Scottish Comedian of the Year 2014. Ha Ha Comedy and Scottish Comedy Awards. Austral Hotel - The Red Room. 1 Mar 2015
Fummey is good fun, and having a black African (from Ghana) as a father, and a white Scottish mother, (who happened to be born in our very own Whyalla on Spencer Gulf) makes it quite obvious that he should kick his act off with many a tongue-in-cheek near-racist joke about his childhood (“nig nog” etc). This then led him into checking out where his audience hailed from, but unfortunately the wheels nearly fell of his act. He dwelled too long getting to know where everyone came from and he treated audience responses to his questions as if they were funny and ripe with material that he could exploit. They were not.
Fummey is a pub stand-up comedian, and it helps one to appreciate his act if you have a beer in your hand. Not because you need to drown your sorrows because the act is so bad – it is definitely not that – but because it reminds you that you are in a pub and therefore the not infrequent dropping of the ‘c’ word and the excess of ‘toilet humor’ is not entirely to be unexpected.
Despite these misgivings, Fummey is affable and engages well with his audience. His gags come quick and fast – once he hits his straps – and the audience don’t stop laughing.
Kym Clayton
When: 13 Feb to 1 Mar
Where: Austral Hotel - The Red Room.
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Mitre Khammash Media. Star Theatre. 28 Feb 2015
What could possibly go right for a production featuring seven singing inmates in a maximum security prison and their desire to win a talent contest during which one gets murdered and one gets stabbed in the chest?
Everything.
This is one of those Fringe shows that slips in almost unannounced, fires up, does its thing, and exits stage right without fanfare but having left its audiences (four out of five full houses) spellbound.
The story revolves around four inmates coming together as an acapella quartet (one is possibly a terrorist, one is high on drugs, one is new to the prison system and one is in for hacking into defence department computers). Their competition? A sad faced ukulele player. A shoe in you would think. But waiting in the wings is a 6 foot 7 inch tattooed thug and his dark eyed bearded side kick who have a trick or two up their sleeves.
All comes good in the end, though not for the contestant who gets killed, or the one who gets stabbed in the chest, or for that matter the Singing Inmates quartet. They lose the contest to the wicked duo that have transformed into the almost loveable lycra clad balletic gymnasts, Snake Eyes and Jimmy Sticks, who go on to better things... we are left to believe.
The storyline is a vehicle for the remarkable talents of the onstage team. The cast: Mitchell Bartel, John Khammash, Sama Aghili, Ryan OʼDea, Matthew Lykos, Ben Catt, Tyson Olson and Aaron Vinall, sing, dance, and beat box their way through this tight little 2 act cabaret cum comedy cum drama cum proscenium arch production with consummate ease. Their skill belies four months of intense singing development, choreographic input and script development, all handled within the onstage team itself.
But it’s the singing voices, the precise harmonic qualities, the absolute confidence between the seven performers, and the energy behind each number that seduces the audience. The sheer vigour and clarity of the vocal element of this production is almost overwhelming.
The on stage microphone technique is impeccable and the technical volume control from the bio box is subtle and never overdone.
Everyone’s a winner.
Twenty-five year old Mitre Khammash as producer (and the up-front financial backer) is also writer and first time director after recently graduating from the Adelaide Centre for the Arts production course. What a remarkable debut as a director. A historic moment at the end of the final show when Khammash took a solo bow and the house erupted in applause and wolf whistles.
Lighting design and operation by Luke Bartholomew is stunning and even the set change black outs ever so subtly lit in green or blue or violet were theatrical statements in their own right.
Stage management by Laura Pearson (currently at A C Arts) is a difficult assignment in this small theatre. Many set changes are (tables, benches, flats) soundlessly placed in a choreographed display of true professionalism by Pearson and her backstage team.
Costumes by Melanie Pearson are the real deal. Hair and Make-up by Kassie Davies and Genevieve Carey deserve a mention, particularly when so many of the inmates had paint on tattoos, particularly the very tall Snake Eyes whose whole body had to be painted up each night.
And the venue? Theatre Two, Star Theatre, Hilton. One of the best small proscenium arch stages in Adelaide. Malcolm Harslett (Mighty Good Productions) in whose capable hands the Star Theatre complex has been run for many years has done a fine job in presenting the space and providing this unique inner suburban performing arts venue for new talent. Bravo Malcolm!
How does one sum up such a rewarding audience experience by a talented team of, on the whole, new to the performing arts practitioners? By taking risks and supporting local talent (onstage and back stage and technical) here, in Adelaide, before they drift interstate or overseas.
Itʼs a ten out of ten from me. Will there be a sequel? If I told you, I might be killed by Snake Eyes!
Martin Christmas
When: Closed
Where: Star Theatres - Theatre 2
Bookings: Closed
The Garden of Unearthly Delights – Le Cascadeur. 28 Feb 2015
Dressed in workman’s overalls and ready to take out the garbage, the Trash Test Dummies tear up the stage in a bumbling, tumbling laugh-out-loud performance that only a blind-man would fail to enjoy.
Their key prop is your domestic wheelie bin from which they flip, juggle, balance, beat and hide throughout a myriad of skit length sequences. Jamie Bretman, Jack Coleman and Simon Wright are the three performers who dazzle us with their acrobatic skill and slapstick comedy.
Audience members aren’t safe from the action as the players traverse the auditorium chasing each other in and out of seated audience members. After challenging the audience to a ball fight, ducking and diving is in order when all the kids and most of the adults collect up the balls and return fire.
The story is quaint. The three friends look at various emotions including exclusion, love, enjoyment, grief and celebration. But there is never a dull moment in the journey and by the show’s end it is clear, everyone has had an amazing time.
Take the kids and don’t miss this show – there is nothing ‘rubbish’ about the Trash Test Dummies!
Paul Rodda
When: 25 Feb to 15 Mar
Where: The Garden of Unearthly Delights – Le Cascadeur
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Adelaide Festival. Her Majesty's Theatre. 28Feb 2015
When Tommy was created, it was into sheer adoration and admiration as a seminal rock opera, borne of the late psychedelic-era.
It was a musical achievement which lifted Pete Townshend and The Who to an alternative iconic status in which they have remained, certainly in the minds of the Baby Boomers, if not in ensuing generations.
Thus it is a Boomer-powered audience who are packing out Her Majesty's to see this new incarnation of Tommy, an audacious re-working with a heavy jazz foundation.
Eric Mingus, jazz musician son of the jazz legend Charlie Mingus, laid claim to Tommy as a youth and reached out to Townshend who became his friend and also gave him carte blanche with the rock opera.
Now it is a jazz fusion opera - presented in concert mode.
Audience reactions to its Adelaide Festival World Premiere have been mixed. The unversed young say the story is impossible to understand. Some of the old decry the jazz as indulgent and intrusive. Certainly this critic was to find the riffing improvisational dissonances of the jazz overture an ironic companion to an opera which was famous for melody.
Herein Eric Mingus is the focal figure, bearded, rotund and possessed of a rich, sometimes piercing voice from which he favours Satchmo-esque rolling gutturals.
At first, despite the huge band onstage, it seems as if this may be his show as he shrills lamentations at the death of Captain Walker.
Then the characters appear and with them, the Mingus reworking of the rock opera songs.
Camille O'Sullivan is breathtaking in black, glitter cocktail dress, as the child mother, the sodden mother, and the fraught mother. Her voice is rock and jazz and blues; it is heart and passion; it is guts and glory; it is wide-ranging and simply sublime. She steals and saves the show from the moment she opens her mouth.
The songs roll on: ‘It's a Boy’, ‘1921’, ‘Amazing Journey’, ‘Christmas’, ‘Cousin Kevin’, ‘The Acide Queen’, ‘So You Think It's Alright’, ‘Pinball Wizard’, ‘Tommy Can You Hear Me’.
All the songs are arranged to a very different beat to that recalled from the original score. The melodies are there, however, still arresting, still beautiful. They are slower. Sometimes their percussive bases seem almost calypso, sometimes they take the horse-riding tempo of the east, sometimes they wax folksy, sometimes a tad hard rock.
Other stars emerge. Harper Simon, so sweet of voice, delivers a truly chilling ‘Cousin Kevin’, the sadistic babysitting relly who, by accident, is to introduce that blind, deaf and dumb boy to the salvation of pinball.
Poor little Tommy had become blind, deaf, and dumb after witnessing his father murdering his step-father. The rock opera describes the sad state of his isolated world, the things that befell him and the suffering of his mother.
Gavin Friday plays the other bad guys - the Acid Queen and Uncle Ernie. It's debatable as to whether the Acid Queen should be performed by a woman. Mingus has chosen otherwise as, indeed, he has for Tommy, who is performed by Yael Stone, very much a woman.
In a red feather boa with the song paced right back, Friday wins the audience over as a deeply ominous Acid Queen. He wins acclaim again as he sings ‘Fiddle About’, embodying the awful paedophile, Uncle Ernie.
To one's utter horror, there was laughter from a woman in the audience at this performance and this song. Inappropriate is just not the word.
Tommy was always outrageous to some but it never was a comedy.
Robert Forster plays Tommy's ineffectual father. He is beautifully cast and has a simpatico stage presence, as well as a good voice.
Accordion-player Elana Stone does backup vocals from the orchestra and in a solo, oh so beautifully. And then there is the other Stone as Tommy who finds her voice at the end of the work. Unfortunately, Mingus has her do a spot of rather feral jazz screeching before she is liberated to the lovely denouement song, ‘I'm Free’.
The new Tommy is most certainly defiantly different.
For Mingus, it is a vehicle for assorted jazz and self-expression. He even throws some Baptist Deep South preacher business into it.
But, with musical director Giancarlo Vulcano, he turns on one helluva multi-genre concert and, bless him, he keeps Tommy alive and well at the core of it.
There are some directorial weaknesses. There could be some more use of spotlights. The light is good but not exciting. Lead singers could come further downstage.
But, this old superannuated hippie just loved it.
Samela Harris
When: 27 Feb to 1 Mar. 15
Where: Her Majesty's Theatre
Bookings: bass.net.au
Compagnie 111 - Aurélien Bory & Le groupe acrobatique de Tanger. Festival Theatre. 27 Feb 2015
Some leapt to their feet in acclaim. Some sat and scratched their heads as the huge cast of ‘Azimut’ took its curtain call.
‘Azimut’ was the big Adelaide Festival of Arts 2015 opener. It was preceded by a ritzy everyone-who-is-anyone cocktail party in the Banquet Room and followed by the 9pm switching on of the Blink light display in Elder Park.
The timing was perfect. Indeed, as it happened, there was time to spare.
‘Azimut’ is a short show. Maybe 45 minutes.
It is also a dark show - not in theme but in illumination.
From woe to go, the performers are shown in various degrees of half-light or darkness. The brightest moment is when they are back-lit in silhouette to climb up and down a massive grid. This is highly aesthetic and, like much of the show, somewhat meditative.
It is, after all, about a legendary Sufi teacher's quest to climb to heaven whence he realises that things may have been better back on earth.
The show opens with performers hidden in big bags which dangle over the stage. They seem to be cocoons and they rise and fall and move to atmospheric music. It is very slow and mesmeric. Eventually, they land and give forth life.
Darkness is a good mask for illusion and gives a strange and ghostly look to the tall, writhing people tower formed by the acrobats.
The show is not "acrobatic" in the sense that we usually expect in the vein of Shandong or Circus Oz. There is a scene of performers cartwheeling in turns, faster and faster across the stage. But athleticism is muted in favour of the sense of spiritual quest with wonderful ancient songs further evoking the mystical mood.
There are some very sweet moments of physical theatre. There is a very pregnant woman and then there is the birth, whence all the performers and hence symbolically, all of humanity, comes squeezing through her loins. This is presented as miraculous with a humorous bent. Conversely, there is also the giant bag into which, one way or another, all the performers must somehow fit. This is done with endearing whimsy. Of course, its suggestion is that we are all in this world together.
There are some lovely moments with billowing curtains and textural reveals. But, when a performer walks upside down on the ceiling, Adelaide goes ho-hum. It's a nice trick, but an old one.
There's a rattle of excitement when arrays of metal poles are revealed and shudder in response to thunderous sounds. This may refer to forces of war or nature - those things so big and scary, making man so small and vulnerable.
Thus is it in ‘Azimut’. From Tangiers via France, a show which is short, dark and esoteric.
Samela Harris
When: 27 Feb to 1 Mar
Where: Festival Theatre
Bookings: bass.net.au