Only an Octave Apart review: An eclectic cabaret mash-up of classical and pop songs

Only an Octave Apart

Gate Theatre

★★★☆☆

“The song you would often sing / Is echoing, echoing yet,” Justin Vivian Bond sings with haunting elegance in the Gate Theatre for the Dublin Fringe Festival. That sad observation of a regrettably lost lover was made in a 1940s song, but in this cabaret it’s also a lyric that shrinks the distance between centuries.

Bond’s vocal is translating French-language verses sung by the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, whose voice is like a beam of light, arriving here after passing through arias by Purcell and Gluck. Their cabaret, a mash-up of classical and popular songs, is interceded by flooring crosstalk comparing the New York cabaret scene with the vast universe of opera. (“It’s pronounced ‘Ah-dit Piaf,” Costanza says. “I think this show needs some Ah-diting,” Bond replies.)

While they are brilliantly quick on the mic, their song list is occasionally eclectic, digging up the 1927 popular song Me and My Shadow and the 1972 bossa-nova hit Waters of March to play up differences between their voices. Bond’s solo refracting Judy Garland’s I’m Always Chasing Rainbows through the 1983 song Rainbow Sleeves, by Rickie Lee Jones, becomes grammatically confusing, jutting from a first-person perspective on failure to a second-person display of encouragement.

[ Dublin Fringe Festival: Full coverage here ]

Other song combinations are ingenious. Following grim reports from an American tour of vulnerable people’s rights being stripped away, a pleading aria from Gluck’s 18th-century underworld opera Orfeo ed Euridice transitions into the stirring Peter Gabriel-Kate Bush duet Don’t Give Up. From the Greek underworld to modern desolation, a consoling message gently gets through: “You’re not beaten yet.”