Jazz and cabaret star, Libby O’Donovan opens up about love
Award-winning musician Libby O’Donovan opens up about love, heartbreak, music, religion – and being a nun.
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Libby O’Donovan aimed to be a saint but had to settle for being a nun. Not that the cabaret star minds too much about the downgrade, she’s always had a fascination with nuns. She is even listed on official government records as “Sister Elizabeth O’Donovan”.
This is not a joke. Last month O’Donovan performed Sister Elizabeth at the Adelaide Cabaret Festival, a tribute to all things nun.
“I am officially a nun,’’ insists O’Donovan.
“When I was 18, and I had to pay rent and pay taxes, I got a letter from the ATO and they said, ‘first name’, and I said ‘Elizabeth’, ‘surname, O’Donovan’, ‘prefix Miss, Mrs’ and I was like, ‘f--k off’, I’m not going to put that down based on my marital status,” she says, laughing. “So I ticked ‘other’ and wrote Saint, and when the letter came back, they downgraded me to Sister.
“So, officially, across all government records I am Sister Elizabeth.’’
O’Donovan is returning to Adelaide this month for Love Sermon, a collaboration with her friend, writer Clementine Ford. Love in its various forms has been very much front of mind for the 46 year old in recent times.
There are those nuns. Then there is a mother’s love. O’Donovan was on stage for Sister Elizabeth with her 13-year-old daughter Maisy who sang with the St Mary’s school choir.
“What I really love is seeing the joy on Maisy’s face,” O’Donovan says. “I totally understand it from the perspective of someone that does it as a living and I look at her and I go ‘yeah, man, you’ve got it’.”
Then sadly, and painfully public, there was lost love. On Boxing Day last year, O’Donovan’s high-profile marriage to country music icon Beccy Cole collapsed.
Cole had fronted the media on multiple occasions, but O’Donovan kept private.
It begged the question: How was she doing?
“Gosh,” she says. “I live with a constant state of gratitude for everything that I have experienced.”
It’s clear O’Donovan is vulnerable when discussing the subject. Equally, she refuses to go into detail.
Her eyes begin to water as she continues: “There are lots of complex emotions that come up with any kind of situation and particularly romantic loves that often … end and then there’s a period of moving through that. But I’m really grateful for everything that I’ve experienced.
“I’ve had great romantic loves in my life, and certainly the most recent one, I can’t fault it.
“There were beautiful, amazing, joyful experiences throughout that entire relationship that I’m eternally grateful for.
“It’s part of something that’s helped shape who I am now.”
The jazz and cabaret star has piercing green eyes, store-bought, blonde-dyed hair, and a golden smile. We are speaking on the bright Semaphore patio of her best friend and she is wearing ruby glitter heels, blue glam makeup and an atlas printed jacket.
Her energy is infectious and perspectives engaging, perhaps somewhat due to her “unusual” religious upbringing.
O’Donovan grew up in Broken Hill and lived in a rectory where her parents provided an “open house” for the community. “It was living in the church practically,” she says.
The rectory was where O’Donovan started to understand the meaning of love.
When she came out as gay to her parents as a teenager, she was free to pursue love on her own terms, whether it be romantic or platonic.
The message from her parents was simple: God is love.
“This construct of love, this understanding of love, what this embodiment of everything that is love, Dad says, that is God,” O’Donovan says.
“Both of my parents have never said ‘you can’t be this’ and ‘you can’t be that’, they just approach everything with love.”
O’Donovan never spoke of a particular time where she might have been vilified because of her sexuality. “If anyone approached me from a religious point of view to say Jesus or God didn’t do that or whatever, I’d be like, God is love and there can’t be any better proof than this,” she says.
“I’m a loving being and this is what part of that means for me. I haven’t felt any different. Ever.”
It may also partly explain the interest in nuns. There were three nuns in the audience for Sister Elizabeth. Two Josephites from the Mary MacKillop order and a Sister of Mercy, who were curious about the performance.
“They saw the poster and they said, ‘Oh, let’s go to that. It’s called Sister Elizabeth, it’s something about nuns’,” O’Donovan laughs again. “They loved it. They were like, is this going to be offensive?
“But the whole show honours them … and the amazing nuns throughout history.”
A part of her fascination with nuns is a popular culture that often depicts them as sexual deviants or horror villains.
“When I was researching for this show, the two most popular genres for any movies about nuns are: nunsploitation … and horror flicks,” she says.
“Why are people so terrified of a woman who doesn’t want to subscribe to what they’re being told to do and wants to instead live in the company of other women singing hymns, wearing comfortable shoes, frogs with pockets, growing vegies which are sustainable, and donating to charity.
“It’s a very wholesome existence.”
O’Donovan also can’t understand why people portray nuns as “subversive”, when historically they provided phenomenal work to society.
“Hildegard of Bingen wrote operas before operas were even invented. She was a natural healer and a scientist … and she wrote what was the first recorded description of the female orgasm,” O’Donovan says, with passion.
“We can’t imagine why (nuns) don’t want to be ‘Love Actually’, and why they’d want to live in a convent.’’
O’Donovan says her life as a performer was set up by her parents. She tells the story of when her mum, an American from a small country town, gave equal weight to both her sister and her creative endeavours.
“My sister was like, ‘I painted this rock in folk art class’, and they’re like, ‘Oh, that’s wonderful’,” O’Donovan says, while mimicking an American accent.
“Singing at the Opera House, paint a f--king rock, same reaction.”
There was never a hierarchy.
“It’s set me up for a really beautiful life in this industry, because sometimes it can be competitive,” she says.
“Sometimes it can be fickle, dog eat dog, you know, you’ve got to scratch and claw and sometimes everything’s about publicity, or trying to get the story right, or control the narrative or whatever and I’m just like, there’s enough squares for all of us here.”
The guiding hand of her parents clearly means a great deal and the story of how they met is instructive. It was in the wake of the Vietnam War and there was a shortage of teachers and nurses, with many young women turning back to old duties of being a mother and wife.
It led to advertisements overseas, in hopes that young women would move to fill these roles.
O’Donovan’s mother, Prue, only 21 at the time, responded to the advertisement that said, “teachers wanted in Wagga Wagga”.
She took a gruelling long-haul flight, crossing the Pacific Ocean to start a new life, and went to church in Wagga.
“There was a visiting priest there, preaching. That was my dad, Bart, and they met,” O’Donovan puts simply.
“I don’t think she was too keen at first. She was a bit like, “whatever’.”
After a period of time of getting to know each other, O’Donovan’s mum wrote a letter home.
“My nana says she wrote a letter to her that said, ‘I’m doing this, I’m doing that, I’m teaching at Wagga High School’ and then in tiny, tiny writing at the very bottom she wrote ‘PS I’m in love’,” O’Donovan says. “That’s how my nana found out she was probably not going to be coming back to America.”
O’Donovan’s parents got married in the ’70s and have been together ever since.
Their secret is they kept their independence but have always “championed each other”.
“They do very different things even though they’re both priests or have been priests. They’ve had different parishes,” she says.
“They’ve always had retreats ever since we were little where one will go off for like a week and do whatever for a retreat and come back and then the other will go off.
“They haven’t tried to shackle each other or one hasn’t played a (gender) role.”
Her parents swapped domestic duties when O’Donovan’s brother was born.
“They haven’t swapped back yet,” she laughs.
“He’s 36.”
This tight-knit family environment also nurtured her love of singing and performing; her “career” effectively began when she was belting out hymns in church with her sister. “I’ve always been someone who loves singing with other people, no matter what genre,” she says.
It’s also when she discovered that she had a killer voice, a voice which has taken her across the globe performing to audiences at the most celebrated of arts festivals, and on some of our most famous stages.
She has performed solo seasons for the Adelaide Festival, Adelaide Fringe, Adelaide Cabaret Festival, Edinburgh Fringe, Sydney Spring Festival, Perth International Arts Festival, Melbourne Fringe, Feast Festival and Hindu Festival for her written and performed work.
She has performed in dozens of shows including Patch Theatre Company’s Sharon Keep Ya Hair On!, Matthew Robinson’s Metro Street, Doppio Parallelo’s DJ Squat and Contaminations Lab.
Her most recent cabaret work includes The Story of Meredith Crocksley, Some of My Best Friends Are Single and Gady La La – Songs for the Sophisticated Fag Hag.
O’Donovan was nominated for the Helpmann Award alongside Cole for their show, The Cowgirl and The Showgirl.
She won the Green Room Award for musical direction.
She has been described as a “powerful and sassy performer” and lauded for her “richness of vocal range and emotion-filled song interpretations”.
It also doesn’t hurt that she’s willing to try pretty much anything.
“I’ve sung at a Hindu festival in India with an a cappella, South Indian chronicle group and then I’ve sung country music and I’ve done straight, experimental, out there jazz and I’ve sung straight jazz and I’ve sung in operas and I’ve sung in music theatre production,” she says.
But it’s in cabaret where she seems most at home.
“I’ve written so many different cabaret shows and performed so many different cabaret shows and I just really love it,” O’Donovan says.
“You’re basically able to combine however you’re feeling or whatever you want to comment on with music – which is the great love – and present that.
Whatever you see on that night you’ll never see again, the next night will be different.
“Music theatre or opera is like you’ve got to hit this mark on this beat and do this and do that and it’s the same every night.
“But cabaret is just wild and people can call out. I love that. I love a heckle.
“I love the interaction and I’ve had unbelievable things happen, that have been just so fun on a particular night and if you weren’t there you missed it.
“This is one opportunity.”
Even while O’Donovan’s personal life felt turbulent, her professional career was the complete opposite.
This year, she was awarded the Adelaide Cabaret Festival 2022 Icon Award at The Variety Gala and was named an Order of Australia for her services to jazz and cabaret.
On the first point, she says she was shocked but humbled when she found out she was the recipient of the Icon Award, having worked in the cabaret scene for decades.
However, when she received an email about being named an OAM, she thought it was junk.
“How can this be real?” she says, laughing.
“It was like ‘you’ve been successfully nominated for an OAM’ … but I had to fill out what my bio was and click on this link, and I’m like ‘nah’.”
O’Donovan was only convinced of its legitimacy when she received a formal follow-up letter via Australia Post.
It was definitely a spark to light up some of the darkest days, however O’Donovan says she is able to separate her personal struggles from her professional work by compartmentalising, a tactic commonly used by artists.
“I just try and stay really present with what’s happening right now, making sure that I acknowledge all of the feelings that come up and sit with them and work through them,” she says. “As a performer you could have a massive migraine, and then get up and do 60 minutes of a gig and no one would know and then get off and go, ‘I now need to vomit and be in a dark room’, or you can have similarly terrible personal tragedies happen.”
Next up is Love Sermon with her good mate Clementine Ford.
It speaks on matters of the heart. It touches on unrequited love, deep friendship, motherhood, breakups and self-love.
And O’Donovan has concluded romantic love is “the least interesting type of love”.
After three decades of friendship with Ford, their love for each other hasn’t waned, only morphing with the incarnations of themselves over time.
“There’s no surprise that (the Disney musical) Frozen was so incredibly popular when little girls and little boys have been waiting for something to be about friendship and NOT about romantic love,” she says.
The pair went to the same high school but didn’t connect until years later at a denim fashion parade, where Ford had entered the best camel toe event.
O’Donovan says she remembers thinking how funny she was.
“We started corresponding with each other, messaging and then catching up and then we had this, what she calls in her book How We Love, the summer of love,” she says.
“We were together all the time for this whole summer, almost every day just around each other, getting to know each other and we just loved each other, just really fiercely from that point.”
O’Donovan accepted Ford’s invitation to perform her Love Sermon in her usual laid-back manner, not realising it was Ford’s keynote address at the Opera House for the All About Women festival this year.
“She had written a love sermon, but she wanted to incorporate music into it,” O’Donovan says.
“We literally had a rehearsal in the foyer or the buffet area of the hotel with the piano.
“It was this really organic thing.”
The spontaneity of the show has a “beautiful charm”, O’Donovan says.
“It wasn’t orchestrated, we hadn’t been in rehearsals for eight weeks or anything like that.
“It was literally … having a bit of a play in the hotel and then traipsing off to the John Sutherland room at the Opera House.”
It wasn’t a huge gig by O’Donovan’s experience, but the connection between the pair solidified their choice of songs that would speak to the sermon.
“Taking a song that is meant to be a love song between two people and actually either turning it on itself so it’s a love song to yourself or about friendships, which makes it far more interesting,” she says.
“The beauty of the sermon is simple. There’s not one type of love that triumphs all, it’s complex.
“It does traverse more than just one particular type of person, even who you are within yourself.
“It’s really beautiful.”
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