KEY POINTS:
PERFORMANCE
Who: Helen Medlyn in Hell, Man
Where and when: Herald Theatre, to Aug 19; 6.30pm Wed & Thu, 8pm Fri & Sat, 4pm Sun
Helen Medlyn and Penny Dodd josh each other in style. They are colleagues and mates and they have just launched Hell, Man the final of their series of two-woman shows in the Herald Theatre.
"We're back," the promo reads, "and dealing a rogue card." Bulging with "boy songs", this show is all "male". Restraining her outstanding attributes, the curvy queen of song becomes a low-down, tuxedo-clad Jack the Lad.
Medlyn laughs at the theatrical hyperbole and we talk about a decade concocting the various Hell shows that have touched so many audiences all over the country.
"It's an indulgence for Penny and me," Medlyn confesses, "doing the songs we love."
"It's pure pleasure," chimes in Dodd. "We don't have any limitations put on us."
"It's a culmination of both our experiences," adds Medlyn, "our knowledge, and our fun times."
Fun is assured in Hell, Man but it is also a thinking person's night out. The two women have put together a show that looks with wry affection at the male of the species. "We wanted to present him with all the vanities and foolishnesses that both men and women have," says Medlyn. "But he is still real. At one point we were erring towards making him a caricature, but we didn't believe him. I really like him."
Dodd is coy, and Medlyn pounces. "Penny and I could fall for a guy like that. We tried to give him heart and humour."
Medlyn and Dodd are masters at putting music through the style mixer. It's difficult not to surrender to an opening bracket that takes off with Sinatra's Come Fly With Me and ends up in the thornier sexual politics of the Beatles' Norwegian Wood.
The Beatles, Dylan and James Taylor sit alongside Samuel Barber, Handel and Schumann. Dodd admits that putting Taylor's Sweet Baby James as a filling in a Barber and Handel sandwich was tricky. "You've got to be a bit sneaky to make it work."
But work it does, and magnificently.
Medlyn admits that Schumann's Ich grolle nicht was "kind of nasty" in the composer's original Dichterliebe cycle. "But we change the environment of the song so it doesn't resonate like it might in the original."
Elsewhere songs are painted more darkly. An amiable George Strait country ballad The Chair becomes a disturbing glimpse of a lounge lizard with tired pick-up lines.
I am won over by Medlyn tackling Dylan's Emotionally Yours, without the grandiloquence of his original version. She just sits and sings.
From Dylan's opening words, "Come baby, find me, come baby, remind me of where I once begun", I am hooked.
Medlyn admits that taking on the masculine point of view has been a learning curve. "Putting the pants on isn't a big stretch for me because mezzos do it all the time," she jokes, reminding me of her dandified Prince Orlovsky in Die Fledermaus a few seasons ago, but she has been digging deeper.
"I am trying to adopt some of that masculinity or masculine way of presenting yourself and using it on Helen Medlyn so I can become a cooler performer."
Dodd's experience and instinct is the touchstone for the singer when she wants a progress report, and there is some sass between the two women when Medlyn brings up Irving Berlin's My Defences Are Down.
"I just saw men in check shirts," quips Dodd, remembering when Medlyn first brought the song to a rehearsal. The initial shock passed and the check-shirted males disappeared. "I reharmonised the song and put a jazz spin on it to make it more interesting, to shape the pacing."
It is difficult to find the perfect description for Medlyn and Dodd's special brand of music theatre. "We call it cabaret," Medlyn ventures, "because people want one word. But once we win them over, they realise it's much more than that."
Win you over they will and you will be staggered at how smoothly songs by Sondheim, Schumann, Tom Lehrer and Frank Loesser jostle and nestle with each other.
Hell, Man is a celebration and, in a sense a farewell, although both women will continue to be formidable forces on the local music scene.
