Cabarets in Canberra Theatre Courtyard Studio bring a Taste of Tinseltown and Buzzing Broadway

The Courtyard Studio is being turned into a Hollywood-style nightclub for a week or so. Free-Rain Theatre is putting on a couple of cabaret shows in which Canberra singers perform songs from stage and screen. Ticket prices include a light refreshments buffet served from 30 minutes before the show and there's also a beverage service throughout.

The musical director for both shows, Nick Griffin says, "The first cabaret is based on Broadway shows since 1985 and the second cabaret is drawing on songs from movies since 1939."

The former includes selections from shows such as Les Miserables, Hairspray and The Phantom of the Opera, while the latter will feature songs from a wide range of films including The Wizard of Oz, South Pacific, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Moulin Rouge!

Performing in the shows will be some of Canberra's musical theatre talents. In the Broadway show will be Louiza Blomfield, Kirrah Amosa, Cher Albrecht, Lisa Irvine, Kaitlin Nihill, Alexander Clubb, Steve Amosa and in the Hollywood show will be Lexi Sekuless, Tim Sekuless, Amy Lapthorne, Fraser Findlay, Colin Milner, Blomfield and Amosa.

Griffin says there are about 20 items in each show, ranging from ballads to comedy songs and solo songs to big ensemble numbers.

He says Can't Help Falling in Love (featured in the Elvis Presley movie Blue Hawaii) from the Hollywood show is "definitely the highlight".

"The whole cast sings it and it's spine-tingling."

But he also likes many of the smaller-scale numbers including Kirrah Amosa's rendition of The Wizard and I from Wicked, the Broadway show.

"It's a pretty vocally demanding song and she just totally smashes it."

Amosa says that in the Hollywood show she is singing "two beautiful ballads" – the Eva Cassidy version of Over the Rainbow from The Wizard of Oz and Whitney Houston's version of I Will Always Love You, used in The Bodyguard as well as an Andrews Sisters-style Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy (from Buck Privates) with Lexi Sekuless and Lapthorne.

She's also performing Don't Forget Me from the TV show Smash – about the mounting of a musical on the subject of Hollywood legend Marilyn Monroe – and in the Broadway show, Take Me Or Leave Me from Rent and Someone Like You from Jekyll and Hyde.

Amosa performed in her first musical when she was 12 – Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat – but didn't get back into them until after finishing Year 12. She credits Griffin – a frequent actor, musician and musical director in Canberra theatre – with rekindling her interest and in the past few years the 21-year-old has appeared in local productions of Hairspray, Footloose and Legally Blonde and also worked as a lead singer with the band Tuchasoul.

Tim Sekuless, a longtime actor and director in Canberra, is no stranger to cabaret. He and his sister Lexi performed a Marilyn Monroe-themed show together and he used to perform in cabaret in Wollongong.

He'll be performing in the Hollywood cabaret and says that among his numbers will be Kansas City from Oklahoma! and – with the other cast members – Pure Imagination from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and the title song from Goldfinger.

Sekuless says that while many of the songs come from movie musicals that were adapted from stage shows, in many cases the film version was how people became familiar with the title so it seemed to fit into this themed cabaret.

He says the two cabarets are quite distinct in style.

"The Broadway show is an energetic, high-impact performance," he says, with a focus on younger performers and more recent, funkier shows and songs, while the Hollywood show was a more traditional and nostalgic cabaret show with an emphasis on older material.

"They're aimed at two very different audiences."

If the cabaret format was successful, he says it might continue.

"The question is whether there's a hunger for this kind of thing in Canberra audiences. You never never know if you never never go."