The Wild Party: Gin-Soaked Jazz Classic Returns

“Rightly brings the house down” Sydney Morning Herald

Fourteen years ago, The Wild Party sold-out in Sydney and later at the Melbourne Comedy Festival. This funny, sophisticated jazz cabaret left audiences screaming for more. Now, The Vashti Hughes Ensemble - 4 actors and a 4-piece jazz band, - has regrouped to envelop new audiences in the illicit and alluring underworld of this groundbreaking Jazz poem.

Written at the height of the 1920's, Joseph Moncure March's rhythmic narrative poem was considered so steamy when first released, the Chicago police seized and destroyed any the copies they found. Enough books escaped to second-hand bookstores where they inspired decades of wide-eyed fans. Beat poet hero William Burroughs said of it: “It's the book that made me want to be a writer."

The audience is plunged headlong into the seedy prohibition world of speakeasies, bathtub gin and sexual ambiguity. The show's blonde vamp Queenie, a vaudeville dancer, decides to throw a party and take revenge on her violent lover, Burrs. Her plan is to seduce the sexiest man she can find. She finds him quicker than she imagines when the debonair Black arrives on the arm of her best friend Kate: a hard -drinkin', coke -snortin' siren who struts and bitches her way through men and the vitriolic text. It all goes horribly wrong when Queenie falls for Black and the tale ends in gunshots in true Chicago style.

The uncanny rhythms of the text are wildly echoed by piano, drums, sax and double bass. Raval is the perfect new cabaret room for The Wild Party with its beautiful art deco ambience and speakeasy atmosphere.