A Four-Storey Immersive Cabaret Experience Is Coming to Kings Cross
A show featuring brothels, dive bars and general debauchery.
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Have you ever been to an immersive cabaret experience? Or, have you ever heard about immersive cabaret experiences, and wondered what they actually involve? We asked Lucas Jervies, director of the new and (you guessed it) immersive cabaret show Hidden Sydney: The Glittering Mile, to give us the lowdown. The show forms a part of City of Sydney's wider Art & About program, which showcases the creativity in Sydney all year round.
For context, Hidden Sydney centres on Kings Cross in the '50s, '60s and '70s and features characters from that world. Our beloved Kings Cross was once home to more than just loud nightclubs and patrolling police – it was home to brothels, dive bars and general debauchery as well.
The characters in Jervies cabaret are bouncers, drag queens, crooks and general people of the night: Bea Miles, Abe Saffron, Roie the Witch and Standover Jim are among some of the people you'll (literally) meet. Homeless poets and drug dealers alike will tell you their stories, not to mention the iconic Les Girls showgirls (they're the ones who inspired "Priscilla Queen of the Desert").
"Kings Cross is famous for these eccentric characters," Jervies says. "They're such colourful interesting people". Cabaret, as we know, is notoriously colourful territory, so sounds apt.
In terms of immersive cabaret, Jervies explains that "the audience walks through the venue and each room is a different scenario, a different world that they enter. We see, for example, a dressing room backstage, and the audience is standing in the dressing room with the drag queens. There's no fourth wall, so the drag queen is addressing the audience... I can talk about it as much as possible but it doesn't mean anything until we get the audience in there because they're the other character."
Ultimately, the audience will be able to interact and talk with the characters over the course of the show, for a fully immersive cabaret experience. That means you'll be chatting to Rob Mills and Virginia Gay in character, they'll be bobbing around in there somewhere.
Interestingly, Jervies says that there's quite a bit of girl power in the show. He says he wants the audience to come out of the experience realising how integral female figures are to the time, to recognise their strengths.
"What we found was that in most of the stories out there, the women seemed to be the protagonists. Kings Cross was more like Queen's Cross. There were all these wonderful, strong women who seemed to be the leading figures. It was about finding the optimism in these characters and talking about their fight for survival. There's men impersonating women, wanting to be women; I just thought that was very interesting."
Debuting late September and running for four weeks, Hidden Sydney takes place in what was in a former life Sydney's largest brothel – the four-floor effort known previously as "The Nevada", now known as The World Bar. Fun fact: it had the biggest bed in the world.
Hidden Sydney: The Glittering Mile is produced by Live Ideas and Working Management and presented by City of Sydney's Art & About. Shows will run from Friday 16 September – Sunday 9 October. Tickets ($35 -$45) are available via Ticketmaster.
