Gravel-voiced performer Stewart D’Arrietta must love us up n the Mid-North Coast. He was in Port Macquarie in January with buddy John Waters for Lennon Through a Glass Onion and now returns with his own show – My Leoard Cohen.
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“It’s [Glasshouse] is a great facility, fantastic state of the art and the people who work there are great,” he says.
But I had to ask: “Why Leonard Cohen?”.
“I listened to him as a young man, but then the taste for his music went away. I hadn’t listened to him for a long time when my daughter, who was in Europe at the time, told me I had to listen to his album, and I fell in love with it again,” D’Arrietta says.
His interpretation of the somewhat heavy themes Cohen sings about is completely different, he says.
“I look at them as if I’m the musical director and Leonard has just walked into the theatre and I give his music a different twist. There’s bossa nova, reggae, klezmer – Jewish dance style, and some jazz treatment.”
Cohen has always been a polarizing figure on the music scene. “You either hate him or love him,” D’Arrietta says. But interestingly, those are the type of musicians his shows centre on. “I like to puncture the pomposity of society,” he laughs, “I could never do Abba.”
One of Cohen’s most loved songs Dance Me to the End of Love, is one D’Arrietta really spices up. “I get caught up in the energy of it. It’s frenetic with its Jewish rhythms and I go a bit crazy.”
D’Arrietta insist there is a sense of humour in Cohen’s music. Like in the line: “she’s 100, but she’s wearing something tight”. Obviously those who are into the Edinburgh Fringe Festival thinks so too. His shows at the 2017 festival sold out, as did his run a the Sydney Opera House.
Poetic anecdotes, punctuated with D'Arrietta's trademark laconic humour, offer a narrative frame by which the audience can contemplate the life of one of the world’s most enigmatic songwriters. This is Cohen's music as you've never heard it before. Instead of haunting, it’s more rock’n’roll.
His answer to my question as to how he chooses to attack a song is “I have to live with it, play it on the piano, play it lots of different ways.” He says it may start out one way, but he might later find a better way to do it.
“We might even take it back closer to the original.
“Not everyone loves what I do. I’ve taken a risk by doing it, and it’s really from an experimental viewpoint. It’s theatre, but you have to be different because the competition is stiff out there.”
Cohen died in 2016, so D’Arrietta considers he is keeping his songs alive. “We love it, principally I get a real kick out of it.”
On stage adding to the musical joy is Michael Kluger on piano accordian, Greg Hensen, Victor Rounds, and John Betterson on vocals and guitar.
