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On a chilly September evening at the new Loading Dock Theatre, beside the infamous former Darlinghurst police station, the singer and comedian Shalom Kaa, an “Asian-looking Maori with a Jewish name”, dressed in a T-shirt and chinos, is telling his story of gay self-discovery, having arrived here on inner-Sydney’s Oxford Street in the late 1990s from rural New Zealand.
In this converted space at the Qtopia Sydney Centre for Queer History & Culture, where police cars would once pull up with queer arrestees, Kaa sings Kylie and Whitney hits and a religious hymn from his Jehovah’s Witnesses upbringing before guiding the audience to participate in a ceremonial haka.
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On a windy Monday afternoon, actor and singer Simon Burke stands outside the home where his family lived for his first 13 years of life, a two-storey cream Victorian terrace in inner-Sydney’s once raffish Paddington. Fifty years on, the wooden front door is unchanged.
At four, little Simon would sit on a letterbox here, pretending to play piano on this spiked wrought-iron fence. We gaze up at the jacaranda on the street, its purple spring flowers blooming above the power lines.
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It’s time: the Wharf Revue is exiting the stage after 25 years of political piss-takes and satirical skewerings, from songs about the unceasing weaponisation of refugees since the Tampa affair to shadow puppetry spotlighting the misogyny of the “ditch the witch” rally. Now, just like Joe Hockey celebrating a budget of health and welfare cuts with cigars, the Revue’s final satirical show will ignite memories of our greatest political nadirs.
Beginning in the Sydney Theatre Company’s Wharf theatre in 2000, the Wharf Revue quickly became known for its annual touring show mashing Broadway belters and political assassinations. And every year they always had an abundance of material, given neither major party ever learned from the other’s machiavellian machinations.
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