The smell of incense, rope curtains creating a charm that balances between a lush parlour and my grandma trying to keep the flies out, a bright pink phone, and yes, oh yes, an ashtray. I absolutely love it when performers smoke on stage. They make second-hand smoking desirable, the smell is romanticised and transformed into a story, it’s not a bad habit, it’s a character trait. As soon as Tomas Pevenage steps on the stage we know he’s aware of it. Flashy pink eyeshadow underlines his sexy tone in French as he tells us he has quit smoking and takes a drag. Vanity and the capricious flirt of the town is at the front. But what does it mean to have bad habits as character traits?

Tomas Pevenage’s performance is a tribute interlaced with a love story and a spiral thread of mourning. He tells the story of discovering Sabah while travelling in Palestine, how one of her songs became an earworm he couldn’t escape. Sabah is the stage name of a renowned Lebanese singer whose oeuvre densely occupied the second half of the 20^th century. She’s a woman to behold, not only because her life is deliciously full of Hollywood-style gossip but also because she has a knockdown wardrobe topped with whipped-up bleached hair. Her personality and style invite doing drag as well as arouse jealousy for embracing an unapologetic hedonist lifestyle. Tomas’ glitter-heavy outfit and a talent for languages serves well to feed our guilty pleasure hunger. He switches from language to language, deliciously pronouncing the consonants of all words.

On stage, Tomas transforms into a fragmented character that’s darting between Sabah, French singer Dalida, his mother, his aunt and himself. It looks like he’s trying to catch the identity-limbo he’s in. He’s being transformed by the travels, learning Arabic, visiting holy places where either prophets, his love, or his idols were born. He tells us how he met someone who had stars in his eyes and got love-struck. In the end the charming man jilted him at the altar of the first kiss, very dramatic, something that for sure requires another outfit change. Tomas doesn’t take himself too seriously and that allows for many funny moments during the show, like when he irons a massive peroxide blond wig – this is vanity and image pushed to its limit.

This leads Tomas to his mother and her relationship with peroxide. Long hours spent as a child looking at her bleaching her hair is contrasted with the fact that she’s out of touch now, neglecting her looks, unaware of her son’s journey. We hear their conversations through an old-school wire phone, Tomas imitates her thick Aalst accent, it’s wonderful and funny. But we also understand that Tomas is somewhat struggling with his mother ageing, her comments are funny as well as expose ignorance of Tomas’ identity. On the one hand, how could she not be confused, with Tomas elbow-deep in his identity quest? On the other hand, there’s a suspicion that she doesn’t understand her son and never will.

“While Tomas does share sensitive and often uncensored details of, say, his sex life, right afterwards he escapes into a grand gesture.”

All of these stories make up a collage of Tomas’ life abroad, colourful, full of glitter, stars, impressions, all of it enabled by his playful, almost naive openness. But there’s a certain emptiness behind it all, as if Tomas was dissociating during the harder parts of his journey. It seems like Tomas tells about his life as if it were a Disney soap opera. Every time there’s too much emotion he breaks out in song. Or rather he lip-syncs to songs by Sabah or Dalida. These songs carry big emotions, but they aren’t his. He is trying to catalyse something from these songs, but it’s second-hand. This leaves it all too fluffy and out of reach. The burlesque is all that matters and the emotion doesn’t cut deeper than crocodile tears. And while Tomas does share sensitive and often uncensored details of, say, his sex life, right afterwards he escapes into a grand gesture.

© Arber Sefa

© Arber Sefa

© Arber Sefa

© Arber Sefa

© Arber Sefa

© Arber Sefa

© Arber Sefa

© Arber Sefa

At times, it feels like Tomas is too seduced by the romantic expressions of the Bohemian artistic lifestyle. He doesn’t address the hardship and destructiveness of it all. All that’s left are romantic markers of what it means to be interesting and successful. To smoke after quitting – that’s wicked, to have sex with an officer – that’s juicy, to go to a bathhouse in Damascus – that’s steamy. His personality never escapes the tension between genuine and hidden under the cakey makeup. Even his shy embarrassing moments make the audience laugh, and that left me wanting.

“I wonder whether the performance style itself, the cabaret, hinders Tomas from engaging with the more discomforting side of his search.”

In the end it makes me wonder whether the performance style itself, the cabaret, hinders Tomas from engaging with the more discomforting side of his search. By default, the style invites big, explosive emotions and, most importantly, it must be entertaining. It’s hard to stretch it beyond showiness into zones of awkwardness and discomfort. Maybe I’m looking for something impossible and the felt tension is the result of my unmet expectations? At the same time, it cannot be that Tomas went all the way to conflict-ridden unruly places to find no conflict on the stage. Not to mention that both Sabah and Dalida are dead, icons of the past, and his mother struggles with her memory.  In a way, Sabah is a show about everything that’s now lost. And while it, like its namesake, shines through thick and thin, I’d like to see the less diva and more human side of Sabah.

On tour until May 2025.