It should come as no surprise to anyone to hear that I do like my men just that little bit deranged... more "Tim Burton" than "Ted Bundy" obviously, but deranged nonetheless...And Kim Smith's stage persona in Morphium is just the right kind of deranged.
He's also incredibly sexy... what with the guyliner, tight shirt and perfect hair. But more than sexy, he's a whole world of slinky and mysterious up there on stage.
Thinking about it now... basically he's like a cat... well, a cat that sings in English, French and German and wouldn't be out of place in a smoky underground club in the 1940's!
But c'mon... who's not going to be won over by someone who looks that good and who can sing in three languages! And boy can he sing! Vocally he can turn on a dime too... go from almost a whisper to belting it out... from bright and bubbly to dark and painful... and the spin he put on some of the songs was fantastic... Kylie Minogue's Confide In Me in French... Somewhere Over The Rainbow in German...
The staging of the show is very smart too... when the pianist, Amanda Hodder, came out the lights were dark on the stage and up full in the crowd... as she played the lights slowly raised on the stage and lowered over the crowd. By the end of the couple of minutes of her playing the audience was absolutely still and somewhat mesmerised when Kim arrived from the back of the crowd and wended his way through slowly singing.
In fact, he had the crowd so completely under his spell that I think we missed a queue to sing the chorus of one of the numbers... so he just stood there and let us wallow in our mistake. But oddly it wasn't out of character for the show... Kim knows just when to pause and let the audience anticipate the moment. You can feel the transitions between interconnected numbers and only when Kim lets the audience go between numbers did we all break into thunderous applause.
I very much agree with the review on the AdelaideNow website... "Polished to perfection but still wickedly dirty when the moment calls for it, Morphium is one truly engaging hour of cabaret."
I'm giving it two very enthusiastic thumbs up.
And I think it will be a while before I managed to get this song out of my head!
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