It’s not every night you attend a cabaret which ends with the leading lady dressed as a blue dinosaur kicking huge inflated penises into the blissed out audience, but that’s what happens during the finale of Christie Whelan Browne’s excoriatingly brilliant cabaret, Life in Plastic, which was given a single sold-out performance in chandeliered glamour of the Sydney Theatre Company’s Wharf 1 Theatre as part of the 2025 Sydney Festival.
The reason for the dinosaur costume is revealed early in the show and provides one of many hilarious highlights in a cabaret that is at times hysterically funny, deeply moving, brave, dangerous, but always riveting.
Helpmann Award winning, Whelan Browne has starred in a succession of major musicals, plays, television dramas, soapies, and satirical shows, most recently, Shaun Micallef’s Mad as Hell.
But for many it is for her appearances in a series of high-profile court cases resulting from her participation in the stage musical The Rocky Horror Show that she is best known.
However, Life in Plastic is not about her theatrical and television triumphs, nor about her court appearances, although the court appearances are cleverly acknowledged and dispensed with early on.
Instead, Whelan Browne’s complex, life-long relationship with her body and beauty, as represented by her on-stage Barbie Doll bestie, and her real-life battles with endometriosis and failure to conceive, that are the focuses of her show.
Perhaps not the usual subjects for a light-hearted, entertaining evening of cabaret, but in the hands of Whelan Browne and those of her writer and director, Sheridan Harbridge, these topics, presented with such disarming candour and wit, become both fascinating and inspiring.
Whelan Browne doesn’t shirk naming names. Her revelation of Rob Mills as her less than gallant first love drew audible gasps from her audience. The reason for the floating penises is explained in her references to her court cases.
Her show begins with Whelan Browne costumed as her fifteen-year-old self. But as the show progresses, she affects a worldly, sophisticated exterior, raising some eyebrows by deliberately incorporating coarse language, the reason for which is revealed towards the end of her show.
But whenever she talks about her husband Rohan, himself a sought-after musical theatre leading man, or their three-year old son Duke, she melts noticeably and charmingly.
Threaded through the show is a well-chosen repertoire of songs, given fresh new arrangements by Glenn Moorhouse, and performed on-stage, occasionally a little too-enthusiastically, by multi-instrumentalist, Francesca Li Donni.
These include Girls Just Want To Have Fun (Robert Hazard), I Was Born This Way (Lady Gaga), Barbie Girl (Aqua), Natural Woman (Aretha Franklin) and an outrageous ode to body hair which has to be seen to be believed.
Impeccably conceived and performed with a frankness that was at times almost unnerving and enhanced with a luscious lighting plot by Trent Suidgeest which highlights every mood change, Life in Plastic is an extraordinary creation which offers an uncompromisingly frank and intimate insight into the thoughts and motivations of one of country’s most admired and accomplished leading ladies.
Christie Whelan Browne: Life in Plastic
The Thirsty Mile (Wharf 1 Theatre – Sydney Theatre Company), 15 Hickson Road, Walsh Bay (Sydney)
Performance: Tuesday 14 January 2025
Information: www.sydneyfestival.org.au
Image: Christie Whelan Browne – photo by Neil Bennett
Review: Bill Stephens OAM