Celebrating 30 Years of Finucane & Smith at Luna Park

Hip hip hooray! Finucane & Smith are turning 30, and naturally, they’re celebrating in the only way they know how: with a gloriously unrestrained carnival of cabaret, burlesque, music, dance, comedy, glamour, chaos and more than a little bit of diva.

Over the past 30 years, Finucane & Smith have created 36 full-length shows, performed across 19 countries, toured 160 Australian towns, entertained more than a million audience members and collected 21 awards along the way. Not bad for a company that has done it all without a penny of ongoing funding.

To mark three decades of making wildly inventive, genre-defying art, the company is returning to Melbourne's iconic Luna Park for Dance Palace, a month-long party running every weekend from mid-August. Dance Palace will bring together a dazzling cast of performers for an event that promises, in true Finucane & Smith fashion, to be anything but predictable. Expect pub rock queens, Bollywood love gods, torch singers, burlesque artists, First Nations performers, gothic legends, live painting, flying pants and plenty of surprises along the way.

Ahead of the glorious mayhem to come, we spoke to a dozen of the 30 performers taking part in Dance Palace about the show, the company, and what makes Finucane & Smith such a singular force in Australian performance.

Dance Hall!: The Diva Carousel review | Finucane & Smith | Luna Park

Art has the ability to change people's way of thinking and it has the ability to unite us. In Moira Finucane's Dance Hall!: The Diva Carousel, a number of Melbourne's finest talents come together to celebrate art and to inspire us to be better and do something good, particularly with the way the current Australian Government has been treating refugees, women and people from the LGBTQI community.

While the show is a little tamer than you might come to expect from Moira Finucane, it is still a hugely entertaining evening with a mix of regular faces and new faces within the Finucane family. Maude Davey wins the crowd over with each one of her acts, including her puntastic turn as Earth. Her performance of The Angels' "Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again" is always a joy to watch and was clearly an audience favourite. James Welsby's highly energetic vogueing number is an empowering reminder for constant self-growth and self-exploration and learning to be comfortable in your own skin and never denying who you are. 

The singing and dancing continue throughout the night with Paul Cordeiro literally having people dancing in their chairs with some seated choreography to Tina Turner's "Nutbush City Limit". Chanteuse Clare St. Clare performs a gorgeous cover of Beyonce's "Halo" and counter-tenor diva Mama Alto hypnotises the audience during their performance of Des'ree's "Kissing You". In her Melbourne diva debut, Willow Sizer cranks out a commanding rendition of the Eagles' "Hotel California".