When mezzo-soprano Jacqui Dark writes and performs in a cabaret show, it doesn’t just have a theme. It must have a reason.

In 2014’s Strange Bedfellows: Under the Covers, the spine was the enduring closeness between Dark and fellow opera singer Kanen Breen, who co-parents her son Xander. This year’s Songs My Friends Taught Me explores, if possible, even more intimate territory.

Jacqui Dark, backstage at Sydney’s Camelot Lounge. Photo © Bec Hannaford.

For much of 2022, Dark was absent from the stage and it wasn’t clear if she would ever return. About a year ago she underwent surgery for an extremely rare form of cancer followed by a lengthy, “hardcore” regime of chemotherapy.

February 2022 had seen Dark onstage singing composer Ilya Demutsky’s scoring of Russian folk texts in The Australian Ballet’s Anna Karenina. By late March she was in the operating theatre and further Anna Karenina performances had to be cancelled. So did engagements with Pinchgut Opera, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and Orchestra Victoria, which was to present a fully orchestrated version of Dark’s lauded 2021 cabaret showcasing the songs of Jacques Brel. “It was...