Gilbert and Sullivan Society of SA. Arts Theatre. 27 May 2023
It only costs about $3000 for a cheap return flight to New York. A half decent hotel costs just $300 for the night and a ticket to A Chorus Line on Broadway would set you back about $300. But, hold your horses, the show is long closed after 6137 performances.
Luckily for us, our own Gilbert & Sullivan Society has found the resources to stage a production of this famous show which could easily hold its own in that elite mecca of musicals they call Broadway.
That is saying a lot.
But there it is, in The Arts Theatre, with a massive cast of singers and dancers, creating a classic chorus line in which not a single toe is out of line. Choreographer Sarah Williams clearly has imposed the classic discipline and motivation to this huge ensemble.
Director Gordon Combes seems to have lured a lineup of quietly elite performers from the city’s music and dance teaching circles along with some outstanding young talent. One sees the name Pelican Productions in a number of CVs.
Musical director, Mark DeLaine, similarly, has rounded up a superb orchestra with a sensational brass section while costume co-ordinator Anne Humphries has the entire ensemble dressed to audition character until the high-kicking grand finale in which a lightning quick change brings them out glittering in wow-factor golden top hats and tails.
There are two directors in this show. One, Gordon Combes, directs in real life while the other, for the most part, is a voice in the dark from Zach, the director of the Broadway show which needs a chorus line. David MacGillivray is that voice, interviewing the hopeful talent and trying to elicit a sense of who they are. McGillivray gives this role not only authority but also heart and soul, compassion and emotional depth. Not bad.
Just as the audience responds to these qualities, so does it warm to people it gets to know through Zach's interviews. Since, to a person, they are impeccably performed, the audience gets the rare and satisfying experience of genuinely caring about all those characters singled out on stage.
There’s Mike, who came to dancing watching his older sister’s classes. Liam Phillips gives him life with the famous I Can Do That tap routine. As for Val, who was not noticed until she had enhancement surgery, Laura Williams might have been born to sing Dance: Ten Looks: Three. Then there’s Allycia Angeles, dynamic belting out Nothing as Morales, and lithe Mimi Yoshii lamenting short stature as Connie. There are just so many shining lights: Alana Shepherdson as Cassie and Maya Miller, Chloe Fusco, Jemma Allen, Maggie Cooper, Jenny Allard, Junxiang Huang, Benjamin Johnson, Teagan Garvey, Ris Mosel, and Anton Schrama, as well as a further line-up of fine dancers.
Then there’s Lachlan Stieger delivering Paul’s confessions about trying to conceal his drag work from his parents and bringing a tear to the eye.
There is a thread of plot and myriad salient messages in this show, originally conceived by Michael Bennett, who was inspired by real people in the real showbiz world. It is that veracity which has kept on striking a chord with audiences around the world. So, A Chorus Line has had “legs” for decades.
Its set requires nothing more than plenty of bare stage, and a wall of mirrors for the dancers to rehearse to. Behind that, in this production, the orchestra is hidden until a final reveal.
Sound balance and lighting are the other major factors which make the difference between a good and bad production. They’re both impeccable in this one.
It is a ripper of a first class show.
Grab a ticket if you can.
Thank me later.
Samela Harris
When: 26 May to 3 Jun
Where: The Arts Theatre
Bookings: gandssa.com.au
Red Phoenix Theatre. The Studio - Holden Street Theatres. 26 May 2023
Never let it be said that Red Phoenix is not brave.
In its way, it is just as brave as Russian playwright Nikolai Erdman whose farce, The Suicide, it has chosen to produce in its tradition of presenting Adelaide premieres. This play was to cause Erdman to be exiled to Siberia by a very unamused Stalin.
Fortunately, its Adelaide audience is amused. And, there are no major repercussions for the company, apart perhaps from a spot of exhaustion. The play has undergone many rewrites and translations since it was created in 1928 and it has been presented all over the world in various languages and to very amused audiences. This is the Peter Tegel translation.
Directed by Brant Eustice, Red Phoenix presents it as a highly stylised, over-the-top, almost Commedia piece. This is not an accident. Erdman was defying naturalism and his characters were all archetypical, most of them fatuous and manipulative.
Actors shout and ham. And how. Grinning and grimacing, thumping and stomping, shrieking and weeping, and throughout, getting their tongues around an endless repetition of multi-syllable Russian names.
There are some hilarious characterisations, cartoon-like all of them, for it is a work of robust satire.
No wonder Stalin reacted.
But all the frenetic debates about communism and individual freedom have a new resonance for a 2023 audience, very much in the thrall of the Putin era and the war on Ukraine. The program notes which explain the play’s context in Soviet history are recommended reading.
It is to be recognised that Erdman stands tall in theatrical history, noted as one of the world’s great playwrights. There are some who judge The Suicide to be the perfect play.
The play’s plot is a little bit inscrutable, however. It revolves around an unemployed citizen desperately seeking some way to feed his family. When he fails at his latest plan to become a tuba player, he mentions suicide. And suddenly it is on for young and old, not to prevent him, but to capitalise on it. An array of supercilious exploiters descend to claim his death to be for their cause - from businessmen, poets, and priests to jealous women.
Therein, while one feels the familiar anguish of the wife and mother-in-law versus the faux fancifications of the would-be mistresses, the niceish Ruby Faith and the utterly audaciously hilarious Nicole Rutty. There’s a cameo one won’t forget in a hurry. Then again, if there is a fall-over-funny characterisation, it is that of Sharon Malujlo as the hapless mother-in-law charged with the task of distracting the interloper.
There is a vast cast in this play and lots of opportunities for actors to flex their skills. Ron Hoenig has not been seen on the Adelaide stage in aeons but there he is as the local butcher and when it comes to his turn to claim the prize, he’s a comic gem. The matchless Geoff Revell, of course, is sheer magic to watch onstage both as an hysterical, frenetic comic foreground character and also as a quietly reactive actor when the attention is directed elsewhere. It is clear Revell is at home in this genre.
It is Joshua Coldwell as Semyon who carries the narrative, clear of eye and diction, playing the Candide of the suicide world. And thus the rowdy predators descend.
Guffaws break out in the audience as Michael Eustice enters in the role of Aristarch, artfully strutting and blustering it out with his hair in a bizarre pompadour. And soon, the audience is informed that it has been cast into the play as The Intelligentsia. Battle lines are drawn in old Soviet tropes as the stage becomes more and more crowded with the advocates and claimants. They come and go through the quaint minimal scaffolding set which suggests doors and walls.
Indeed, the whole Studio theatre is used to accommodate the action. Bobbie Viney, showing that nose rings were in vogue in the 1920s, gives heart and well-wrought desperation to Semyon’s hapless wife. She fears for his life. Kate Anolak is a picture of competence and reliability in her role as Margarita. Sometimes she seems like the only sane one on the stage.
It is hard to focus on everyone with such a fine and large cast working with such diligent madness in this vast political pantomime, but they include: Tom Tassone, Samuel Creighton, Russell Slater, Callum Logan, Jess Corrie, Malcolm Walton, and David Lockwood.
Director Brant Eustice, with a huge and skilful Red Phoenix production team behind the scenes, has evolved this old landmark theatre piece into a spectacle of machinegun agit prop with a latter-day Brechtian edge.
It makes for a big, loud, and wild riot of a night.
Samela Harris
When: 26 May to 2 Jun
Where: The Studio – Holden Street Theatres
Bookings: holdenstreettheatres.com
Joh Hartog Productions. Holden Street Theatres. 19 May 2023
Two lovely leather couches loom large on stage set in a tastefully designed bit of room, maybe a swish hotel room. We are confronted with a brash and rudely robust American looking like a modern Sioux shaman counterposed with an effete Englishman swirling a glass of rosé – a sanguine metaphor that turns bloody awful.
A play is under discussion and the London director and Hollywood star are waiting for the playwright to complete a perfectly volatile triangle. Before she arrives, some compromising discussion about women betrays toxic masculinity in two flavours. But the female Northern Irish playwright - initially giddy upon meeting the star - proves not to be trifled with.
Ulster American is not the script of the deceased Australian author David Ireland who won the Miles Franklin award three times; it belongs to the fully alive David Ireland who penned his award-winning script in 2018. Ireland may identify quite firmly as North Irish or Irish or British as his heroine in this play does. The author juxtaposes the gallimaufry of the Northern Irish conflict with condescending British attitudes and its bipolar politics. The script is fresh with post-Brexit confusion here echoing the dangerous Irish/English national and religious dichotomy. A very clever insight into modern British angst.
The US and UK persona, played a bit too formally yet lively by stalwarts Brendan Cooney and Scott Nell respectively, have a wonderfully robust tête-à-tête that creates a minefield of sexism. The vivacious playwright, played by the coruscating Cheryl Douglas, maneuvers the men into the minefield and Kaboom! Kaboom! as the tripartite of disagreement accelerates out of control, and the pretext of placation turns into a bloody mess.
Director and producer Joh Hartog moves his actors for effective physical emphasis of their colliding worlds, especially when the men gang up and pressurise the poor woman to get their way. The male characters are so awful, the performances seem on the verge of parody. There are so many great battles in this war of wills: bleak, black and terribly funny in a cringe-worthy way. It is exciting to watch the changing status change again until we have a winner. Have we come only this far in the 21st Century?
David Grybowski
When: 10 to 20 May 2023
Where: Holden Street Theatres
Bookings: holdenstreettheatres.com
State Opera of SA. Her Majesty’s Theatre. Pirates of Penzance and HMS Pinafore. 14 May 2023
G&S lovers can never have enough G&S.
Adelaide long has had a Gilbert and Sullivan Society which flourished in the non-professional arena with a seemingly bottomless resource of willing and able operatic talent. Up and comers honed their skills and deep-dived G&S while audiences thrived seeing excellent light opera productions at affordable prices.
It is not that this phenomenon has gone. It is just “resting” with the local G&S mob presenting some Broadway shows and other musical joys - because the great big, official, State Opera South Australia has stepped into its G&S territory.
And good on it!
G&S long has been thrust into a quaint nether-land of opprobrium by serious opera adherents. One could describe it as the bastard nephew of the classical champions, and while Verdi, Rossini, Wagner et al. have been revered in assorted languages and degrees of high theatricality, the comic common touch of these old British satirists has been generally demeaned.
This critic can attest to this with a big “then” through yesteryears and, disappointingly, some “now” elitists and purists one thought may have learned better.
G&S is funny. Worse still, it can be downright silly.
Hence the delight in Stuart Maunder leaving the SA Opera company with the parting gift of a massive and mighty G&S Festival - an intense array of G&S works.
It is a huge commitment from the company members. They have been called upon to double up all over the place, sometimes playing two roles in two different productions in one day.
This critic may attest to this, having attended Pirates of Penzance at the matinee and HMS Pinafore a few hours later in the evening. Thus comes this unusual, blended overview review.
For Pirates, a very neat proscenium set is boxed on Her Majesty’s stage with lights outlining the name of the show. It opens with the Pirate King whooping into sight and cuing the curtain. This is to be the beginning of a new love affair with Ben Mingay, the crown jewel of State Opera, a performer who oozes star quality.
He’s a heavenly, diabolical, and very funny Pirate King. And his comic timing comes to the fore again in HMS Pinafore when he embodies the impossibly pompous Sir Joseph Porter. Indeed, he is the best Porter this critic has seen in quite a slew of Pinafores through the years, albeit it is a mystery as to why State Opera makeup caked his nose in suppurating sunburn sores. The vanity of Mingay’s Sir Joseph overrides his disfigurement with endless preening and posturing, highly exaggerated, but never over the top. And, of course, he sings like a dream.
Back on the Pirates stage, he’s butch and athletic amid his motley crew.
As the Pirate King, he comes up against the other particularly posh G&S stereotype, Major General Stanley who is delivered in an award-worthy performance by Douglas McNicol. McNicol is possessed of a mighty bass voice and a tongue twistable enough for the notorious string-of-eruditions song: "I understand equations, both the simple and quadratical // About binomial theorem I'm teeming with a lot o' news // With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse…”
Like Mingay, McNicol springs again into action for the evening operetta. He is Deadeye Dick in Pinafore, and about as scruffy and ugly as he is sleek and fanciful in Pirates.
The double bill phenomenon is an extraordinarily rare chance to see this sort of versatility and Maunder certainly has pushed his performers to the far reaches of professional excellence.
Pirates features the heroine of Mabel, the most beautiful of the Major General’s daughters with whom the handsome apprentice pirate Frederic is to fall in love. He’s played with comic panache by John Longmiur with Desiree Frahn soprano-trilling to utter perfection as sweet Mabel. She is equipped with a stage presence almost as bewitching as that lovely voice.
With all these characters, quirky musical numbers, and quite ridiculous plotlines, one realises that G&S is all to be taken with very large pinches of salt. These works are satirical. They abound in digs at political and societal issues, the currency of which remains alive today. Hence the popular endurance of G&S.
HMS Pinafore has a lot of fun with authority, its inept police force with their “catlike tread” having kept audiences in gusts of laughter for a century. And still so, right now at Her Majesty’s.
Both shows are superbly choreographed with lots of quirky added details.
Indeed, Maunder has turned on a luscious treat all round. He has secured that living legend of costume design, Roger Kirk for the costumes and, in extremes, from plain seamen in stripes to the exquisite Jessica Dean clad in a delicacy of a shimmering romantic gown as Pinafore’s gorgeous Josephine, it is a showcase of excellence and finesse.
Never could it more truly be said that “the frocks are lovely” on a stage full of swirling full skirts and petticoats. Even Antoinette Halloran’s two comedy characters, Little Buttercup in Pinafore and the piratical nurse in Pirates, are clad in a splendour of whirling fabric and, if one looks closely, some clever character detail. Halloran has two big roles to deliver and she does so with immense vigour and wit.
One may strew compliments throughout the State Opera cast, not forgetting Nicholas Cannon, Jeremy Kleeman and Nicholas Jones as that handsome Pinafore hero. What a crisp, rich tenor he is.
Conductors Anthony Hunt and James Pratt deserve all the applause they attract at curtain call. The Adelaide Symphony Orchestra responds beautifully to their batons.
All the production values merit a big tick - none more than Maunder whom one salutes as he ticks off.
Samela Harris
When: 11 to 21 May
Where: Her Majesty’s Theatre
Bookings - Pirates: premier.ticketek.com.au
Bookings - Pinafore: premier.ticketek.com.au
University of Adelaide Theatre Guild. Little Theatre. 5 May 2023
The Wonderful World of Dissocia is an incredibly vivid, heartwarming and heart-rending - and where useful, quirky and humorous - exploration into an illness of the mind. In the program notes, director Tom Filsell openly opines his sojourn with getting back on track dodging his own dark spaces. If you don’t think you are on a spectrum of some sort, you are probably kidding yourself and missing opportunities to empathise with those who have been nudged a little more along the continuum than you. Filsell has done a great service by offering Adelaide this opportunity to forgive ourselves, understand each other and heal.
Scottish playwright Anthony Neilson has a reputation for confrontational theatre and has written enough plays over 30 years to fill a computer screen. …Dissocia is smack in the middle in 2004 and won the Critics’ Award for Theatre in Scotland for best play.
The production might be best enjoyed if you just go, it’s great, take my word for it, and revel in the reveal of the clever writing and brilliant performances. STOP READING NOW AND BUY A TICKET!
However, if you have the mental condition where you must know exactly what you are in for and take no risks, read on.
In the first half, we get a look inside Lisa’s head ala Samuel Beckett, only way more interesting and less stodgy and esoteric. Having taken Psychology 101, I diagnosed Lisa with a psychosis and couldn’t understand her dissocation from the colourful mayhem going on in there. D’oh! Dissociation. I get it. In the second half, we go through the looking glass into Lisa’s rollercoaster ride of on-the-drugs and off-the-drugs, the hated side effects and the even worse outcomes for loved ones. The condition looks rather fun compared to subjugation through medication.
The huges success of this production is the copious workshopping that was undertaken to realise Neilson’s script with scant stage instructions. The playwright worked with actors in originating the play and the same research, reflection, self-examination and spontaneity has been fetched by this director and cast, and the ensemble work is joyous and thoughtful.
In the first half, Filsell and actor Nadia Talotta recreate a sort of Dorothy in Oz or Alice in Wonderland with Lisa as she travels places populated with fantastical people and experiences, some of them scary. And did we ever think these young women had dissocia? The set is full of lighting trickery, highly styled costumes, outrageous props and actors delighting in expressive abstraction. Lisa’s dissocia has her respond with the equanimity of Mario in the original Super Mario digital game - trips up, dusts off and keeps going without emotional engagement. Not really in the real world. Talotta is a Jedi warrior of performance – a NIDA graduate, and it shows.
The second half is in contrast, sober, or more like the morning after a binge – in the realm of morbid hospitalization. The theatre expediency of doubling up roles for actors carries a strong message of how the brain works its dreamlike imagery in this show. Using the Oz analogy, the scarecrow, the cowardly lion and the tin man have real life persona.
Sound design by Nick Butterfield, Abi Steele’s scenic design and prop making, Gillian Cordell’s costumes, and Stephen Dean’s lights are all necessary goods contributing to a fulsome theatre experience.
The workshopping resulted in super realistic performances when naturalism is required manifested in playful banter, overtalking and speechless signalling. The script is thusly reinvented by the team. I was especially moved when Paul Pacillo as Lisa’s partner and Talotta as Lisa both realise the impact of unhealthy behaviour on each other - the one inside trying to look out and the other outside trying to look in. A moment of great pathos that summed up what this production was trying to achieve. Bravo!
David Grybowski
When: 4 to 14 May
Where: The Little Theatre
Bookings: trybooking.com