Whet your appetite this festival season in a thoroughly gin-soaked way.
Following sold-out seasons at the 2016 Adelaide Cabaret Festival, Melbourne Cabaret Festival and Tasmania’s Festival of Voices, the tipsy candour of Mother’s Ruin: A Cabaret about Gin will travel around the country for the 2017 festival season.
After opening in Sydney, Mother’s Ruin will travel to Adelaide Fringe Festival and Hobart’s Ten Days On The Island in March.
Equal parts historical and hysterical, this soulful ode to gin tumbles and soars through darkly comic tales of love, women, gin and secrets with two of Australia’s hottest cabaret stars, Maeve Marsden and Libby Wood.
Together, they ignite the stage with stunning vocals as they take an intoxicating musical stroll through the history of one of the world’s favourite tipples. Mother’s Ruin also examines gin and its association with women’s history sparked by the London gin craze in the 1700s.
Mother’s Ruin is a joint venture from Sydney production company Blackcat Productions, gin writer Elly Baxter, director Anthea Williams, and Jeremy Brennan.
Maeve and Libby are long-time collaborators, evident in their perfectly synched, flawless harmonies. Described as “buxom and bodacious”, the pair form one half of the hugely popular and award-winning cabaret act, Lady Sings it Better.
Featuring music initially performed by Amy Winehouse, Nina Simone, Martha Wainwright, Billy Joel, The Popes, The Pretenders and more, this gin train winds through the streets of 18th century London to New York speakeasies, the Australian bush and the jungles of Peru, via sailors and barmaids, bootleggers and master distillers. There are songs about gin, and songs you never knew were about gin…until now.
