The international cabaret star and lyricist Dr Adam Perchard and the award-winning composer Richard Thomas will be performing their show Interview With The Vamp at Soho Theatre.
Dr Adam Perchard (cabaret star, comedian, poet, and occasional fortune-teller to the international elite) is an old vamp with one hell of a backstory – and Richard Thomas (Olivier Award-winning composer of Jerry Springer the Opera) is here to get the scoop! Featuring dazzling original music by Richard, witty and moving lyrics by Adam, vocal fireworks, and rampant repartee, sit back and let this iconic duo take you on a whirlwind tour of the doctor’s brain.
Hilarious, macabre, surreal, and touching, this is cabaret at its funniest and most full of heart. Interview With The Vamp at Soho Theatre. London, from Wednesday 10 – Saturday 13 July 2024.
You’re bringing Interview With The Vamp to Soho Theatre, how would you describe the show?
It’s an epic queer song cycle – bursting with jokes and spectacle and vulnerability. It covers a whole range of wild and wonderful stories from my life as a cabaret performer, club kid, English literature lecturer, and occasional fortune teller to the international elite! Song, spoken word, and storytelling colliding in a joyful and surreal explosion. Love, lust, loss, and laughter. Think: Kafka does Broadway, Dylan Thomas does drag, Sylvia Plath does ketamine.
What inspired you to create Interview With The Vamp?
Richard Thomas showed me a collection of musical ideas he had had – fragments of melody that needed a home. We decided to see what happened when I took those melodies away and let my strange, purple, glistening brain have its way with them. The result is a wild ride through my unconscious. Vulnerable, macabre, hilarious, and unexpected: the resulting show has taken us to places that neither of us could have envisioned, and we can’t wait to share them with you.
You’re working with Richard Thomas, why do you think you work so well together?
Richard and I worked together as composer and performer for years. I was in the hit Brexit musical that he wrote with Jonny Woo, and we have always had a great time together: we share a robust, riotous, ribald sense of humour. This is the first show we’ve written together, and it’s been bliss. He writes the music and I write the words, but he’s also a lyricist in his own right and I am a singer, so we each have a lovely affinity for what the other is doing. Every time we write together is an adventure. We go from comedy to drama, from jazz to musical theatre, from sublime to ridiculous – often several times in the same song. It’s a trip, baby!
How would you describe the music in the show?
Don’t tell him this, but I think Richard is one of the most exciting composers writing at the moment. This is incredible musical theatre, but also so much more: this fluid expansive form we have come up with means that we can flit through all sorts of musical genres. He has every musical colour dancing at his fingertips. The music is rich, wild, romantic, thunderous, hilarious, dancy, elegiac, toe-tapping – spectacular. He also has a lot of fun pushing me to my limits as a singer. We have some insanely long sustained high notes, some crazy fast passages, lots of bravura moments – basically we are both giving you everything we’ve got and we are loving every minute.
What is it about the cabaret genre that lends itself to this type of storytelling?
Cabaret by its very nature is fluid, inventive, shape shifting, and radical. Cabaret started out as a very political art form and I think that sense of the political, of a sense of justice lurking amongst the sequins, is still very much there in this piece. This is a big-hearted comedy show but it doesn’t shy away from looking at some of the darknesses of this beautiful, terrible world we live in. Cabaret is also about license: it’s about the freedom to do whatever you want, satirise whatever you want, say whatever you want, feel whatever you want. It’s a big sociopolitical Jacuzzi, babies – and everyone is welcome!
What would you say to anyone thinking of booking to see Interview With The Vamp?
Do it. Do it now, darling! Don’t waste another minute! It will make you laugh, make you cry, and send you out into the world with a big joyful sequinned swagger. Make sure you stick around for a wine with us in the theatre bar afterwards though – mine’s a massive Sauvignon blanc.
