Luck Be A Lady

Amelia Zirin-Brown is standing in line at a New York Post Office when she answers a call from The Music. It may seem a world away from the wonderfully glamorous cabaret spaces inhabited by Zirin-Brown's stage persona, Lady Rizo, but posting out copies of her new CD is a task the New York-based performer relishes. “I'm in the line to post personalised albums,” Zirin-Brown explains. “Personalised so it's more of an experience. And this is new for me because it's my first album.”

The album, Violet, includes a handful of original songs and a sumptuous neo-soul cover of The Carpenters' Close To You. Though Zirin-Brown's cabaret shows feature originals including the wry love song I Google You, she's made her name reworking pop classics from a diverse playlist stretching from Dolly Parton to The Pixies.

In January Zirin-Brown will be bringing her smoky cabaret show to Sydney Festival's Spiegeltent. It may have taken the performer ten years to venture outside of the US but it didn't take her long to develop a connection with her new audiences.

After braving the Edinburgh Fringe and proving a success, Zirin-Brown was invited to perform at this year's Adelaide Cabaret Festival, her first time performing in Australia and already it seems like the start of a very promising relationship.

“My work really resonates with international audiences,” Zirin-Brown says.“It works in New York too obviously, and on the West Coast of the US but it resonates with British and Australian audiences in a way that I had not expected it would.

“What I didn't expect to find in these markets is there's such a cultural respect for live entertainment. The US tolerates it and we will go and see live entertainment but the US is based around the record industry and the movie industry, and then live music and theatre are afterthoughts. So it's delightful to come over and perform for people not just in the business.”

When Zirin-Brown first moved to New York to perform, cabaret was stuck in a rut, musical theatre performers singing swinging show tunes but in recent years the scene has been re-energised.

“I think that it is that there is no word to describe what I do,” she says. “There's a lot of rock'n'roll in what I do. But it's in the dressing of cabaret. I totally owned that term because when I started doing it in professionally in New York it was not cool. It was very passe, there was this antiquated feeling which was a pretty exciting.”

Getting audiences into seats hasn't been an issue for Lady Rizo for quite some time and a warm Sydney welcome should be just the impetus she needs to make Australia a regular tour destination.