Michelle Brasier ~ Adelaide Cabaret Festival 25 ~ Review

[Cabaret, Music] Michelle Brasier - Average Bear Dunstan Playhouse Sun 8 June, 2025 Michelle Brasier is full of life and positivity. She is busy chatting with the crowd as the audience files in and quickly makes her way to the stage when the lights go down muttering to herself about being late! Average Bear is her life story and through it we learn that her life has not been easy. Growing up in the country and feeling like she didn’t belong, teenage angst, personal injury and family deaths have littered her journey with significant challenges. She eventually persuaded her mother to let her go to Melbourne and study musical comedy and from there, as the saying goes, she hasn’t looked back. She has a great stage presence and radiates an infectious warmth. She also has a wonderful voice and uses it to alternate between song and sung narrative. Her rapid-fire delivery inevitably means some of the humour gets lost in the stream of consciousness word flow, but there are always more laughs coming. A very efficient band (that was too quiet for my liking) provided smooth back up. On guitar is Michelle’s partner Tim Lester who’s also quite accomplished at delivering funny lines. His imitation of a heavily accented French doctor even had Brasier giggling. Given the subject matter this show could so easily have been a downer but it’s far from it. And that is the point of Average Bear. There’s humour to be found in every situation, and as Brasier says, laughing and crying are physiologically linked. So too is singing apparently. Her short lasagna ditty on the occasion of her father’s death is really funny. On the other side of the emotional coin, a lament she sang at her brother’s funeral was tear-jerkingly haunting – the highlight of the night for me. So, despite the drama and the tales of trauma we all go home feeling buoyed by optimism and her love of life. That’s quite a feat. And a real treat to boot. 4 stars Michael Coghlan This was the only Cabaret Festival performance of Average Bear.