‘Backseat Diamond’ is a show with a great premise, featuring a singer with a great voice, but the delivery of the final product left us wanting a lot more.
‘Backseat Diamond’ is a ,largely one woman, show from Megan Kozak who is in her final year of studying musical theatre at the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts.
It has a brilliant premise. An ambitious and ruthless young singer has made the move from backing vocalist to being the third member of an all girl group ‘The Diamonds’. She found out about the audition for the Diamonds from another singer – just before the accident where the brakes failed on her car.
Now the opportunistic Mary has gone one step further and incapacitating the other two thirds of the trio so she can have her time in the spotlight. Welcome to the show.
This production has such a great central idea. There is so much you could do with a homicidal backing singer, but while Kozak is a faultless singer, the space between the songs was awkward and lacking the comedy writing that could make this idea shine.
The show featured a stack of well know tunes, which while sung really nicely, they didn’t have a great deal of oompf and gusto that was needed to bring this show to life. The songs didn’t appear to have any connection to the narrative, which in turn made you wonder why bother with the background concept anyway.
Don’t write this up and coming performer off though, she’s clearly got great ideas and with the right collaborators and a little reworking this show could be a festival sensation.
‘Backseat Diamond’ is at The Velvet Lounge in Mount Lawley until Sunday January 25th, tickets available from Fringeworld.
Graeme Watson
