Saturday 1 March 2014

Grumpy to Snow White in 0.22 Seconds

So the worlds second largest Fringe Festival is happening at the moment and amongst the business of my final year of studies, I'm excited to be a performing artist this year!  The gospel choir I sing in has a one-nite-only concert next weekend at the Adelaide Fringe Festival.  If you're ever in the area, the Adelaide Festival season is incredible, featuring several festivals around late summer/early autumn (Aussie seasons here so February - April).  Arguably the feather in my little city's artistic cap is the Adelaide Fringe Festival, an amazing Fringe Festival second only to the Edinborough Fringe Festival.  I won't ramble on about it but if you get the chance I'd seriously recommend coming to Adelaide one year to check it out.

Anyway, the point of this post is to talk about a Fringe show I went and saw on Thursday night.  How I found out about this show is kind of a cute story (in my opinion anyway).  I was doing a sort of pop-up promo performance with my choir at the 'Fringe Caravan', a temporary performance space set up in the city where Fringe Artists can do little 10-minute sets to promote their shows for free.  I was tired from the busy-ness of being back at school and just not having a great day and I'll be honest, I was pretty darn grumpy.  I was standing with my group waiting for our turn to perform, feeling sorry for myself and just wanting to go home and be an anti-social hermit when I hear this gorgeous male voice singing along to an acoustic guitar.  Considering where I was, this wasn't that much of a surprise or anything out of the ordinary - until the lyrics broke through my grumpy-pants-aura.  

"I wanna be where the people are, I wanna see, wanna see them dancing..."

Oh yes my friends.  This guy was standing there, bold as brass, singing Part of Your World from The Little Mermaid!!!  I swear I went from Grumpy to Snow White in 0.22 seconds!

Anywho...this guy finishes the song and then starts talking about how that was from his previous Fringe show  called 'The Disney Project'.  Obviously at this point I am completely enthralled and when he starts talking about his new show called 'The 90's Project' I've already decided to buy tickets (Have I mentioned my deep rooted love of 90's pop music?).  So I convinced/bullied a friend into coming with me and bought tickets for Thursday night's performance.  Mr. Ariel, which I have at this point dubbed him, performed as part of a 4-piece pub band and the 90 minute show was fantastic.  I mean I'm happy with a mixed tape of 90's songs but to listen to 4 very talented musicians performing some of my favourites live was just spectacular.   A bit of searching and a tip from my friend led me to Mr. Ariel's YouTube channel (His name is actually Max but I think Mr. Ariel suits him), where he has a whole bunch of videos of him singing covers of various songs and lo and behold! There is a playlist called...The Disney Project!!!!!

As a Disney nerd, this has made my week...well my festival really (well ok, performing has made my festival but this is a close second!) and I wanted to share the love with everyone (plus it is shameful that his vids don't have more hits) so go and check him out HERE!  

Amazing voice, great musician and Disney tunes - what are you waiting for? He's a rather handsome young chap too (Bit too young for me sadly! Hehehehe!), so really, it's a win-win-win situation.  Enjoy!