Floozy, Jamie Mykaela
Studio Underground, State Theatre Centre, 24 January 2023

This floozy is a tiny, hyperactive bundle of nerve endings under a beehive wig. She’s dolled up in a little red dress and strapped to a ukulele or, increasingly, a big bad electric guitar five sizes too big for her.

Jamie Mykaela is back, albeit briefly, in her hometown (her “ex-town”, she insists) after a couple of years in Oxford, that storied, grim (to her), weird university city, with the pandemic snapping at her heels.

Returning with her is a set of new, original songs and some funny and sad stories, but mostly a window into her life and art.

There are surprises for those who know her best for her hit show of the last two Fringe Worlds, Daddy, where she tore at the dark places behind the popular song. Daddy was brilliant, angry, savagely funny and fearless. Mykaela was passionate, but an observer. In Floozy, there is no detachment. It’s as up close and personal as you should want to get.

That brilliance is all there again. She’s a remarkable singer with punk and high cabaret sensibilities underpinned by years of classical training. She sparkles and flares on stage, demanding your attention.

I’m loathe to make comparisons, but there are times she reminds you of Liza Minnelli, and even her mother Judy Garland. The same glisten, the same dam about to break.

Her songs – titles such as “I Hit Water”, “Lovely Little Setback”, “Escape You” give the game away – are sad, well-structured and witty, if, as she concedes, a little “too much Sarah Blasko”. She lets rip at the top of her range on her “Old Lady Song” and the Dead Kennedys’ “Too Drunk to Fuck” to startling effect.

Mykaela is a terrific comedian, sharp as a tack and observant, well aware of incongruity, especially her own – a close encounter with a musician hero of hers at a gig made “the feminism leave my body”. Most of all, she’s no floozy, no matter what she claims.

For all that, Floozy is an uncomfortable show and one still to find its feet. It will be most effective, I suspect, re-tooled for an audience other than this one. Leaving home may be hard, but coming back and explaining why you left isn’t easy either.

Floozy’s finest moment happened by accident, as the show was ending. She wrenched the mike from its stand a little too hard and it smacked her in the mouth, chipping one of her famous teeth and cutting her famous lip.

She looked down, in curious surprise and said: “There’s blood on the microphone”.

Ain’t that the truth. She couldn’t have said it better if she’d tried.

Floozy is at Studio Underground until 28 January 2023.

Pictured top: The many moments of Jamie Mykaela in her show ‘Floozy’. Photo: Jed Cowper