MURDER MYSTERY ALL PART OF NAUGHTY FUN
Alexandra Centre the venue for cabaret show Saucy Jack, writes Louis B. Hobson.
The far reaches of the universe just got nearer.
Near as in The Alexandra Centre in Inglewood where Simply Theatre has set up Saucy Jack’s Cabaret.
Saucy Jack’s is a seedy cabaret on the bad side of a distant galaxy where a serial killer is dispatching the bar’s cabaret acts.
It’s not the Ghostbusters Saucy Jack calls in to put things right again, but the Space Vixens who fight intergalactic crime with the power of disco.
Dale Hirlehey, co-artistic director of Simply Theatre, and the director for the Calgary premiere of Saucy Jack and the Space Vixens, says you’d be right to see shades of The Rocky Horror Show and the Jane Fonda erotic space classic Barbarella in this wild musical spoof of those cheesy space dramas from decades ago.
“Saucy Jack and the Space Vixens is like a mash up of Rocky Horror, disco and the old space melodramas,” says Hirlehey.
“We’ve been dying to do the show here in Calgary for a few years now.
“When Simply Theatre was located in London, Ont., we did a version for the London Fringe Festival in 2010 that won Best of Fringe and sold out every show except one.”
In 2000, Hirlehey was working as an assistant to Art Fidler, the artistic director of London’s Original Kids Theatre.
“There was a poster in Art’s office for Saucy Jack, and it didn’t take me long to ask him about the show.
“In 1995, Art’s son and some of his friends in London got a spot in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, but lost the rights to the show they’d planned to stage. So they had to write one of their own or lose the venue they’d secured.”
The result was a one-act version of Saucy Jack and the Space Vixens which was a late night musical that took the fringe by storm winning a coveted Fringe First Award for innovation in theatre and outstanding new production.
The show was such a hit the group fleshed it out into a fulllength play for the following Edinburgh Fringe where is was an even greater hit.
Saucy Jack eventually moved to London’s West End, playing in small venues and eventually The Queens Theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue.
Productions have also been mounted in Los Angeles, Seattle, Oslo, New Zealand, Anchorage, Glasgow, Amsterdam, Memphis and Brighton.
Hirlehey caught a performance in 2002 in a tent that had become its annual venue at the Edinburgh Fringe, and he recalls getting so caught up in the fun he “was dancing in the aisles and out into the street after it ended. The fun and the disco music are infectious.”
Hirlehey explains that his Simply Theatre team are turning the Alexandra Centre into a cabaret where the audience gets
to sit at tables.
“The show takes place in and around the audience so you are completely immersed in the atmosphere of the cabaret. Your emcee for the evening is played by Michael Brown, with Fadi Saghir as Saucy Jack.
As the evening unfolds you get to watch as the Space Vixens (Jamie Robinson, Tanis Laatsch and Chelsea Wellman) sleuth out the diabolical killer of cabaret performers.”