On A Night Like This: The Erin Minogue Experience

One of the marvellous things about cabaret is its immense flexibility. A show can embrace a story, or not tell a story at all. In fact, some of the most precious cabaret productions are the ones that nod courteously at a known story or event, and then embellish unabashedly. On A Night Like This: The Erin Minogue Experience is one such show. In cabaret, as it is in life, don’t let a lie get in the way of a great story!

This fictional biopic cabaret celebrates the glory of the Minogue sisters, through the eyes of the much, much lesser known Erin Minogue. The other, other Minogue sister, played by Lizzie Moore, catalogues the various Minogue classics as she strives to reach a modicum of stardom.

Erin Minogue is introduced to the world by D’arren, musical director-cum-comedian Anthony Costanzo, and it is clear that her budget doesn’t compare with Kylie or Dannii’s. Confetti aside, there’s minimal fuss, no band, no pyrotechnics, just a girl with a piano and a very well organised slideshow. Of course, no history of “Australia’s ‘real’ royal family” would be complete without a slideshow.

As Lizzie Moore sings her way through the hits and the misses of the Minogue girls, the slideshow wonderfully punctuates the mood. The lives of her superstar siblings are visually and musically reviewed, decade-by-decade, but the life of the third sister is curiously un-photograhed…

Moore’s Minogue was honest, enthusiastic and extremely charismatic as she told the truth behind the scandals, and provided insight into the family.

‘Locomotion’, with a healthy dose of audience participation was a crowd favourite, and the cabaret-cum-karaoke version of ‘I Should Be So Lucky’ was a perfect finale. Erin Minogue herself admitted that there were too few Dannii Minogue hits to bother with, so the memorable numbers were either from Kylie’s catalogue or, curiously, from INXS.

Lizzie Moore and Anthony Costanzo were a formidable team in On A Night Like This: The Erin Minogue Experience. With the happy cohesion of all production elements, this show, based on a true story but entirely fabricated, is a wonderful example of cabaret at its finest.