COMFORT FOOD CABARET - Tuggeranong Arts Centre

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Michelle Pearson performing "Comfort Food Cabaret"

Written, performed and cooked by Michelle Pearson.

Tuggeranong Arts Centre, ACT, April 5, 2025.

Reviewed by BILL STEPHENS 

Torn between a career as a singer and her love of cooking, Adelaide songstress, Michelle Pearson combined both talents into a cabaret show Comfort Food Cabaret, with which she now tours the world plying her audience with tasty treats as she serenades them.

Pearson has performed Comfort Food Café more than 107 times to over 9000 people in Australia, the United Kingdom and Europe, her 2024 Edinburgh Fringe Festival season selling out before the cast even arrived in Edinburgh.

However, these Tuggeranong Arts Centre performances are the first time it has been presented in Canberra. In fact it is the first time Pearson herself has ever been to Canberra, a fun fact she shared with her audience, after bursting on to the stage to the strains of the Anthony Newley/Leslie Bricusse song, Feeling Good.

As she organised her cooking equipment and ingredients for the first of the three courses she would demonstrate during her show, she quickly engaged her audience with stories surrounding the inspirations for her recipes.

A gifted storyteller with a relaxed stream-of-consciousness style, all her stories were around food, mostly against herself, and mostly confiding her misadventures while in the search of love and culinary perfection.

One such story concerned her dislike for dishes combining meat and fruit, and her discomfort when invited home by an early boyfriend to meet his parents she felt obliged to devour a generous plate of apricot chicken served by his adoring mother.

Along the way Pearson’s stories would inspire songs. Harry Warren’s At Last at the discovery of a particularly satisfying flavour; Dolly Parton’s 9 to 5 at the start of a cooking adventure; Ryan Griffin’s I’ve Been Missing You, when confessing a passion for Nutella; and a particularly moving version of Keith Richard’s Wild Horses when sharing recollections of her father.

All her renditions were accompanied by her excellent on-stage trio, Aaron Nash (Keyboard), Stephen Foster (Bass) and Kevin Van Der Zwaag (Drums), who also provided background music as the audience, having been tantalised by the smells wafting from the stage, was treated to a delicious sampling of each course, which had been pre-pared by  cooks, Loren Quinn and Rhiannon Groutsch and distributed by Tuggeranong Arts Centre volunteers.

Although it has taken eight years for this entertaining combination of cooking demonstration and cabaret performance to eventually make it to Canberra it has certainly been well worth the wait to experience Comfort Food Cabaret.

                                                    Photo by Cassidy Richens

         This review first published in the Digital Edition of CITY NEWS ON 06.04.25