Em Rusciano: Addicted to Love → Adelaide Cabaret Festival
The Dustan Playhouse is brimming with Rusciano’s biggest fans— the women of all ages, the gays, and the few straight men dragged along. She apologises to them, and the women giggle excitedly— we know these men have no idea what they are in for…
Adorned in a red leotard made to show off her “revenge body,” Rusciano wastes no time getting straight to business. She opens with Love is a Battlefield alongside her band who wear red Choose Me shirts. The scene is a clever nod to a rouge-filled romanticism. Then, her red gloves come off physically and metaphorically.
Rusciano targets one man in the audience. Alejandro. And he becomes a symbol of the men everywhere. He becomes this character for her to throw rhetorical questions at. He sits there clueless whilst the rest of us splutter with laughter and nod in agreement. We all know an Alejandro.
Through her unravelling stream of consciousness, Rusciano unpacks this universal need of women to just ‘be chosen’ by a man. She admits that this is what innocently led her to the marriage of her “first husband” (a title she is re-claminging over the term “ex”) and early pregnancy of her first daughter. She brings attention to the fact that no one tried to stop her, that earns many murmurs of agreement. She then glares at her dad who plays in her band, asking him the same question, which becomes a clever running joke of the evening.
Rusciano tells us the stories we have been waiting to hear since her divorce. The messy, honest and hilarious dating tales and triumphs are finally exposed. She bares it all, the sex stories, the dating-app horrors, the high-school sweethearts that suddenly emerge post break-up and the 90s’ weird fascination with age-gap romance.
Her storytelling is wild and honest. She is often on the floor to collect herself mid story, and we are all laughing too. The joke that had us absolutely HOLLERING with laughter was when Rusciano broke a wine glass, after saying the “lesbians who run this theatre” didn’t want her drinking on stage. Three of them come on stage to clean up, whilst we all collectively need three minutes to recover.
As a twenty-eight year old sitting there in the audience, it was comforting to know that even the men Rusciano is scrolling through on Hinge are the fish-holding, Japan-travelling, HYROX-loving men who still don't want a woman to “take themselves too seriously. There you go ladies, no matter their age, these men are the same, just in different fonts. This is the best kind of girlhood therapy: collectively laughing at the reality of dating in the 21st century.
Her political commentary does not attack, but rather asserts this collective frustration felt by women that men are failing to meet the high standards women now have for themselves. We are now the “up market executives on Madison Avenue” as she says. She says to the men, looking after your own children is not “babysitting,” get a headboard for your bed and maybe go to therapy instead of Japan.
She has no reservations attacking Mel Robinson’s Let Them theory though. Because, if we just keep letting men behave as they do, they continue to subconsciously uphold the patriarchy that operates against us. Rusciano’s solution though: tour show to the Mines! Bring your straight male friends!
She breaks up the deep-belly laughter a few times throughout her set to sing some mash-up covers and also debut a song from her musical she has written recently. At the end, we are all up dancing to Addicted to Love, and chanting with her the cheeky change to the lyrics in the chorus (hehe).
Rusciano gives us a show powered by feminine rage and the newfound confidence that comes from choosing yourself later in life. Addicted to Love also lands somewhere sharper: a reminder to stop centering men like they’re the whole plot and choose you!
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