FOR a woman who cartwheeled across the stage as KK Juggy of Machine Gun Fellatio, drew moustaches on her breasts as a burlesque bombshell and then ran away with Circus Oz, Christa Hughes's coming Spiegeltent shows mark a departure from her trademark show-stopping shenanigans.

Perhaps her impending marriage has sparked a backlash?

"All that fighting against the norm and now I'm settling down myself," she says, smiling. "I always thought I'd be footloose and fancy-free with a string of lovers; getting married shocks me the most about myself."

In a fitting prelude to her church ceremony wedding, Hughes joins her father, Dick, for a Sunday jazz session at the Spiegeltent, one week before her nuptials. On an evening that will rekindle memories of the pair's raucous Sunday afternoons at the Shakespeare Hotel in Surry Hills in the early '90s - where Dick played piano and Christa sang - the father-daughter combination promises a kitbag of "beautifully rowdy" jazz and blues standards.

"I do a gig with Dad the week before he gives me away and then I [return to the Spiegeltent to] do a show about temptation as a married woman," Christa, 36, says.

Dick, 77, who describes himself as an amateur jazz player and a "professional listener", was the first solo jazz pianist to perform at the Sydney Opera House. He planted the seed for Christa's shared jazz obsession.

Dick says the duo's repertoire is guided by the family's favourite songbirds, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday and Lee Wiley.

His jazz fanaticism is "almost spiritual", so it's no wonder Christa developed a passion. "The very best of it is great art," he says. "The best jazz has soul; it is an honest cry from the heart." If the Sunday afternoon with dad is a mellower affair, Christa's solo show Temptation is slightly naughtier, paying tribute in song to everything that leads us into temptation. "Once you can't do something, all of a sudden there's a desire," Christa says.

She says the focus of Temptation and the show with her father is singing the songs rather than "performing" the stunts that have come to define her live acts.

"I got distracted with performing," she says. "[With Machine Gun Fellatio] I would be roller-skating topless and that would draw attention to me, but would distract from what I was really doing, which was singing. Now I'm just looking forward to singing the songs."

Her first live performance was as a shy teenager joining her father's band on stage at Soup Plus to sing a few ditties. "I really wanted to sing but I didn't want people to watch me do it," she says. "I completely grew out of that."

Christa has reworked Temptation's previous content and says the subject matter of the songs now ranges from food to lying, crimes of passion and plastic surgery.

After a pilgrimage to New Orleans, the origin of much of her father's well-loved jazz collection, Christa had a yearning to sing accompanied by horns. For Temptation she will be joined by Leonie Cohen on piano, Sam Goldings on trumpet and tuba and John Hibbard on trombone. As well as her own songs, Temptation's repertoire includes compositions by Tom Waits, Cole Porter and Velvet Underground.

For a woman who has spent much of her career playing the temptress with flair, it is rather comic that Christa performs Temptation as a newly-wed. "Well, rather than playing the temptress, sometimes fantasy is better than reality," she says, smiling.

CHRISTA HUGHES

With her father Dick, October 19, The Famous Spiegeltent, Opera House, 9250 7777, $35/$30. In Temptation, November 12, The Spiegeltent, 9250 7777, $35/$25.