Rick Lau interview
Posted:
1 Jul 2009
Rick Lau doesn’t look like a cabaret artist. Though this is possibly because we were expecting “feathers and tits, right?” Lau finishes the thought, rolling his eyes as we chat over lattes and guava juice in a coffee shop.
In a staccato Aussie lilt that betrays his Ngau Tau Kok roots, the NIDA graduate gleefully tells us about his “European debut”. He is taking My Queer Valentine, his fifth and most successful one-man cabaret show to date, to this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival. It’s an achievement for any actor to get a stage at the annual Scottish event, but even more so for Lau; Hongkongers, much less Hong Kong-born cabaret artists, are rarely represented there.
My Queer Valentine enjoys its third run of the year at the Fringe Club this fortnight. It is a witty, sometimes dark look at gay life, told through the eyes of history’s queer songwriters. Lau wrote the show with mentor Tony Taylor, in part as a personal answer to the hoopla surrounding California’s divisive Proposition 8. It’s a simple affair; just Lau, his pianist Warren Wills, and 12 songs, all chosen for the colourful stories they tell.
One tune tells the universally relatable story of a student-teacher school crush, another of a potential gay bashing in an army shower stall. A third tells the oddly sweet tale of a pair of lesbian seagulls who find their way onto Noah’s Ark. “All together,” concludes Lau, “they tell of a pretty damn fabulous, well-lived life.”
While he dismisses the stage as a political platform, the singer admits: “I’d like to show people that all the emotions the characters experience in the show, we can relate to [whether we're] gay or straight. We’re all the same."
Though it is the song and dance that keeps musical theatre a light-hearted genre, Lau argues that music provides a higher plane of expression than words alone. “A lot of people think it’s absurd that we suddenly leap into song,” he says, “but there comes a point in every story where the emotional stakes are too high for words to convey.”
Cabaret is not simply the camp fest Liza Minnelli would have us believe. It is an intimate form of lyrical storytelling that requires a basic comfort in one’s own skin. “You cannot lie when you’re performing,” explains Lau, “the setting is too small. You have to be willing to be vulnerable on stage. At the end of a cabaret show, the audience should feel like they know the performer better than they did at the beginning.”
Lau wasted no time ridding himself of self-consciousness. After graduating from the Sydney drama school that churned out the likes of Cate Blanchett and Mel Gibson, his first role was in the musical, Naked Boys Singing. We ask the obvious question. “Of course,” quips our Broadway star in the making, “completely.”
It is this confidence that drove Lau to where he stands now. When funding looked bleak for Edinburgh, he admits he felt like giving up. Then he remembered his life motto, “Leap, and the net will appear”, and he leapt, leaning on family and generous friends for support. “I can see it every time I say that,” the Hong Kong-raised Australian relates, “I see myself standing on a cliff about to jump. And you know, when you do, people will come to you.”
And here he is, in free fall and loving it. Samantha Leese.
My Queer Valentine runs Wed 15-Thu 16 at the Fringe Club theatre.
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