Women in Voice 11, closer than ever to the hearts of Brisbane audiences and still the best available showcase for our local singing talent, started as a very small show in a very small venue eleven years ago. But right from the beginning, it was about big ideas and even bigger voices, and this year's line-up featured more than the usual amount of both.

Enthusiastic newcomer Anje West had the task of opening the show - made somewhat easier by the ever-stylish Carol Burns' warm introduction - and made the most of it with a set of traditional and contemporary Brazilian songs, performed with warmth and exuberance. Her selection of repertoire may have been a little low-key for those who had come to the show expecting a riot of showbiz pastiche, but West's performance was both musically excellent and sincere, her obvious passion for the Brazilian aesthetic proving infectious.

Currently in her third year of a Bachelor of Music degree at the Queensland Conservatorium of Music, Kate Miller-Heidke represents a new generation of highly skilled musicians equally at home in rock, jazz, or classical music (classically-trained Katie Noonan of George would be another example). Miller-Heidke's set consisted mainly of her own Tori Amos-esque song-poems, delightfully contrasted with a hilariously satirical take on the opera diva on the one hand, and a New Millennium Riot Grrl number ("Blah, Blah, Blah") on the other. While this stylistic flexibility was impressive, the still-maturing voice was quite phenomenal, not only in range and power, but in subtlety and depth of colour as well.

Local cabaret diva Carita Farrer's appearances at Women in Voice usually take the form of thoughtfully costumed one-woman mini-musicals in which she pays homage to classic showbiz archetypes - in a nutshell, she does drag better than most drag queens - she is camp, hilariously perverse, and musically accomplished. You can usually count on her to have the audience in stitches, and this year her performance as a washed-up Barbara Cartland/Streisand, aided handsomely by a white lap-puppy glove-puppet exceeded expectations. Draped in reams of sugar-pink fabric, Farrer crooned her way through four or five of the top five songs we never needed to hear again (I have four words for you: The Way We Were). The repertoire might seem perverse enough in itself, but the hilarity comes from Farrer's idiosyncratic slapstick, which is always over the top, but somehow never overdone. The oversexed "lapdog" hand puppet spent the evening burrowing into Farrer's crotch and décolletage (think about it, a hand puppet) while she pretended try to look and sound as elegant (and overmedicated) as possible. The act is nothing new - in fact, nothing she does is ever really 'new', but she is just so good at it that it always seems like the funniest thing you have ever seen.

Annie Lee is well respected in dramatic circles, and her performance was an effective demonstration of her ability to ensnare an audience. After opening with a slightly unnerving version of "Windmills of Your Mind", which she sang while spinning slowly on the spot in near-darkness, Lee proceeded to get under the audience's skin with a warped, but darkly observant, inversion of the mercilessly cheerful values of "My Favourite Things". The arrangement denied us the release of the chorus until the very end, instead giving us verse after verse (accompanied by subtly deranged harmonies), while the increasingly weird lyrics (which began with the not-so familiar line, "Raindrops on kittens and whiskers on rose") circled around the themes of beautiful pain and painful beauty. Lee finished with an impressive self-penned tango called "Envy" which hit us all where it hurts: in the Annie Lee tradition, let's say it was a pleasantly uncomfortable and uncomfortably seductive performance.

A veteran of the Australian music and theatre scene, Margret Roadknight may have come as quite a surprise to the younger members of the audience. Measuring somewhere around six feet (a conservative estimate) and still as spiky and gangly as she must have been as a teenager, Roadknight fronted up to the microphone looking somewhat uncomfortable in an elegant pants-suit, scarf and tiara to sing an old-time music hall style number about what the Queen would do if she weren't Queen (lots of drinking and dancing in the Caribbean, if you want to know). Funny enough in a hammy sort of way, but, "aha, a total red herring", I thought to myself a moment later. Quick as a flash, off came the accessories (as Roadknight remarked, "disguises tend not to work for me"), and out came the real Margret Roadknight: a gutsy, growling, scat-screaming blues warrior who "ain't afraid of no man, and very few women." The band responds with obvious respect (and maximum volume, which is no threat to Roadknight's massively powerful voice), the auditorium goes berserk, and Roadknight becomes crowd favourite for the night.

The final performance of the evening (before the traditional en-masse finale) belonged to Alison St. Ledger, who this year elected to do the drag king thing. And not just any drag king, either - The King, no less. From the Pelvis' early rockabilly persona through to the Las Vegas Legend, St. Ledger did a truly impressive job of bringing glory back to what has got to be show business' most overdone act - the Elvis Impersonator. Her voice was, as always, awesomely powerful and spot on pitch, and while the audience wasn't always sure whether or when to laugh (a danger when performing a parody of someone that you actually adore, as I suspect was the case here), the set and the audience warmed up to the extent that, by the end, the Playhouse was engulfed with hoots, hollers, and tumultuous applause. Which is just as it should be: Long live Women in Voice - (and The King)!

Details

Women in Voice 11 Presented by Queensland Performing Arts Centre
with the Queensland Folk Federation and Annie Peterson, producer

Director: Karen Crone
MC: Carol Burns
Featuring
Carita Farrer
Annie Lee
Kate Miller-Heidke
Margret Roadknight
Alison St. Ledger
Anje West

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