Peter Frost On stage in Cape Town
Retro-shows. You’ve got to hate them. The Beatles, Stones, Rock’n’Roll, Abba. The peddling of a simpler, sweeter tune to an audience desiring the sanctity of an understandable past. Big business in South Africa for years now, and well-received by suburban audiences, if not critics who fail to see merit in mimicking a dead (or good-as dead) artist, in a show where the singer becomes little more than a vessel for a tired song and a tired star.
Enter Abba(ish) – none too soon. Wicked theatrical duo Fred Abrahamse and Charl-Johan Lingenfelder dish up Swedish spuds for the 1990s, along with ladles of the gentle cynicism, reflective power and mainstream camp this decade calls its own. It is an Erasure-style Abba tribute, to our own bad taste, to camp, and, more interestingly, a barometer on just how far we have come, artistically and socially, in ten short years. It’s as if Fred and Co check out the past, decide it’s quaint but hopelessly naff, and offer up their own thumping alternative.
Thump it does. Amanda Tiffin, Christine Weir, Heinrich Reisenhofer and Pierre Neethling give face and voice to the Swedish super-group and the show is divided into two very distinct acts. First act follows the retro-show guidebook, slightly dull and rose- tinted in nostalgic muck, albeit it to a better set (that fab six-foot back-to-back Abba lettering on stage) with renditions of the syrupy as well as the lesser-known.
Act two – aptly titled Abba(toir) – is the surprise, the reason audiences are coming back three, four times to see it. The track The Visitors, quirky anyway, becomes an S&M slaughterhouse orgy of leather, clasps, crotch and makeup as those on stage blast into Lingenfelder’s way-out techno romp. White jump suit becomes wayward cock-ring.
Pierre Neethling’s mesmerising gender fuck Gimme Gimme Gimme a Man After Midnight is next, the showstopper with balls. Cool stuff for a shocked room. Techno gives way to reggae, rap (Money Money Money with Reisenhofer slam-dunking) and a smorgasbord of other contemporary music styles. The surprise is that it works so well – proof if any is needed that Lingenfelder is this country’s brightest musical star and that Abba may have had something after all.
With the music demanding so much, especially in the second act, performers are pushed to the limit. All four must dance as well as they sing, which isn’t always the case. Jazzart’s Reisenhofer might be in his element, but Christine Weir struggles when the going gets really fast. Pierre Neethling burns white hot though, and it’s a fine thing to hear Amanda Tiffin shaking loose roof rafters again, shaved head and all.
This is the kind of show that deserves the cult status it is accumulating, (a CD of act two is in the offing) and a good idea would be to find it a home – Broadway would be perfect – and use it as a platform for new and varied performers; when members move on, replace them and continue the show. It is certainly strong enough for that, and maybe we’ll see some new artists developing some new skills