By Nick Dent
Songs from the Book of Life
Cremorne Theatre, QPAC, Friday April 12
★★★½
“Why are you here?” Deborah Conway asks the audience on making her no-nonsense entrance in Songs from the Book of Life. “I know – It’s Only the Beginning.”
Conway’s “love-hate relationship” with her biggest hit is the framing device to this 90-minute scripted presentation, a distillation of her 2023 autobiography performed on acoustic guitars with Willy Zygier, her musical and life partner of some 33 years.
Deborah Conway condenses her memoirs into a 90-minute show titled Songs from the Book of Life.Credit: Jason Lau
She says she’s grateful to have a song that everyone knows, even if its sunny optimism about the first rush of new love makes it an outlier in her generally spikier oeuvre.
This, after all, is the singer whose breakthrough in 1985 with the band Do-Re-Mi was the excoriating Man Overboard, a chorus-less ode to marital malaise that wore its feminism on its sleeve, and featured congas.
Rather than a greatest hits show, Songs from the Book of Life cherry-picks songs that reflect meaningfully on episodes from her life. For instance, a 2016 ballad about parenthood, Serpent’s Tooth, follows an eye-opening soliloquy about her father’s mental illness and discussion of her own relationship to her daughters.
Conway, now 64, still has the megawatt smile, the killer cheekbones and the svelte figure that saw her begin her career in modelling, and even landed her a lead role in an ’80s Ozploitation picture (Running on Empty – admired still by the drag race set).
Deborah Conway and Willy Zygier have been life partners and collaborators since the early 1990s.Credit: Jason Lau
Her voice, always powerful and impressive, now has a beguiling twang – perhaps a legacy of her Patsy Cline period. As you’d expect, Zygier harmonises perfectly with his wife, circling her unobtrusively while deploying flawless guitar embellishments.
Conway touches upon her school years (guidance counsellors recommended a career as a travel agent), the rise and fall of Do-Re-Mi, and her abortive record deal with Virgin in the UK, as well as triumphs such as her various ARIAs and her recent Order of Australia.
Projections of photographs and footage from her early years are woven effectively into the staging, and there’s even a bit of choreography.
Conway doesn’t go much into the storied love life that takes up so much of the book – it’s not a kiss and tell.
And the show does not address the way she and Zygier have been personally affected by the Israel-Hamas War.
Her memoir’s title is a reference to the Hebrew Book of Life, and Conway (her Leeds-born father changed his name from Cohen) speaks about how her Jewishness has become more important to her as she has gotten older.
Elsewhere, she has spoken out explicitly in support of Israel in the current conflict. Here she makes reference more broadly to Jewish persecution in a way that is nevertheless bound to attract comment.
A more timid performer might have avoided mentioning Palestine. Timidity has never been in Conway’s DNA.
But this isn’t a show about current events. It is, as Zygier notes wryly during the encore, about nostalgia.
There are only eight songs in a concise set list, but they are all bangers and diehard fans are unlikely to be disappointed. For our money, Alive and Brilliant – her first single written with Zygier – is the quintessential Conway track and a highlight.
Few Australian singer-songwriters are more deserving of a victory lap.
Songs from the Book of Life plays at Bird’s Basement, Melbourne, on April 20, The Playhouse in Hobart on May 25, Regal Theatre in Adelaide on June 8, and His Majesty’s Theatre, Perth, on June 16.