What Will You Be Helping Us Fund?

You will be helping HMS PopUp Productions to fund the touring of our show to the Melbourne Cabaret Festival and beyond! We've been lucky enough to be invited to join the festival in an incredible venue this year... but we need to get 13 (yes 13!) cast and crew to Melbourne, and then to Sydney to take our fresh West Aussie show to the rest of the country.. and beyond!

This will support the show in the longer term, ensuring all contributing artists are equitably rewarded for their stunning contributions, helping us to get our show in front of festival directors and arts enthusiasts from around Australia and enabling us to take the show on the road to other festivals at home and abroad.

The Show

A Saucy Little Secret Set to Scandalise the Melbourne Cabaret Festival

HMS PopUp Productions’ A Saucy Little Secret, is a masterful piece of cabaret theatre by Melanie Bainbridge, following the lives of five strong women whose music and attitudes influenced the development of modern blues, queer lifestyle and racial tolerance.

Famous not only for their music, but also for their progressive and alternative attitudes to sexuality, race issues and relationships, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Gladys Bentley, Ethel Waters and Alberta Hunter, all broke into the music scene through the buffet flats and rent houses of Harlem, but rose to be successful and wealthy recording artists in their own right.

This short but spectacular era, later known as The "Harlem Renaissance" is where our story unfolds. It follows the lives of five unstoppable women whose tenacity and passion for music and public life allowed them to transcend childhoods cut short and marred by rape, abuse and desperate poverty and to ascend to great heights, as black blues queens in a white, well-heeled world.

Five of Australia’s premier actors and jazz, soul and blues musicians come together to share their untold stories. Our very own Di Shaw, Libby Hammer, Ofa Fotu / Odette Mercy, Natalie Gillespie and Harry Deluxe, with Magnus Danger Magnus and a host of incredible Perth musicians bring this tale to life for the Melbourne stage.

Backed by a ballsy blues band of Perth’s finest musicians, and set against a projected set of beautifully drawn artistic renditions of 1920’s Harlem, this show is a must-see for lovers of blues music, theatre and blues history. Audiences should come willing to have their funny-bones tickled, their heartstrings tugged and their cheeks kissed by some of the sauciest performers in the country.

The special event invites audience members to immerse themselves in the decadent spirit of the Harlem Renaissance by dressing up in 1920’s style and joining us for the rent party to end all rent parties.

A Saucy Little Secret is touring to the 86 for Melbourne Cabaret Festival for two nights only, July 3^rd and 4^th 2013.

You can check us out at the Melbourne Cabaret Festival website here: http://melbournecabaret.com/, here: http://melbournecabaret.com/index.php/shows/a-saucy-little-secret, and at our magical venue, the 86, here: http://www.the86.com.au/MelbCabaretFest.html