A Response: Karaoke Heaven

Closing out the coverage to the Auckland Live Cabaret Festival is a response to Amanda Grace Leo's journey through Karaoke Heaven.

Amanda Grace Leo might be the tiniest thing on the stage she performs Karaoke Heaven on, even the microphone occasionally threatens to eclipse her. However, across the show’s hour, she packs in a lot of a show, and a lot of personality. She was the highlight of the festival’s opening night gala, and she’s no less winning as the headliner of her own show.

Karaoke Heaven covers a lot of ground. We follow Leo’s story from her parents meeting – during a production of Joseph and the Technicolour Dreamcoat, which is about as adorably musical theatre as you can get – to her being born in New Zealand, then spending the bulk of her childhood in Singapore, before moving back here. She skips over her twenties, as many of us probably wish we could when recounting the story of our lives, before discussing her current pivot into doing all of the many things she currently does with her life, including being a muti-talented performer, a tarot reader and a frankly, just a super charismatic human being.

Leo is unsurprising, the main asset of the show. She has a huge voice, full of character and specificity. Occasionally, musical theatre can tend towards performer who have the pipes, but not the plumbing, but Leo is fully connected to her material, whether it’s a song that she wrote when she was a teenager, performed with the confidence that someone in their [redacted]-thirties has. Her energy is also commendable, and never once drops, even as she speeds through a barely abridged recounting of her own life.

Her biggest asset, however, is her ability to draw you in. Even in the Wintergarden, a gorgeous venue which can occasionally feel so wide you could drive a fleet of eighteen wheelers through it, she manages to make it feel like she’s singing just for you. Leo could be performing for five people or five hundred, without turning the dials up or down on her performance. It’s a rare ability, and it’s one that makes me excited to see whatever she’s working on next.

Leo, and her accompanist, have an innate idea of when to shift between the spoken word, and when to shift between the music. This is also a skill in itself, especially for a show that slips between the two nearly constantly, but it feels organic, almost as though the spoken bits are inhales, and the sung parts are exhales. It would be so easy for a show that spans so much material, not just in terms of the actual content, but the emotional spectrum, to put the audience in a state of tonal whiplash, but Karaoke Heaven never falls into that.

The only place the show occasionally falters is the writing, which falls back on certain stock phrases – fever dream, crashing out, “I’m a Leo so X” – which is certainly endearing to a general audience, but not necessarily specific to Leo. It also tends to muddy with the tone, as do callouts to follow various social media accounts. Leo is dealing with deep, messy, stuff that is both exposing and vulnerable. 

These dips into familiarities pull out of the piece’s depth, and place it in a shallow place that does a disservice to the material that Leo clearly wants to excavate from her past, and it’s material that I know for a fact resonates further. A tarot motif is introduced, then kind of dropped, and I’d love to see it incorporated more as part of the fabric of the show, especially seeing as it seems so core to Leo’s current persona, and absolutely core to whichever act of her life she’s in (two of three, or two of infinity?).

There’s a hefty emotional undertow to Karaoke Heaven that has sat with me overnight. How much more interesting would the world be if every person was given a stage for an hour (and perhaps a little reverb on the micro) and a captive audience to hear them? How much richer would the world be, how much more would we learn about each other? Not all of us would come up with a show as fun as Karaoke Heaven, but it does make me think. I’ve seen Leo on stages for over a decade now, and always been a fan of her as a performer, and getting to know her life story, where we might overlap, and where we don’t, allows me to engage with her on a deeper, richer level. Not everybody’s going to come away feeling that, but I’m glad that I did, and glad that a show like Karaoke Heaven has a place in a festival like this, in an economy like this, in a landscape like this.

The Auckland Cabaret Festival runs until July 5 at the Civic Theatre.

This response was commissioned by Auckland Live. You can find more information about this commissioning structure here.