Songs My Mother Taught Me

Naomi Ferguson tours with Graham Wardrop and Alex van den Broek – 6 April to 8 May.

It is the magnetic smile that strikes you first, but it is the voice that lingers. Naomi Ferguson has a honey voice, a compelling stage presence, and in Songs My Mother Taught Me, presented to acclaim at the 2009 Christchurch Arts Festival and the Wellington Life is a Cabaret season, the perfect vehicle for showing off her talents.

Songs My Mother Taught Me is very much a New Zealand story, set in the '70s, a time when teenage Cilla leaves behind her sheltered upbringing to let her hair down while studying in Christchurch. Academic study collides with social upheaval as Cilla experiments with drugs, protest, motorbikes and music festivals. She falls in love, has her heart broken and her ideals shattered, eventually finding the strength to live life on her own terms.

Accompanied by top musicians Graham Wardrop (guitar) and Alex van den Broek (piano), Ferguson tours the country to relate Cilla’s story with seamless segues into the iconic songs of the '60s and '70s including those of Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, and ‘I am Woman’ by Helen Reddy.

Book at Maniototo Information Centre.