Adelaide Festival Theatre
June 11, 2018

The first and only prior occasion when I saw Lea Delaria was over a decade ago at the Adelaide Feast Festival. At that point, Delaria was the most prominent lesbian stand-up on the planet, but had also branched out into jazz singing with a chart-topping cover of The Ballad of Sweeney Todd. Jump forward to 2018 and Delaria’s profile has exploded thanks to television and her break out role as Big Boo on the award-winning prison show Orange is the New Black. However, unlike male comedians such as Eddie Murphy and Chris Rock, who sacrificed their edge for mainstream success, Delaria joyously remains a bombastic in your face “dyke daddy” spraying expletives and rants about “going down, down under” with plenty of references to Donald Trump and Mike Pence.

Notwithstanding the banter, music was Delaria’s focus and the majority of the tracks came from her top selling House of David album featuring covers of twelve David Bowie classics. Boys Keep Swinging was a wonderful, amusing, wry opening and I was impressed immediately by the skill of Delaria’s all-girl jazz trio of Helen Sung (keyboards), recent Juilliard graduate Endea Owens (double bass) and Sylvia Cuenca (drums)...