Daz and Shaz want to get close to you
Image: Darren and Sharon Carpenter aka Darren Mapes and Debora Krizak. Image: carpentersfromkempsey.com
Darren and Sharon Carpenter are siblings who hale from Kempsey on the Mid North coast of NSW. They have always loved singing together, their genetically linked voices blending in mellifluous harmony. One day, while rifling through their father’s records, they came across an album by a duo called The Carpenters. Their jaws dropped. The two siblings on the cover looked and sounded exactly like they did – and they had the same surname! From then on, life on stage would never be the same again…
Well, something like that.
The Carpenters from Kempsey is part tribute, part gentle parody, all pure entertainment. Darren Mapes and Debora Krizak don wigs and primary-coloured synthetics and sing the hits of the 1960s & ‘70s brother/sister pop duo, Karen and Richard Carpenter.
Mapes has been playing Darren Carpenter for 20 years. It began incidentally; a session singer named Shirley Thomas was constantly being told she sounded like Karen Carpenter, so she decided to do a tribute show. Her search for a “Richard” led her to Mapes.
“We started doing this show and…I was always a bit uncomfortable with it because we were in these ridiculous wigs and ‘70s outfits, we’d walk on stage and people would laugh, and then we’d do this retrospective of their lives and it was quite a sad story,” says Mapes.
It didn’t feel quite right, so Mapes invited his friend, comedy writer Linda Nagle, to watch the show. She suggested they become Darren and Sharon from Kempsey and inject some Aussie “Kath and Kim” styled humour. It worked.
The duo play all The Carpenters well-known hits including “Top of the World”, “Goodbye to Love, Yesterday Once More”, “A Kind of Hush, Rainy Days and Mondays”, “Calling Occupants”, “Ticket to Ride”, “Close to You”, “Superstar”, “Mr Postman”. They’ve also given some unexpected tunes the Carpenters treatment.
“We’ve done a Cold Chisel medley which is in a Carpenters style, then we’ve got a Divinyls song called ‘I touch myself’, which when you hear it start, sounds like ‘Close to You’ but then it’s not.”
The Carpenters from Kempsey will incorporate “Christmas in July” celebrations in their one night only show at Paddo RSL. A unique Aussie tradition, the mid-year Yule-tide festivities will include prizes and a chook raffle.
And we’ve only just begun to describe the fun…
