Cabaret trio Mark Trevorrow, Rupert Noffs and Bev Kennedy will bring their acclaimed show Old Friends back to Brunswick Picture House on Saturday, 5 September, marking the third time the production has played the venue.
The show first came to Brunswick Heads in 2024, then returned in 2025 during the trio’s two national tours of Choose Bob! 40 Ridiculous Years. This time, Mr Noffs said, the show has been rebuilt from the ground up.
“This time, though, Old Friends has been completely rebuilt, with new songs, new stories and a much broader repertoire,” Mr Noffs said. “It’s not just Sondheim anymore. We ricochet from Broadway and jazz standards to ABBA, the Bee Gees, Kander & Ebb and pop songs you probably wouldn’t expect to hear us tackle.”
Mr Trevorrow, best known for his long-running character Bob Downe, hosts the show alongside Mr Noffs and Music Director Bev Kennedy, an ARIA Award winner who also performs with the Metropolitan Orchestra and teaches at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.
Mr Noffs said the region’s audiences were part of the draw of returning.
“There’s something about Northern Rivers audiences. They’re incredibly open, smart and up for an adventure,” he said. “If I didn’t live in Sydney, I’d move there in a heartbeat.”
He said Brunswick Picture House itself had become a kind of home base for the trio.
“What the boys have created at Brunswick Picture House is extraordinary. It has become a genuine home for artists and wonderfully unexpected work,” Mr Noffs said. “Mark is practically on the electoral roll there now; he’s just hosted Winter Burlesque, and Bev calls it her spiritual home.”
Mr Noffs said choosing the setlist was a collaborative, and occasionally chaotic, process between the three performers.
“Mark, Bev and I have a constantly firing group chat where we’re forever sending each other songs and saying, ‘What about this?'” he said. “Mark naturally leads the charge because his repertoire is encyclopaedic and he’s been doing this for so long. He also loves a medley; give Mark three songs and, by lunchtime, they’ve somehow become eleven.”
He said Ms Kennedy brought a different instinct to the process.
“Bev is incredible at finding obscure gems that neither of us would necessarily think of, while I tend to push us towards the more ‘contemporary’ end,” Mr Noffs said. “I was enormously proud of convincing Mark to sing ‘Suddenly Seymour’ from Little Shop of Horrors, until we realised the musical has just turned 40. So that gives you some idea of what passes for contemporary in Old Friends.”
Audience participation has also become a bigger part of the show.
“We’ve also discovered how much we love getting the audience involved. A great singalong completely changes the energy in the room, suddenly the audience isn’t watching the show, they’re part of it,” he said. “No two shows are quite the same.”
While the show is built around music, the story behind it is deeply personal. Mr Noffs said the idea for Old Friends grew out of a difficult period caring for his mother, Mandy, after she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
“There were days when words became difficult, but music and humour somehow remained available to her. I’d sit by her bed and sing the old songs she knew,” he said. “I hadn’t sung properly in years. I’d spent that chapter of my life running restaurants rather than standing on stages. I started singing because I wanted to bring something back to her. I didn’t realise it was going to bring something back to me as well.”
During that time, Mr Noffs and his husband Matty relocated their New York restaurant, The Lucky Bee, to the Central Coast to be closer to family. The Manhattan restaurant, which Mr Noffs said counted Baz Luhrmann, Toni Collette and Chris Rock among its regulars, had been written up in The New York Times and The New Yorker.
“On paper it was an enormous decision. Emotionally, it wasn’t really a decision at all. Family won,” Mr Noffs said. “Looking back, that choice is woven through this chapter of my life too. Life occasionally has a rather brutal way of reminding you what matters.”
Mr Noffs credited Mr Trevorrow and Ms Kennedy with drawing him back to performing after years away. He said he first met Mr Trevorrow after inviting him to host a fundraiser for the Noffs Foundation, his family’s charity.
“I sang that night, and when I came off stage Mark said, ‘Oh wow, you can sing.’ I said, ‘Well, I try.’ And he said, ‘No, you can sing,'” Mr Noffs said.
The friendship deepened over the years that followed, including visits Mr Trevorrow made to New York while Mr Noffs and his husband were running The Lucky Bee. Mr Noffs said the pair had performed together for about 20 years before Old Friends took shape.
“I had put singing and performing on the back burner for years and genuinely thought I might never do it again,” he said. “Mark taught me something incredibly simple: you do it by doing it. You get back up, then you do it again, and again, and eventually the fear stops making all the decisions.”
He said the show’s title reflected a genuine friendship rather than an invented stage dynamic.
“There isn’t a manufactured relationship on stage. We know each other incredibly well, we’ve accumulated years of stories and music together, and we genuinely make each other laugh,” Mr Noffs said. “So Old Friends isn’t really a title we had to invent. We just finally put a show around something that was already there.”
The two perform “Old Friends”, from the musical Merrily We Roll Along, as a duet that opens and closes the show. Mr Noffs said performing alongside Mr Trevorrow as himself, rather than as Bob Downe, gave the show a looser, more conversational feel.
“The lovely thing about performing with Mark as himself is that it’s very different from performing with Bob Downe,” he said. “The whole thing is much more relaxed, the patter is loose and we can just follow wherever the conversation takes us.”
He said actor and comedian Gina Riley had compared the pair to a famous double act after seeing a recent show.
“Gina Riley came to our show last weekend and said it’s like watching Barbra and Judy,” Mr Noffs said. “What a huge compliment and honour.”
Mr Noffs said Ms Kennedy was the anchor that allowed him and Mr Trevorrow to improvise on stage.
“She’s really the heart and soul of Old Friends. Mark and I can wander off, tell stories, change things and generally cause trouble because Bev is sitting at the piano holding the entire musical architecture together,” he said. He added that Ms Kennedy’s teaching work at the Sydney Conservatorium had shaped the show as well, with emerging performers now appearing as special guests. “There’s something wonderful about giving young artists a platform alongside people who’ve been doing it for decades.”
Mr Noffs, who trained at NIDA and the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and spent seven years performing in New York, is the grandson of the late Reverend Ted Noffs, founder of Sydney’s Wayside Chapel. He said his grandparents’ legacy of care and connection had shaped how he approached performing.
“Nan always said that, deep down, Ted was a performer. He was a showman. He understood theatre; he built one at Wayside Chapel,” Mr Noffs said. “I’m certainly not Ted Noffs. But humanity, care and empathy were at the centre of what my grandparents believed in, and I think that is embedded pretty deeply in our family DNA. Maybe performing is simply my way of expressing it.”
He said moments after shows had reinforced why he kept returning to the stage, recalling a recent visit from his aunt, who had recently lost her husband.
“The next day she texted me and said she hadn’t felt that good in almost a decade and thanked me for getting her out of the house,” Mr Noffs said. “Everyone is fighting something you know nothing about. Sometimes getting out of the house, sitting in a room with other people, hearing some music and having a great belly laugh can be an enormous act.”
He said he hoped audiences would come away with a reminder that it is never too late to return to something you love.
“That dreams really don’t have deadlines, and that music and comedy can heal,” Mr Noffs said. “I came back to performing in my forties after genuinely believing that part of my life might be over. I’m discovering now that sometimes you’re actually better equipped for the dream when it arrives later.”
He said cabaret’s power lay in the exchange between performers and the audience.
“It isn’t simply a concert where we stand there and sing at you. It’s a conversation between the people on stage and the people in the room,” Mr Noffs said. “Get out of the house. Go and see a show. Sit amongst strangers. Hear a song you’d forgotten you loved. For a couple of hours it might lift you out of whatever is going on in your own life, and sometimes that tiny change of perspective can mean an enormous amount.”
Old Friends plays Brunswick Picture House on Saturday, 5 September. Tickets and further information are available at brunswickpicturehouse.com/old-friends-5-sep/
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