmosphere are the main content of this year’s Bread and Circus World Buskers Festival’s headline act Blanc de Blanc. Other than that, the content of this show strikes me as surprisingly thin. Even so, the well-‘oiled’ official opening night audience responds readily and enthusiastically to the party spirit and, after two hours, they leave the wonderful festival Spiegeltent clearly well-satisfied. 

It’s one of those shows that relies on very high-volume canned music to make its impact, but that impact is reflected only intermittently in the visual element and scripted content.  

For me, the antics of Spencer Novich, as the show’s comic ‘skinny white guy’, provide most of the real highlights with his own brand of lip sync; well, not so much ‘lip sync’ as extraordinarily virtuoso ‘whole-body sync’, performed to a kaleidoscopic collage of music and sound-effects, that’s truly breath-taking in its energy, invention and timing.  

But, although other performers generate moments of almost equal amazement, for example in a somewhat freaky contortion act and, later, in a dazzling routine with hula hoops, I begin to find the otherwise endless seductive posing and flirtatious dancing rather wearing – a whole song of scantily-clad bottoms waving at us outstays its entertainment value by a considerable margin. 

If the start of the second half with three completely naked performers on stage is designed to shock, it’s certainly nothing new to cabaret and fringe festival audiences around the world. A passing comment during the interval from an acquaintance that “it’s a welcome wake-up for conservative Christchurch” seems more like a wanna-be-rebel’s desire to buy into some erroneous mythology about twenty-first century Christchurch audiences, not to mention any real shock-value in stage nudity. We had that to much more comic and confrontational effect in last year’s festival’s Garry Starr Performs Everything, to cite just one example. Tonight, a suggestion by one of the actors that “I can see that some of you are frightened and some of you are horny” comes across as more hopeful than accurate. 

If comparisons are sometimes odious, I can’t help remembering last year’s headline act Limbo, with its comprehensive and diverse range of talent along with its exceptionally impressive integration of brilliantly played live music.

A glance at Blanc de Blanc’s website and social media pages suggests that the content of their show varies considerably, so perhaps the balance of cabaret vs. circus in the Christchurch season differs somewhat from what they often offer. 

As I say at the start of this review, tonight’s audience is very well-satisfied by the Blanc de Blanc experience and I have no doubt that the show will appeal equally to audiences during the reminder of the festival. 

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