Crazy Christmas Cabaret

December 17^th, 2008

There are certain traditions in my life, and one of them is watching the Crazy Christmas Cabaret every year, together with my very good and old friend Christian Løber. First year we did it was back in 1997, when the show was “Tarzan, King of the Swingers”.

The show has sexual undertones, especially in the title, and takes famous stories, twists them, mixes them, and turns them satirical.

Last year the show was titled, Fogg’s Off, a reference to Phileas Fogg, who travelled around the world in 80 days, and it was by far, one of the best performances they have ever done.

This year it was Hamlet’s Private Dick (as in detective), a story about Sherlock Holmes, trying to solve a mystery, revolving around Holmes’s arch enemy’s second in command (some Austrian mastermind), disguised as a Brazilian footballer. I know it doesn’t sound that great, and to be frank, it wasn’t. Although the second act was hilarious, the first act was slow, and none of it, reached the heights of shows.

The only true highlight was that Dr. Van Helsingør from Elsinore (a recurring character every year, wildly popular), had a much bigger role than usual, and featured a lot on stage. Another “recurring” character is the fat lady. I put recurring in “”, as it is the same actor performing the same role, in the same type of clothes, and with the same personality, but it’s a different character every year.

Those two roles are simply hilarious, as always; the fat lady always has songs, extremely overdone dresses and is the character, who has the most contact with the audience. The fourth wall isn’t just broken in this show, it was never there.

Amongst the better things, was the fat lady dressed as Amy Winehouse, singing Rehab, as the character she plays in the show, has an alcohol problem. The plot revolves around the mysterious death of her husband (which is why Sherlock Holmes is brought in), and she tells a story of how they ordered gravestones for each other, prior to his death. He chose one for her which said “Cold as usual”, and she went for one which said “Stiff at last”.

The sexual undertones are there throughout the show, but it never gets vulgar like “Ørkenens Sønner” (Sons of the Desert), it’s more in a good spirit; I would say that they do it with grace, but I don’t see how you can get good sexual jokes with grace.

The mind behind the show, is Vivian McKee, who writes and directs the show, as well as having a lot of roles in the show itself. Her roles are normally diverse, and her acting is terrific. She always starts the show with asking who have seen the show before (usually a big majority), making fun of the ones who haven’t and joking about her legs (they’re nice, especially considering her age).

The show; it wasn’t bad, it just started slowly, the literary jokes were further in between, the story wasn’t as interesting (to be fair, last year, was fantastic), but I’m forgetting the most important thing. I wrote that it’s a tradition, that I go to watch this show together with Christian; at first it was his mother, father and brother as well, but the family moved to Belgium, so for two years I saw it with my own family, I also might have missed a year, but now I meet up with Christian every year (this was the second time), and we have fun. This time, I arrived on the day of our tickets, we watched the show, and I stayed at his place for the night, catching up on times past, watched a movie and just enjoyed myself.

Christian is 4 months younger than me, and I have known him ever since he was born, we grew up together (he features on so many of my childhood pictures), and then, unfortunately, he moved to Aalborg, a city in the other end of Denmark, although I did visit him there a few times, but when he moved to Belgium, it was harder, and during those 3 years he spent there, I only visited him 3 times or so. But now we are both back in Denmark, although he lives in Copenhagen, and I live in Århus. But I don’t doubt, that I will see him every time I go back to Copenhagen; the point is that, to me, the most important thing about the show, is seeing Christian again.