Poe Burlesque Theatre. La Boheme. 13 March 2015.
Intimate lighting, cosy seating and Victorian inspired decoration set the scene. Departing the bright lights of Sydney's cabaret scene for the intimacy of Adelaide's La Boheme, Poe Burlesque Theatre presents their homage to Gothic wordsmith Edgar Allan Poe in Edgar's Girls.
Whilst inspired by the works of the poet, fans should feel disappointment at his merely occasional presence. The show title conjurers thoughts of high-brow burlesque artistry regaling the story of Poe's loves and lovers, some of whom provided the creative seed for his greatest works. Alas, it is not to be.
The piece features lovely vocal sets from Morgan Powell, Sarah de Possesse and Clementine Mills. Each possesses a gorgeous voice deserving of more stage time. Unfortunately, that's where the highlights end.
Despite the title of the work, at its close one feels no closer to understanding the "girls of Edgar". The story line is minimal and loose, barely providing a context for the characters, with a comedy routine late in the piece that is confounding as to its purpose and place.
Powell's narration is enjoyable and she presents as the strongest actor of the group. However, reading directly from a notebook throughout, she rarely meets the gaze of her audience and, as a result, fails to connect. In such an intimate venue, it is a lost opportunity.
The burlesque itself is pleasant, but not extraordinary, with the exception of Ginger Foxx. Foxx's sultry and cheeky routine with feather fans is far and away the highest quality and demonstrates both skill and finesse.
Some basic Googling suggests this production has been staged on a much larger scale and with superior production values in its home base. However, this cut down version for the Adelaide Fringe needs less flesh and more substance.
Nicole Russo
When: 11 to 13 Mar
Where: La Boheme
Bookings: Closed
Northern Light Theatre Company. Shedley Theatre. 14 March 2015
Happy Days, the musical, spawned from the fourth season of the American sitcom TV series in 1976. Happy Days ran from 1974 to 1984 and was one of the most popular shows of the '70s. How popular? The leather jacket worn by Henry Winkler as The Fonz is in the Smithsonian Institute. Both the musical and the series are Californian creations that satisfied the market for nostalgia by post-war babies who thought wistfully of high school and grew up on James Dean movies and Elvis Presley music - in fact, they make an inspirational appearance in the show. Just out of interest, Grease the musical opened in 1971, with the film Grease following Happy Days the musical in 1978, so these stories in various media leapfrogged each other. Henry Winkler turned down the similarly leather-clad Italian-American role of Danny Zucco for fear of being typecast, but of course, he already was.
The Northern Light Theatre Company’s reprise is directed by a father and son team (George and Gary Humphries respectively) and a musical direction/choreography team of three sisters (Danielle, Tammy and Kylie Pedler respectively). It doesn't go very well.
The horns in the overture made the orchestra suspect from the start. Nearly all the cueing in the dialogue and some of the scene changes were slower than a math class. At times, some individual microphones didn't work. The choreography was unchallenging, and even then, sometimes arms were going up when they should be going down. Arnold's looked like a shed (set design: John Sheehan).
The situation of the situation comedy, and the narrative, is way past its use-by date. The school kids are all white, reflecting pre-desegregation times. The milieu is nauseatingly American dream and apple pie, with Mrs C straining to escape the gravity pull of the stove. Male Mexican-Americans are portrayed as villains and female ones as sex objects. And the all-star wrestling competition at a picnic? Even one of the characters thought that was weird.
Gus Smith was miscast as The Fonz. Limping around on stage and unwilling to dance, his obvious older age to the Class of '59 made him look like a spent force; it was difficult to see why he was revered in this corner of Milwaukee, or why anyone thought his Fonz was cool, except his Fonz-self. Fonz is supposed to be a drop-out of the current crop of kids, not a hanger-on from the Class of '49, unless he flunked Grade 12 ten times. Nathan Quadrio looked very comfortable on stage and presented the requisite affable and handsome Richie. Bianca Levai was in fine voice as Pinky and gave the impression of subduing her soul capacities to the plain white bread music. Cheryl Ford as the aforementioned mother was the real McCoy evoking sympathy. Delanie Whibley was a standout and could have a career in musical theatre after her upcoming stint to study dance in LA.
Happy Days is a great opportunity to get lots of young people up on stage singing and dancing, but after four weeks of the Fringe, this was a hard landing back into the Adelaide scene.
David Grybowski
When: 13 to 28 Mar
Where: Shedley Theatre
Bookings: seatadvisor.com
Stan's Cafe. Flinders Street Baptist Church. 11 Mar 2015
Three cardinals in their crimson uniforms and a Moslem stage manager take their Punch and Judy-style puppet show on the road. It's a dumb show - the sole vocals being scene introductions in Latin, and missing the raucous audience participation that contributed to Punch and Judy surviving to the present day from its roots in 16th Century commedia dell'arte. Something like Michael Frayn's Noises Off, we also see the frantic offstage business of the cast and crew. Not only are they shifting scenery in and out of the puppet-size proscenium at an impossible and comic rate, but the cardinals themselves are the puppets, rapidly changing head gear and tunics before looking rather foolish in front of the stage lights when gesticulating like marionettes or forming tableaus.
Naturally, the subject matter is the Bible. It was great fun to watch them assemble a scene, guess the familiar Bible story, and marvel at how they accomplish the action, like delivering the fatal stony blow to Goliath, or re-creating the siege of a city. The cardinals were very busy sliding in mountains or hanging a star or donning the keffiyeh. Periodically things go wrong, like a noisily dropped prop or missed music cues.
Beginning with a selected tour of the Old Testament, Jesus was then born, crucified, buried and everything in-between. After the ascension, the cardinal sin of going on too long with the same shtick was apparent. They took us through the Crusades and World War, all as admirably done and creative and colourful as the Bible stories, but essentially more of the same. Right up to the present day; the devil was to blame for the Israeli-Palestine conflict as well.
I felt that director James Yarker missed copious opportunities for additional tension, conflict and humour inherently present in the show's modus operandi. The fact the puppets were missing didn't cause much consternation, perhaps they are always missing. A great opportunity for strife was between the cardinals and the Moslem stage manager, but the single event of disagreement was patched up with holy patience. The relationships between the cardinals themselves was too subtle to get much interested in. The offstage business could have been a lot richer - because when it was, it got a few laughs.
A great concept with huge comic potential - seemingly designed to raise a twitter and not go too far - but it wore me out.
David Grybowski
When: 11 to 14 Mar
Where: Flinders Street Baptist Church
Bookings: bass.net.au
ONEOFUS/Improbable. Dunstan Playhouse. 
0 Mar 2015
Aside from the set which is a cartoon of the faded elegance of mansion rooms, Beauty and The Beast didn't promise much in the first ten minutes. Mat Fraser and Julie Atlas Muz made some introductory remarks about themselves, take seats, and recite the opening of the fairy tale with the aid of another couple who manipulate overheads on one of those old projectors; you know, the kind used in the offices of the world before PowerPoint. But it gets better and better as Mat and Julie alternate revelations of their lives as carnies and their improbable courtship beginning in the sideshows of Julie's beloved Coney Island with the tale of Beauty and The Beast which stands as a metaphoric narrative arc for their love story.
With the aid of puppeteers Jess Mabel Jones and Johnny Dixon, this humorous, heart-warming and magical tale is told with every trick known between pantomime and pornography (in fact the show is rated 18+). Goblets fly through the air, arms and body dismember and re-attach, clothes go on and off, and then stay off. In a frantic and racy banquet of fruit, lascivious tongue lashings of bananas and melon foreshadow the finale.
Beast even takes a sponge bath and washes his ass with his heel. Try that as your next party trick! But it's no parlour game for Fraser; that's how he does it even when no-one's looking. You see, Fraser's physique is a fall-out of his mother's prescribed use of Thalidomide.
Beauty is won over by the lonely but enigmatic Beast and their marriage is consummated in ecstatic variation. Not for the shy or faint-hearted. I have to admit, I experienced a hint of envy as I watched this couple - so in love, and creative, and free - have this opportunity to reaffirm their vows with such gusto. Bravo!
While former Miss Coney Island, Julie Atlas Muz, is very comfortable in her career performance genre of burlesque, and at being her lovely self, one does have to know something about acting to perform even melodrama. On the other hand, Fraser would be absolutely convincing in anything from Shakespeare's Henry V to Hemingway's Henry in 'Farewell To Arms.' He has a glorious vocal presence and steady command of the stage. Disabled my arse.
A must see for the Festival.
David Grybowski
When: 10 to 15 Mar
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: bass.net.au
Queensland Theatre Company. Adelaide Festival. Her Majesty's Theatre. 10 Mar 2015
The theatre is smokey. Flames lick out of a 44-gallon drum on the stage. And old man sits nearby against a backdrop of massive blackboards covered in chalky scrawlings.
The atmosphere is established for the audience shuffling into place in Her Majesty's.
This is a big night for Adelaide theatre. This is the 2015 Festival's big theatre production. It has been a thin theatre program this festival and audiences are hungry and expectant.
Black Diggers is a big show from Queensland Theatre Company, written by Tom Wright and directed by Wesley Enoch. It has already had seasons interstate and it has been localised for Adelaide, with references to local names and places.
It is a national story, after all; a broad-strokes account of Aboriginal Australians who served in World War I.
It is a tale of hope, innocence, friendship, loyalty, and racism.
Young Aboriginal men volunteered for service against a cultural tide which had denied them recognition. Black Diggers condenses the accounts of many of those men into a series of vignettes layered swiftly and neatly one upon another. The all-male cast is huge and it is as beautifully co-ordinated as an elite army unit. There are swift costume changes and tableaux. There are highly-disciplined representations of unruliness - for these men out in the charnel house of WWI, on the death fields of Gallipoli, Amiens, Passchendaele, and Messines, were also rough kids from the bush. There, so far from home and fighting for a political cause few really understood, they discovered the comfort of mateship. They were equals in combat, in sharing the hell of war. Skin colour was not an issue.
There were instances of intolerance, however, and the characters of Black Diggers chose various ways to respond. One chap, in punching out a racist soldier from another troop, explained to his mates that his violent retaliation had been at the accusation of not washing, not at the racial slur.
Hence were things different for Aboriginal soldiers. They were part of a family of Aussies bonded by deed. They gained a sense of national belonging and a new sense of country.
The production has some marvellous moments, none a more poignant portrait of war than the row of soldiers sitting in their trench singing their songs and killing time for day after day, their boredom occasionally disturbed by sudden bursts of utter horror and panic. The boys reflect on the small areas of gained or lost territory these slow strategies were achieving. And years rolled by.
The endless suffering breaks the spirit of some. One lad reveals that he really should not be there. He is only 15.
Places of combat are painted large in white on the great blackboards and, as the play draws to a close, they are whitewashed for the names of dead Aboriginal soldiers to take their place in black upon them.
Throughout, there is a soundscape which colours the audience's imagination with the details of time and place - from the birds of the bush through to the shocking blasts of shellfire. It is a brilliant and exemplary soundscape, impeccably balanced against the action onstage.
The soldiers come home in various states and to various receptions. Racism is not dead, but then again, from some quarters, belonging and equality has been earned and recognised. Some returned men will cope with the future and some will never be the same. Ever was it thus.
But for some Aboriginal men there were some dire injustices, not the least of them the deeply ironic loss of their lands in the solider-settler land giveaways.
Black Diggers covers this huge subject with its large scale - the large stage made to seem cavernous with just platforms and the blackboard background. It is a well devised and designed production. The cast is diverse and likeable. They play myriad characters, from recruiters and officers to an outback mum. When they sing, they do so with the ragged enthusiasm of a batch of untrained boys.
The play is finely written. There are some lovely turns of phrase. However, it is overwritten. There are some soliloquies which drift into didacticism. And the play suffers from afterthoughts, as if it does not know quite when to end.
Ah, but what a brilliant bugler.
Samela Harris
When: 10 to 14 Mar
Where: Her Majesty's Theatre
Bookings: bass.net.au