John Frost for Crossroads Live. Her Majesty’s Theatre. 3 Jan 2022
In what is rather a coup for South Australian, and indeed Australian audiences the 70th anniversary of the world’s longest running play sees it performed professionally outside of London’s West End for the first time!
Although not the first production on Australian shores (Therry Theatre – then Therry Dramatic Society – mounted a production at Adelaide’s Arts Theatre in 2011, amongst others), it will be the first professional touring production and with an all Australian cast.
The appeal is easy to spot. Forget your woes and leave your troubles at the door. The delightfully simple and altogether too predictable characters of Agatha Christie’s play are sure to entertain. Think you know who did it? Spot the obvious set up? The twists have twists of their own and even if you see one of them coming you are unlikely to spot the next.
Of course audiences are also required to maintain the mystery, so you won’t find any clues here – suffice to say it not one of the servants, there aren’t any!
The assembled cast including Anna O’Byrne, Alex Rathgeber, Laurence Boxhall, Geraldine Turner, Adam Murphy, Charlotte Friels, Gerry Connolly, and Tom Conroy are simply splendid. All of the characters are larger than life and yet representation seems remarkably ahead of its time. Penned in the early 1950s it manages subtle references to class, politics and socialism, homosexuality, bullying, conscription, and the enduring effects of trauma. Not what one might expect from a crime fiction bordering on farce.
The eccentric 19th century English interior stylings of the box set by Isabel Hudson are deliciously pleasing. With crackling embers in the hearth and a light fall of snow beyond the stained glass windows, the many doors make for some delightful fun with all the coming and going of characters. The beautiful set and wonderful costumes – including no less than 6 dark overcoats, light scarves, and soft felt hats – is sensitively lit by Trudy Dalgleish’s warm and enriching lighting design.
As hosts and housekeepers Mollie and Giles Ralston, O’Byrne and Rathgeber are suitably naïve. O’Byrne gets to show off her acting chops in the third act when details of her past come to bear, and Rathgeber is every bit her jealous and protective husband. Prudish guest Mrs Boyle, played by Turner is absolutely caustic in her belligerence and has audience members cheering her demise, while Murphy’s Major Metcalf is all austerity and gentlemanly propriety. Charlotte Friels’ burgeoning feminist Miss Casewell is strangely intense yet peculiarly circumspect and Connolly’s Paravicini suitably flamboyant with an undercurrent of suspicion and intrigue. Tom Conroy’s Sergeant Trotter provides the perfect level of inquiry with some beautifully executed character work at the denouement. But it is Boxhall’s Christopher Wren that quite rightly steals the show with his overflowing neuroticism, strange sense of humour, and crazy mop of unkempt hair. All of this action perfectly paced by Director Robyn Nevin.
Really The Mousetrap is a play for everyone. And perhaps that goes someway to explaining the long term success of the production. There is much to be enjoyed on stage at Her Majesty’s Theatre; you’d have to be one of three blind mice not to!
Paul Rodda
When: 31 Dec 22 to 15 Jan 23
Where: Her Majesty’s Theatre
Bookings: ticketek.com.au
Continuing: Comedy Theatre Melbourne, 17 Feb to 26 Mar
John Frost for Crossroads Live. Adelaide Festival Centre. Festival Theatre. 31 Dec 2022
Psssssssst! Psst! Psst! Daw-ling! You look lurv-ly in this new doo! Just a bit more of this Hairspray to hold it all together. Psst! Psst! Oh! Don’t you look absolutely fabulous!
And indeed they did. Opening night of Hairspray on New Year's Eve at the Festival Theatre was the way to get things started in 2023. And why not? It’s the 20th anniversary of the Broadway production which ran for 2642 performances and won 8 Tony awards including Best Musical. Hairspray first Psst! as a John Waters film in 1988 and Psst! again in a 2007 film based on the musical. It must be fun to do because the films featured fetching talent like Divine, Sonny Bono, Debby Harry, John Travolta and Michelle Pfeiffer.
We forget what the world was like in 1962. Maryland, specifically Baltimore, a long way from the Deep South, but a Union slave state during the Civil War, had its problems. Hairspray manages to tackle the big issues of racism, obesity, body image, and gender bending with vacuity, frolic and fun. Fish-out-of-water misshapen Tracy Turnblad wants to make it on the TV dance show, which she does, and applies her new fame to the cause of de-segregation. This is done by enrolling an eclectic band of supporting characters sporting colourful costumes and whacky hairdos. In rom-com tradition, love is in the air.
Producer John Frost for Crossroads Live has assembled a celebrated clutch of Australian and overseas talent for touring this year. Carmel Rodrigues was made for the role of Tracy. She’s only 23 and still remembers her lines from when she played Tracy in a high school show. Her resume shows nothing but hard work to make her professional debut in this production. Brassy tacky, her Tracy is a dynamo of shimmy and song. No cliché about energy could possibly describe her love of performance. Bravo!
The other main cast members are Australian musical theatre majesty. Straight man Shane Jacobson brings his vast experience to bear in the vast girth of the traditionally cross-gender casted role of Tracy’s mum. The 1000 times he played the role of Peter Allen in The Boy From Oz made Todd McKenney a household name. On the other side of prime, McKenney is sweet-as, and his goofing around with Jacobson in the song Timeless to Me was a smash with the audience. Bobby Fox is all of Franki Valli - which he played over 850 times – and four times World Irish Dance Champion. Here he also channels Teen Angel from Grease in his portrayal of Corny Collins. Bravo! Rhonda Burchmore’s stunning career still has legs in the most literal sense. Black American, now Queenslander, Asabi Goodman brings huge dignity to her role as spiritual leader of the numerous black American characters. Her impressive gravitas may stem from her other job as a chemical engineer and her roles in the actors’s alliance. And boy, can she belt out a note! Definitely an exothermic reaction. Those playing the next generation down with Tracy are terrific. A stand-out were the dance moves and voice vibe of New Yorker Javon King. Bravo!
No expense was spared to physicalise the humour in all departments – colour, costumes, wigs, sets, lights, more lights, more costumes, props, big props, ridiculous gimmickry, satirical asides, all singing all dancing non-stop not much light and shade just full throttle energy and over-the-top sixties pop. What’s not to like? Director Matt Lenz did all this according to the script and with his own inventions. The orchestra under musical director Dave Skelton kept it all in sync. The audience returned the love with an instantaneous standing O. Bravo!
PS The program is big on bio and full of photos but omits the song list.
David Grybowski
When: 31 Dec 2022 to 28 Jan 2023
Where: Festival Theatre
Bookings: ticketek.com.au
Mathew Briggs/Under The Microscope. The Space. 8 Dec 2022
A torch flashes onstage. It reveals the silhouette of a figure clearly crashing this way, then that way, then this way on roller skates.
Lights up! Who is this French accented young women clad in ancient flying goggles, vest, shorts and flying scarf?
Lucky! Better. An Angel! An Angel who has arrived in a world of brown paper clouds high in the sky and brown paper little hills dotted about the stage, with a tale to tell.
Andi Snelling’s solo show Happy-Go-Wrong is the most extraordinary, brilliant midi clown physical theatre act filled with very real, very serious life threatening content.
What does cheeky Lucky mean when she says an accident befalling Andi is a ‘happy’ thing?
The constant flipping to and from upbeat Lucky to Andi - struggling to comprehend and survive a viciously uncaring, politicised medical system, presenting as ‘well’ to the world despite being near death - is frankly as confronting as it is spectacularly funny.
Snelling’s command of her audience from start to finish is absolute. Her cuts from Lucky to herself and back are so arresting, so discombobulating one barely has a chance to settle into the next moment of laughter as a follow up experience of suffering is swiftly upon you.
The journey Lucky and Andi take the audience on towards understanding Andi’s predicament is mediated so powerfully in motion. Every action, every slide, turn, fall, tells us so much and reaches deep within us, to recognise something of ourselves in these tense scenes.
Snelling is wickedly gifted in confronting an audience with the most difficult of subjects in the most endearing, kind, warm and compelling manner. That she has done so through her very real personal experience is testament to the greatness within her and deserving of many a repeat season.
This is the play a very wrong world desperately needs.
David O’Brien
When: 8 to 10 Dec
Where: The Space
Bookings: ticketek.com.au
Rumpus. 23 Nov 2022
Medieval Morality plays. Renaissance humanism-infused drama reflecting new worlds through the lens of the older.
Both ground Coldhands implacably, whatever one may think.
The clear throws to fictional fantasy and science fiction cannot hide this intriguing work’s double entwining threads of didacticism and mystical yearning.
Coldhands declares, nay teaches, a truth to our world about climate change and human connection which it needs to know before it even knows it, let alone how to follow it.
Dora Abraham’s text is set in a world where gold has disappeared. There is a force eradicating it and any opposing its power.
Three characters inhabit Ellanna Murphy’s stripped back set with clear allusions to dry, bony dessert featuring sky-reaching bone white claw-hand sculptures and ochre sands. They are a mother (Bonet Leate), hand gloved daughter ((Danielle Lim) and a boy hunter (Sam Lau.)
Mother and daughter are constantly on the run, spiritually sustained by tales she reads from a book. Stories of hope.
When the malevolent force they run from captures the mother and leaves the child, the child is unexpectedly rescued, reluctantly, by the boy hunter.
It’s the relationship between this reluctant hunter and the girl with a mystery to reveal which forges the heart of Abraham’s script.
The allegory of gold / balanced environment / human interconnection is utterly clear. Boy hunter’s ambivalence to direct involvement in the girl’s plight is a clear defence mechanism.
Abraham’s dialogue is beautiful and given great service by the cast.
It is a dialogue encouraging connection to stories; hopes that can be real.
Zola Allen’s direction is focused on ensuring the allegoric poeticism of Abraham’s dialogue lands where it should, through the medium of Danielle Lim’s fervent, warm performance, which drives Coldhands start to finish. The one who can make gold. One whose hands grow colder every time she does.
David O’Brien
When: 22 Nov to 4 Dec
Where: Rumpus 100 Sixth Street Bowden
Bookings: eventbrite.com.au
University of Adelaide Theatre Guild. Little Theatre. 20 Nov 2022
Assumptions about the name of this play are cast to the winds when one discovers that American playwright Robert Askins has written about a manic hand puppet created in a church hobby group.
It is an unlikely subject for a play, entirely preposterous and absurdist - which, of course, is the point.
It could be awful, but director Nick Fagan has cast the incomparable Matt Houston in the lead role of Jason, the loser kid who creates Tyrone, a hand puppet which has his own agenda.
This role requires Houston to swing in and out of the two characters, forlorn Jason gradually becoming more and more in the thrall of the Sesame Street-style creation on his hand. Houston not only has to assert and interplay the two characters but also to manipulate the puppet’s arms and evolving actions. If ever there was a challenging role, this is it.
Matt Houston has it right in hand, so to speak.
His performance is bravura and then some. Not that he gets to play likeable. He’s twice despicable and, as it happens, so are all the other characters in the play. Nasty self-interested Bible Belt Christians, the lot of them. Their language alone is repulsive. This play may hold a theatre record for use of the word “fuck”. And, while the interaction between the recently-widowed puppet-making teacher and her hulking boy admirer is quite funny, it is also grotesque - as is she, a duplicitous grimacing mockery of an exploitative mother.
If one had hoped for redemption from the quiet girl, Jessica, forget it. And as for the pastor, well he carries a bible and is pitiable. So, Hand to God is a pretty repugnant play one way or another. It is just Nick Fagan’s directing skills which keep the audience captivated and looking for resolution. It does not resolve very effectively but, the action has been a very wild ride indeed and no one is going to forget this production in a hurry.
Of course, the Little Theatre makes it intensely proximate and Tom Clancy’s marvellous church design on the upper level has sardonic splendour while the Church hall classroom below is as cheap and tacky, as one may expect.
Good sound, good lighting. Good Southern accents from the cast. All the ingredients are there.
The wonderful Brendan Cooney recently of stunning Stones in His Pockets, gives Pastor Greg a goodly serve of suave smug servant of God while Emily Branford takes the ghastly, strident mother/teacher right over the top and into hapless comedic hinterland. One laughs despite oneself. Tom Tassone embodies the big boy, easy to do as a big boy, but his characterisation is exquisitely nuanced and he gives a stand-out performance. Laura Antoniazzi sweetly depicts the sleeper character, the innocent little girl - or is she? She brings down the house when it comes to the no-spoilers-here climactic scene with Houston. By this time the audience is simply agog.
But, this is Matt Houston’s time to shine. He’s one of the finest actors in town and his talent devours and delivers this show. Applause. Applause.
Samela Harris
When: 20 Nov to 17 Dec
Where: The Little Theatre
Bookings: trybooking.com