Jackie O: The Show She Never Gave - Review

This is Bateman at his most outrageous, campy best. As Jackie he delighted the audience with a cabaret mixture of crude comic stand-up, irreverent songs set to country twang, and a poignant story of loss set just outside New Orleans. Bateman's performance was set against a gallery showing of 14 of his original paintings, and featuring Jackie as cultural icon. There she was as the female half of American Gothic, standing beside a Marilyn Monroe image, posing as a '60's Mona Lisa, or sitting in a lotus pose like bottled TV star Barbara Eden... Each is framed in boucle wool, the same material as the pick Chanel suit Jackie wore for that horrifying ride through Dallas. The gaudy colours and trashy treatment, in both paintings and performance, take camp to its extreme. But throughout beats the heart of a real human message.... This potent mix of the trashy and the poignant makes Jackie O irresistable. Bravo.

- Whalen, XTRA Magazine, Toronto