Adelaide Festival Centre. Festival Theatre. 15 April 2014
On her septuagenarian come-back tour, Helen Reddy both thrills and perplexes.
She still has a terrific set of pipes and impressive lung capacity. But, in black leggings and a black top, she dresses as if she's just popped in for a rehearsal. At least her blue earrings match her eye shadow. With a huge audience, mainly of Baby Boomer women who have paid a hundred and more bucks for their seats and donned bling and gladrags for the big occasion, you'd think the star could have frocked up. Her guitarist, Lenny Coltun, has gone to more trouble.
But Reddy plays it laid back and casual all the way. At first she seems a little detached. She has sung three songs before she remembers to say hello to the audience. As the 90-minute show develops, however, Reddy warms to the task and to the audience. She even gives a few wiggly self-huggies and ends with a declaration of love.
Between songs, the “queen of 70s pop" retreats to a stool amid the musicians "for a bit of a chat". Chat is not her strong point. She sighs and catches her breath, takes some sips of water and gets on with the next song. Lots of Paul Williams, one of her favourite songwriters. Some Don McLean. Some Peter Allen. And, of course, some Helen Reddy.
The fans are in seventh heaven when she does her big hits ‘Angie Baby’ and ‘Leave Me Alone (Ruby Red Dress)’. When she delivers ‘Mama’, which she dedicates to her own mother, Stella Lamond, she pretty much brings the house down. Despite the status of ‘I am Woman’ in the grand scheme of Reddy things, it is ‘Mama’ which is her biggest and most beautiful number on the night in Adelaide.
The little song she wrote when she was at UCLA, ‘You and Me Against the World’, she dedicates to her 16-year-old granddaughter. It is another winner.
Sometimes she seems uncertain as to which song she will sing and occasionally she muffs lyrics. But, since the whole show has the casual air, not to mention costume, of a rehearsal, it goes over.
The audience already loves the performer and, while the years may have taken the edge off her top notes, her voice is still that powerful, unusual and highly-recognisable instrument which earned her years of chart-topping success.
She gives her time to the minute. "It's not over until it's over," she jokes between numbers.
And, when it's over, it has been an evening of ballads and foot-tappers, some wonderful arrangements well played by the band and an intimate encounter with the woman who gave feminism that one triumphant anthem.
Samela Harris
When: Closed
Where: Festival Theatre
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Festival Theatre. 22 Mar 2014
Rocky Horror has come to town - and South Australia takes a jump to the left.
Co-incidence?
Alexander Downer was conspicuous by his absence on opening night since the fishnet gag he did for the Variety Club almost 20 years ago has simply kept on dogging his handsome, besuited image.
Craig McLachlan, on the other hand, was very much the man in fishnets and, after 22 years, he has pretty much made it his own - despite the luminaries who have gone before and after, from Tim Curry and Reg Livermore to Tim Ferguson.
Each actor has brought his own wicked charm or dangerous edge to the role of Dr Fran-N-Furter. McLachlan brings big, beefy, cheeky, ham to it. It plays to all his strengths - physique, voice, comedy. When he is not wiggling that shapely tokus, he is mugging. His fair, curly-headed Frank-M-Furter does not give one the horrors. It is pantomime naughty and wildly self-indulgent, perhaps even channelling a streak of Dame Edna.
But Rocky Horror is no longer a horror show in anyone's lingo. Transvestites don't have cachet as a taboo subject any more. Anything and anyone goes these days. So the shock element of the show has faded. Instead, it stands its ground as a wonderful sci-fi fairy story - a latter day ‘Babes in the Wood’.
The naive, conservative lovers come in out of the storm to a crazy party house where they will lose their innocence. There are lots of wonderful songs. The audience knows and loves them all. All it asks is a good, loud orchestra and a fabulous cast. This show delivers.
It is a production less lavish than some that have gone before - returning to the old roots when it was alternative and risky rather than the mainstream blockbuster it became. The staging is smallish. The band is almost invisible on a balcony behind panels which would seem to have a film strip motif. The set is fairly economical - with some wonderful "stuffed" heads on the castle walls and a few clever trucks - particularly the upright double bed in which Frank has his naughty way with the visitors. McLachlan masterfully milks that scene for laughs - and it is pushed the brink of acceptability but not over.
But, if the show belongs to McLachlan, it is a glorious vehicle for its rising stars. Tim Maddren is simply the best Brad in the history of the business. Not only does he look and sound perfect, but the man can hoof up a storm. Christie Whelan Brown embodies the sort of Janet that Olivia Newton John would envy. She is lithe and lovely and can belt out a song with a big Broadway voice. Magenta also is beautifully cast. Erika Heynatz has a powerful presence, a great voice and wild wigs. Kristian Lavercombe not only has big shoes to fill as Riff Raff but they were there on the stage beside him in the 40-years-on form of Richard O'Brien, the show's creator. Lavercombe's performance is right up there with O'Brien's. Meanwhile, O'Brien gave a new element to his old show with a very casual and familiar delivery as the Narrator. He was an elegant joy to have on stage.
There were no weak spots in the cast. Ashlea Pyke is a lovely Columbia, albeit her costume is less idiomatic than in past productions. Nicholas Christo is so strong as both Eddie and Dr Scott that most people would not realise it is the same performer. Brendan Irving is just the cutest golden-haired muscle man in his leopard skin jocks and everyone is eminently well-supported by the four Phantom song and dance ensemble.
There are no surprises in Rocky Horror. It just rocks on through the ages. It is a cult classic and its fans are in seventh heaven at the very idea of it. They are not giving standing ovations; they are giving it leaping 'lovations'.
Samela Harris
When: 20 Mar to 13 Apr
Where: Festival Theatre
Bookings: bass.net.au
Adelaide Festival. Her Majesty’s Theatre. 15 Mar 2014
Isabella Rossellini is the daughter of Ingrid Bergman. It has nothing to do with the sex life of insects, but it is one of the reasons she was a big drawcard at the Adelaide Festival. She knows it and she generously included a little tribute to her mother at the end of her show, along with a wistful reflection on her mother's "perfection".
Isabella is perhaps something of a rebel daughter.
In her ‘Green Porno’ presentation, she revels in tales of the glory of the duck vagina and the ignoble smallness of the gorilla's penis. She wears whiskers and dresses as a hamster - murderous little creature which culls her litters by eating her own young. Good home economics, Rossellini suggests.
Studying biology and natural history turned Rossellini on to the fascinating peculiarities of insect and animal sex - and brought out the actress in her. Hence, she shows a series of film clips in which she embodies the creatures in question.
She performs the sado-masochism of the snail with glee and fearlessly has herself cannibalised as a praying mantis. She's a hilarious house fly and a decidedly erky spider. Many of these clips can be found on YouTube and it is worth watching them. They depict the essence of the show and the sweetly cheeky way in which Rossellini handles the subject. It is as quirky and funny as it is informative.
It is all good and proper science, after all.
And her show is not a theatrical business but a platform presentation. She performs from a lectern. She wears spectacles. She uses notes.
She is a beguiling lecturer with lots of props and an impish sense of anthropomorphic humour.
On her first night she played to a packed house which responded to her 75 minutes of scientific entertainment with rousing zeal.
She had just added another delightful ingredient to a wonderfully diverse and classy Adelaide Festival.
Samela Harris
When 15 to 16 Mar
Where: Her Majesty's Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
Adelaide Festival. Queens Theatre. 14 Mar 2014
There are five candidates. The audience must vote. Many times.
But first, some personal details.
Angelo, the MC in a terrible chequered three-piece suite, encourages the 187 people in the old Queen's Theatre to give up their personal details by pressing numbers on little keypads with which they have all been provided. Age, gender, marital status, income...
Thus armed with demographics, he presents five candidates who need their votes. The losers will have to leave the stage, he warns.
Initial voting is pretty random since the candidates have not uttered a word. They are chosen by personal appeal. Then the winner and the loser may speak to the audience. It learns a little about them. But, various tests will turn up commonalities.
Which pejorative word is most offensive? Are we a little bit racist? Are we religious, spiritual or nothing? Do we prefer certain characteristics in a leader?
The candidates' ranks slim down. They speak some more. Winners versus losers. Another round of voting and the status quo changes. A back runner hits the lead. Does the audience still favour the candidate it liked before? What will swing the vote? The candidates vie for preference but they still have no real policy.
It is politically hollow but a very interesting exercise because the audience members have only a minute to answer serious questions. Are they a little bit racist? Dare they admit it? Yes, they reason. It is anonymous and all in the spirit of entertainment, after all. So, a majority of Adelaideans own up. They reject religion and spirituality, too. And they show that they are easily swayed by not very much at all when they suddenly change their voting preferences from one candidate to another.
Well, at least it was so on the opening night of this co-production from Belgium's Ontroerend Goed and Australia's The Border Project.
It did not prove that people will vote for people without parties or clear policies for it was clearly a game being played through actors in a theatre.
The votes were tallied by a couple of "officials" at a control desk to the rear of the square dais of stage. The results were transmitted as dots of various percentage sizes on an overhead monitor.
Sometimes the voting results surprised. Certainly the end of the game surprised.
It mightn't have been theatre, as such, but it was an extraordinary adventure in collective behaviour and it left its participants filled with questions, not about politics and elections, but about their own integrity.
Samela Harris
When: 13 to 16 March
Where: Queen's Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
Adelaide Festival. Dunstan Playhouse. 13 Mar 2014
The house lights came up. The announcement was made. The show was cancelled. A technical hitch had glitched out a highly technical production on its Adelaide Festival opening night.
The audience had been in an existential otherworld when it stopped.
They were spellbound by a cube suspended centre stage in the Dunstan Playhouse. It was presented as a seedy little Paris hotel room which turned and pivoted and, with video projections and a haunt of jazz music, transformed itself into a streetscape, a recording studio...
It dominated a wonderful, extraordinary, very different piece of theatre, one delivered by the Canadian company Ex Machina and which told a tale of Jean Cocteau and Miles Davis. Its narrative emerged as if from the memories infused into the walls of the hotel room. This was the room once occupied by Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. It passed on to the young Juliette Greco with whom the American jazz musician, Davis, was to fall in love but then refuse to marry because of the racial tensions of the day.
In the now, the hotel room is occupied by a Quebecois actor, in Paris to do voiceovers for a documentary on Juliette Greco - and also to lick the wounds of his own broken relationship. He chooses the room because of its history.
The room hangs - a surreal entity in the blackness of the stage.
At the beginning, it is a cube which sparkles and illuminates Cocteau line drawings and filmic credits for the play. And then, the character of Robert, the French Canadian actor, soars on wires and there it is, a mean little low-budget room. And the room pivots and becomes a package from which Cocteau may sprout, delivering his Lettre aux Americains. Again and again, the floating cube changes angles and the performers defy gravity to inhabit it.
At the same time, its core identity as the cheap hotel room grows in familiarity and purgatorial intensity. One's heart belongs to the commonality of Robert's lonely pain therein.
Needles and Opium is the revived early work of writer and director Robert Lepage, he who brought to the 1998 festival that vividly memorable work, The Seven Streams of the River Ota.
This work has an autobiographical string along with a rich counterflow of poetry, philosophy and music. It delivers the character of Jean Cocteau, his art, his words, his association with opium. It brings forth Miles Davis, who introduced bebop to Paris, and his flame, the lovely bohemian singer, Juliette Greco.
Among the exquisite and extraordinary scenes Lepage depicts in Needles and Opium is that of the trombonist being captured by Greco's performance through the basement window of a nightclub. Black and white, window bars and shadows, the visiting musician an outsider looking in. Music to music. Black and white. French and American.
Lepage uses myriad ingenious aesthetic and technical devices through the production. He uses the tinny amplification of telephone voice to play with immediacy and distance. Ditto language problems with switchboard girls. He injects irony and humour along with spectacle and artistry.
The lighting of Bruno Matte is sublime. The room which gives so many views is a masterpiece of theatre design from Carl Fillion - albeit, somewhere in its technical sophistication, it let us down - or, more precisely, left us in the air.
The play was almost three quarters in when it stopped on opening night. To come were the subjects of its title - the experiences of opium and needles in the lives of the characters living and dead.
Miles Davis was depicted by a Toronto-based gymnast and dancer called Wellesley Robertson III and already the audience had sampled his power and agility. His big drug dance scene was to come - and so much, crucially more, from the lovely Quebecois star, Marc Labreche so elegant, understated and poignant in the role of Robert.
Yet, the evening incomplete, the audience left with a sense of wonderment and delight. It had been an exceptional experience. Darkly ethereal.
In the added drama of its cancellation, it had become historic as well as memorable.
It had been another privileged dip into the mind's eye of one of the world's great theatre art practitioners.
There is a particular pace to Lepage productions. Just as the cube is somewhere, nowhere in space, the action is measured so that it suspends in time. And, for a play which is borne of the existentialist experiences, it is perfect.
Samela Harris
When: 13 to 16 Mar
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au