cabaret

Ariana & the Rose arrives at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival with The Breakup Variety Hour – a wry cabaret-style journey through the six stages of romantic recovery and she brings with her genuine charm, vocal talent and the kind of infectious energy that makes you root for her from the moment she walks on stage. The Trades Hall, with its intimate rooms and slightly scuffed historic charm, is a fitting venue for a show about the unglamorous business of losing love.

The show’s structure is clever: six stages, neatly framed, moving from the wreckage of a relationship toward something that resembles wisdom. Ariana guides us through each with a mix of comedy banter, personal anecdotes and occasional audience participation, the familiar toolkit of the solo festival show. But it’s in the final stage – a philosophical, even quietly spiritual, reflection on what breakups really reveal about us – that the show finds its most resonant ground. It was a genuinely satisfying way to close, offering unexpected psychological depth after the performance and pizzazz, leaving the audience with something to carry home beyond the glitter.

Where The Breakup struggles is in finding its identity. The original songs, (written by Ariana herself and available to buy on CD), are genuinely good and surprisingly moving but they are almost at odds with the rest of the show. They don’t quite gel with the comedy banter surrounding them and the collision between the two never quite resolves. We found ourselves watching what felt like two shows running in parallel – a moderately entertaining comedy set and a mini pop concert – each quietly undermining the other’s momentum. The songs, which we expected to be more snippy, funny comedic offerings instead spoke of genuine feeling and heartache; the comedy parts were too brief and held the audience at too much of a distance. Holding these two different styles at once is a difficult ask of any audience and on the night we attended, it created a sense of awkwardness that the show never fully settled.

Comedy, as anyone in the industry will tell you, is brutally hard work. The hours behind a single hour of stage time are extraordinary – the writing, the refining, the killing of darlings, the courage required to simply show up and do your thing in front of strangers and hope it lands. The fact that The Breakup has sold out in Ariana’s native New York and toured major international festivals, including our own Melbourne Comedy Festival, speaks to a genuine audience connection that is clearly working somewhere. On the night we attended, the crowd was small and a little cool and she handled it with professionalism and grace, working the room with warmth even when it didn’t quite warm back.

But for those of us who came hungry for laughs, the show could lean further into personal storytelling – the messy, specific, mortifying anecdotes of dating life that make comedy truly land. What we got felt, at times, more like a vehicle for the music than a cabaret style comedy show. The personal glimpses Ariana did share were genuinely engaging, we simply wanted more of them. More of that rawness, more of those stories – the ones that make an audience wince in recognition and laugh in relief and then the balance would tip in a way that could make this genuinely special. It probably didn’t help that in our audience most people were happily coupled, so for a comedy that’s all about break-ups and needs to bounce of the singletons in the room, it wasn’t quite able to find its mark. Nonetheless, the bones of something very funny are here. They just need more flesh on them.

As it stands The Breakup is an enjoyable, well-intentioned romp through familiar romantic territory, performed by someone with good stage presence, a strong voice and a lot to offer. Ariana & the Rose is a performer still shaping her show into its fullest form – and if the philosophical heart of that final act is any indication of where she’s heading, the best may well be yet to come.

To book tickets to The Breakup Variety Hour, please visit https://www.comedyfestival.com.au/browse-shows/the-breakup-variety-hour/.

Photographer: Sidewalk Killa

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