This Pride, John Michael Swinbank is inviting festival goers to kick back and take a sip from the great cocktail songbook. His new show, Bitter, Sweet & Twisted, opens on Tuesday, September 29, at The Ellington’s Soho Nights and promises to be a salubrious soiree. Particularly when he cracks out the Noël Coward.

‘For me, it all starts with theatre legend Noël Coward – the Andrew Lloyd Webber of his day – who wrote some of the most funny, elegant and moving lyrics ever,’ Swinbank told OUTinPerth.

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‘In the title of the show, we reference his great musical, Bitter Sweet and then add the twists of Cole Porter and Stephen Sondheim and others. All of these artists were adept at writing both words and music.

‘Some of the great songs we will present are standards such as Porter’s Let’s Do It, Sondheim’s Send in the Clowns and Coward’s Mad About the Boy, as well as other contemporaries such as Rodgers and Hart’s My Funny Valentine.’

For Swinbank, this show is a chance to ‘reclaim the perfectly inebriated atmosphere of a smart cocktail bar’. After all, the last few years have seen this Coward aficionado camp it up in bigger scale productions in bigger scale venues.

Now though, Swinbank is bringing it all back with ‘a lubricious mix of music and drinks’ at The Ellington Jazz Club when he appears with much loved partner in crime, pianist and accompanist Tim Cuniffe. But in a show of such classic hits, what makes a good cover?

‘Broadly speaking,’ Swinbank crooned, ‘a performance that succeeds in making the song come alive for an audience. That is always our mission – to make the song work. Or in the parlance of showbiz: to sell the song. And my advice? Like all your assets, if you can’t sell it, sit on it.

‘More closely, I think that interpretation is paramount, when the musicians present their version of the song and perhaps shine another light on its mysteries. Many songs have a multitude of facets that can be brought to the fore for the audience. It’s what makes live performance a dynamic occasion.’

There’s even a section where Coward classics are revamped and recast, played under the guise of either ABBA, Mozart or Elton John. ‘This is a mad cap musical quiz where we take some of the master’s greatest songs and tease the audience into identifying them.

‘It’s a lot of fun for everyone even people who are not so familiar with his music. It also shows off the durability of Coward’s music and gets his songbook out of the museum through the musical roughhousing of his famous idiosyncratic and elegant reserve. It’s Coward meets Las Vegas – but then he did that too, you know.’

Bitter, Sweet & Twisted opens at The Ellington Jazz Club on Tuesday September 29, with a repeat performance a month later on Thursday October 29.

Scott-Patrick Mitchell