Dark thunderclouds meant the transition from day to night started about eight hours earlier than expected last Friday, so it was appropriate to celebrate with Evening: A Cabaret.

Perched in peach-coloured shirts, the band played keyboard and varnished string instruments as they welcomed in the audience. Location is a defining factor of cabaret (smoky nightclubs or themed restaurants being the norm) so the restrained surrounds of the Old Chamber Rooms at Trades Hall gave the Duskbuskers an uphill battle. But hills aren’t so important in modern warfare, and they quickly won this battle with Aurora Kurth emerging in diva-esque, shimmering red silk. Her velvety vocals weren’t an immediate match with the bar room banter of Casey Bennetto of Keating! The Musical fame, but they embraced this to build some men-versus-women interplay.

This show isn’t strictly comedy. As their promotion says, it is about the time in-between light and dark – the grey gloaming that turns down the colour and noise, fuzzing and re-focussing the mind as we search out pockets of light where we can meet for a yarn and a yard glass. Evening: A Cabaret’s stereotype-centred jokes and more effective made-for-Melbourne observations are intersected by denser lyricism suggesting the desires and insecurities suffered in night-time pursuits of love. Poetry slips by without punch line, and the feel of the evening changes. Barbecue observations slide into deeper explorations of the hazy mind and by the time the band was singing “the less they know, the more they understand” it felt almost subversive.

Perhaps a second viewing would help (Aurora sings one song twice, enabling the clever wordplay to become much more apparent), but overall the thigh-slapping is reserved for the jaunty music.

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