State Theatre Company South Australia. Dunstan Playhouse. 8 Oct 2022
Persuading political entities to acknowledge lethal viral outbreaks is agonisingly difficult. We know this because of the ongoing abrasiveness between health professionals and political authority throughout the Covid crisis.
But even with the perversity of the anti-vaxers' push, Covid has been easy street compared to the early 80s and convincing politicians that the AIDS crisis was killing gay men.
So much of the gay world was in the establishment’s closet at the time. Shame was loaded upon gay sexual behaviour and, indeed, on homosexuality itself.
Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart documents this socio-medical ordeal. It was a brave and controversial play in its day, the 80s. Today it is a history piece and indeed, in this era of gay marriage, it is important that a traumatic past must not be forgotten.
Hence, it is passionately revived in this State Theatre production in which the artistic director himself, Mitchel Butel, undertakes the role of the tenacious New York campaigner who took on the powers of the day to plead action on behalf of the growing plague of dying young men.
It was a terrible time. No one understood the virus. There were no treatments. It caused terrible deaths. AIDS sufferers became untouchables.
It needed the likes of Ned Weeks to gain attention, and during his quest his strident style alienated him from many of those who were right behind him. Butel plays it in a growing lather of frustration. It’s a valiant performance with his character facing off against his heterosexual brother for support. Mark Saturno embodies that brother and their interactions are powerful, extrapolating so many of the establishment’s arguments against the promiscuity of the gay lifestyle. It’s a bravura performance by Saturno.
Since it is a play of arguments and explanations, didactic in its very nature, it demands of its actors substantial speeches as one after another, they break down and give voice to their pain, grief and frustration. So impassioned and effective are these deliveries that the audience responds with spontaneous applause.
Michael Griffiths, leaves his post as onstage pianist alongside cellist Clara Gillam-Grant, to embody the besuited mayoral authority who has the task of putting the AIDS campaigners in their place as unworthy of official attention. He is exquisitely loathsome.
Indeed, there are intrepid characterisations all round, notably from Emma Jones as the courageous AIDS clinic doctor whose experience as a childhood polio sufferer has given her a particular empathy for this new viral horror story. From simpatico to bravura, Jones is a powerful member of this cast. As is Anthony Nicola playing fey Tommy Boatwright. He delivers light in the darkness and also, unusually in 2022, performs the act of smoking onstage with some credibility.
Matt Hyde in flares, cuban heels, and wig, supports as a strong member of that early campaign cohort, along with Evan Lever, as under-appreciated Micky Marcus with young A.J. Pate strong in the minor parts.
Ainsley Melham delivers the pivotal role of the victim, the handsome young New York Times journalist, Felix. He carries Felix’s transition from glamorous confidence to the last-ditch with impeccable conviction. If there is any levity in this play, it is in his early interactions with the edgy Ned Weeks. And, if there is a weird moment, it would be the audience meeting him at his NY Times desk writing with pen and paper. A newspaper desk without a typewriter in the early 80s? If the company can access rotary desk phones, they could surely get a typewriter.
It is not an easy or happy night in the theatre. The play is relentless and just a bit dated. Designer Jeremy Allen has taken the set to appropriately old-school proportions: the full expanse of the Playhouse stage with one tier as domestica for the musicians and medical rooms; the other as the offices, clinics, and mayoral parlor; all of the above suggested by brick walls, crumbling facades and even an heroic frieze of ancient Greek battle, a certain parallel of which was to be found in the AIDS phenomenon. Set changes wheel here and there quite effectively while Nigel Levings keeps mood in the lights with resting cast members sitting stage-side in the shadows.
Dean Bryant’s direction enables all the torrents of dialogue and, while perchance they could use a blue pencil, the audience’s respect for and engagement with the subject matter underwrites its attentiveness. At denouement, there is not a dry eye in the house.
For a few of us, the production is particularly heart wrenching insofar as it reminds poignantly of a man called Norman Hudson, understood to have been Adelaide’s first AIDS fatality. He had been marketing manager right there in the Festival Centre back in the 80s. He caught the virus when on a fellowship trip to New York. He was a one-time dancer and a vivid, handsome, accomplished, popular man. His name and that of his partner Dr John Downton, a distinguished plant scientist at Waite, are remembered now only by those who knew and loved them. Their relationship, the way in which John tenderly cared for Norman until the end and, subsequently, very quietly succumbed himself to AIDS is the heartbreaking illustration of what this play was and is all about.
Few people remained untouched by that epidemic through its years of fear and suffering, waiting for it to be understood and treated. And, while Norman Hudson may be remembered by a certain theatre-world inner sanctum, at least the name of Ian Purcell, South Australia’s great champion of AIDS care and understanding, resonates and is honoured.
These people deserved mention in the program notes.
That they were not, speaks volumes about the way in which AIDS generally is now the forgotten epidemic. Monkeypox is news now, along with Covid. It is ironic, since HIV is still extant.
Samela Harris
When: 8 to 15 Oct
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: statetheatrecompany.com.au
Northern Light Theatre Company. Shedley Theatre. 7 Oct 2022
Like musical director, Leanne Savill, I also saw the London production of Jersey Boys and was wowed by it. The Jersey boys are of course New Jersey’s favourite sons of the 60s who evolved into the Four Seasons with lead crooner Frankie Valli and singer/songwriter Bob Gaudio. The number and quality of their juke box hits – identifiable by Valli’s tenor tenderised with a sweet and soaring falsetto and Gaudio’s catchy lyrics and melodies backed up with faultless harmonies from Tommy DeVito and Nick Massi – earned them places in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Vocal Group Hall of Fame. With over 100 million record sales, they are one of the best-selling musical groups of all time. And Valli is still touring solo! The Jersey Boys musical ran on Broadway from 2005 to 2017 and won four Tonies including Best Musical.
I hate to agree with a perennial season ticket holder for Northern whom I met at intermission that this production gets off to a slow start. The opening number, Ces Soirées-La, is a rap derivative of a Four Seasons hit, Oh, What A Night, but it simply appears strange and out of place, although it sets up Sanjay Mohanaraj as somebody to keep an eye on. The gentleman also opined that the show didn’t kick into gear until the Jersey boys had their first big hit. I retorted that it's nothing to do with the performances but the nature of the narrative. The book is a detailed and chronologically forensic lookback at the band’s development, and obviously the music wasn’t that good until the hits written by Bob Gaudio were introduced halfway through the first act. Director Ceri Hutton says Sue Pole captures the choreography of the era – and that’s true – but the era’s moves were pretty rudimentary.
Director Ceri Hutton didn’t have the show technically ready on opening night. Lights couldn’t find their actors and sometimes actors couldn’t find their lights – more the former. Several times, monologues began in theatre darkness. At one point, a stagehand tried to steal the keyboard stage left during a band scene, only to be snatched back in the nick of time by the actor. The following song fell flat, but the foursome’s mojo was recovered by the next number. Ironically, the keyboard was used for several more scenes and exited stage right. Go figure. The metallic elevated walkway suited the 2-minute jail scene perfectly but not much else. In fact, it was unsafe. An actor mis-stepped the bottom rung and landed on his knee, and the opposite staircase was missing most of its balustrade. An anachronous LED display identifies various nightclubs whereas the bowling club neon sign looks authentic (and expensive, I get that). I wasn’t the only one put off by the unpleasant-smelling smoke effects.
Setting aside multitudinous peccadilloes, Hutton scores high on selecting the sweetest voices for the fabulous foursome. Deon Martino-Williams is absolutely stunning in re-creating the Valli sound. His virtuosity in the falsetto was a marvel. Bravo! The other three, Michael Coumi, Kristian Latella and Sam Davy provide heavenly harmonies. Coumi’s Gaudio was as nice as Latella’s DeVito was unpleasant, and Davy, as scripted, did a great Ringo to the other three. Together, the emotional rollercoaster of the Four Seasons’ domestic and professional and sometimes criminal misadventures were palpably played in ensemble. Fabulous supporting roles of music execs, mafia types and excitable boys were rendered by Gus Smith, Gavin Cianci and Jaxon Joy. Musical director Leanne Savill directed the band flawlessly to my ears. Ceri Hutton also keeps the whole shebang of 51 scenes on the move.
Matt Byrne was only weeks away from holding auditions for his production of Jersey Boys when serious illness took hold of him around Christmas 2020. He left the world stage late last year (2021) and Northern Light Theatre Company took up the torch with this ambitious production which they dedicate to his memory. Indeed, several cast members in the program notes reflect on Matt’s mentoring role in their theatrical life.
You have hiccups, you have a drink of water, and then they stop. Ceri Hutton’s production has all the bones for maturing into a first-class night out of nostalgically familiar 60s and 70s hits. For the oldies, it’s great to hear the songs in dramatic context and for their kids, it’s a whole new world of musical wonder.
David Grybowski
When: 7 to 22 Oct
Where: Shedley Theatre, Elizabeth
Bookings: nltc.sales.ticketsearch.com
Wickedly Good Productions. Rumpus. 4 Oct 2022
Big questions; director Nate Triosi executes a deceptively ‘simple’ modus operandi exploring them.
Which questions? After All This goes after the conflicting business of religious belief, the great beyond and the origins of morality.
Marcel Dorney’s play spawned a 2012 Green Room award winning production by Melbourne company Elbow Room. It’s easy to see why. Dorney’s writing disavows being buried in complicated, over egged atheism versus religion discourse.
Dorney pitches logical questioning of Christian belief, nature versus nurture debate and death cult beliefs of transitioning to a higher level of existence in beguiling stylistic dark humour.
Director Triosi’s achievement; a keep it simple approach on every level, ensuring simplicity of presentation in performance and design, allowing the deep nature of Dorney’s text to subtly embrace and challenge without any sense of disturbing angst.
Angst - maybe, maybe not, as the hour progresses.
The audience travels space to space three times within the Rumpus building. Cast members are hidden amongst the audience. We have no idea who they are until they sprout.
Characters Emily and Angus spring from the foyer bar. Emily has pasted a child-like Jesus themed drawing to the wall. We’re welcomed musically and emotionally to the conflicts of childhood and religious belief. Playwright Dorney has split his characters function. They directly address the audience as narrators, yet play children (and others), in struggled remembrances. We get the ‘simple’ yet complex confusion and denial. Do we?
We’re moved on.
A screen projected equation greets us. Another hidden cast member emerges. We’re entertained by a slapstick style take of Dr George Price and John William Hamilton, purveyors of two vastly opposed schools of thought on morality and faith. It’s as slapstick funny as it’s vicious. We just stand there, gazing at the projected equation encompassing the issues the characters fight over.
We’re moved on.
Most disturbing experience of all is this line of characters in uniform, espousing with gentle warmth and sincerity the mystery of death cult belief.
This is the point at which After All This resolves into an endless experiential conundrum. Nothing offered up is neutral. Comprehendible, consistent, but always pushing towards a favoured position dependent on personal reaction. It’s the very function distinguishing great theatre, as an experience, as a means of really knowing what we think we ‘know’.
David O’Brien
When: 4 to 16 Oct
Where: Rumpus 100 Sixth Street Bowden
Bookings: rumpustheatre.org
Fred Smith. Prospect Town Hall. 30 Sep 2022
It’s only a year and a bit since the Taliban waltzed back into Kabul on the back of the ill-conceived, thinly veiled surrender by the US. Fred Smith was an officer with DFAT in the embassy in Kabul from 2020 until he was evacuated in May 2021 as the Taliban raced through the provincial capitals. An interim virtual embassy was then established in Doha. By the 15th of August, the Taliban controlled all but the Kabul International Airport (KIA) and Fred and a select few Aussies went back in on the 17th to return remaining Aussies and rescue as many Afghani collaborators and their families as possible. Perhaps you recall from your television viewing the heaving throngs in the withering sun behind the razor wire, or the young men clinging to an enormous American air transport whilst taxiing on the tarmac. Eventually, the US medical facility at the airport ceased operations, and consequently on the morning of the 26th, the Australian mission was evacuated. That very evening, an Islamic State suicide bomber detonated at the airport gate where the Australians had been working. 200 people were killed including 13 US Marines.
Fred was no stranger to Afghanistan. He was assigned with the diggers in the province of Uruzgan intermittently from 2009 to 2013. And that’s not the half of Fred. Besides a comfortable Canberran life with a wife and a kid and a career, Fred has an uncanny capability to diarise and entertain by performing his own music. While the US was busy spending US$2.6 trillion on Afghanistan, Fred has recorded thirteen albums of original songs based on his empathetic reaction to the cornucopia of human conditions he encountered on the job in Afghanistan, PNG, Bougainville, the US and at home. The Dust of Uruzgan is the title of both a book and a CD on the diggers, the Dutch and the doings during the ADF’s warfare in that Afghan province during his watch. Fred was the subject of an Australian Story episode in 2013 entitled, A Sapper’s Lullaby, a lamentation of the losses of ADF engineers charged with finding and defusing the deadly IEDs. Former ACT Australian of the Year, ABC presenter Virginia Haussegger, AM, called him a “Canberra treasure,” selling him far too short.
Sparrows of Kabul is a concert with a five-piece band, a slide show, and an insightful analysis of the Afghani story from the post-9/11 American invasion to the fall of Kabul – 21 years of hope, corruption, brutal conflict, and heartfelt encounters. With a backdrop of fetching still photos and moving images of war machinery, camaraderie, and the tension of patrols outside the wire, our guitar-toting diplomat is shown disarming his Afghani hosts and entertaining the troops with his bonhomie and heart-rending ballads, and he did so to us.
From the lines of a 17th Century poem shown on stage, Fred began the concert with his evocative and haunting song entitled, 1000 Splendid Suns, referring to Kabul’s womanhood hidden behind the endless compound walls. Jen Lush’s accompanying ethereal voice was transcendental. The first half of the show focusses on the Dust of Uruzgan years. Fred crafts beautiful songs garnered from his personal experiences of those he encountered. No doubt he yearns for the hit he deserves, like John Schumann’s I Was Only 19 - Schumann even attended out of respect for the passport stamping-singer-songwriter. Fred’s style wavers from trad folk to electric folk to rockabilly – all with memorable melodies and haunting lyrics.
After intermission, the concert with pictures focusses on the days of the evacuation one year ago. The Gates of KIA is an apology to his daughter for PTSD. Even a year later, Smith still gets messages via WhatsApp; cries for help from inside Afghanistan. There is a tender song for the people he couldn’t get out. Yet 4100 Afghanis were evacuated by the Australians and Fred was their angel. It’s not all beer and skittles – Fred reflects on the Brereton Report on potential unlawful killings. Sparrows of Kabul is also a hefty poem by Fred that he recited to remind us of the importance of poetry to the Afghanis. The insouciant birds flit amongst the debris only days after the bomb blasts. The concert was bookended with exquisite accompaniment by Jen Lush in Trembling Sky.
Fred’s band comprises the aforementioned heavenly vocalist, Jen Lush, Paul Angus on drums and keyboard, Mark Seddon on bass, and stimulating electric guitar work from Stevie Pederson, but he draws on local talent from wherever he plays.
Fred is also very active assisting the Afghani diaspora of refugees and its new citizens of Australia. The concert was opened with a message of thanks from the Afghani ambassador in Canberra read by Fahim Hashimy, a film maker and the artistic director of the upcoming 7th Ghan International Film Festival Adelaide – an event born in Adelaide and expanded to Sydney and Melbourne (29-30 October at the soon-to-be-closed-unless-you-do-something-about-it Mercury Cinema). Note: the ambassador is not Taliban - he represents the government-in-exile. Australia does not recognise the Taliban regime. Many members of the Afghan community were present including persons that Fred himself had processed and even worked with in Kabul.
Fred’s disarming style and dry humour, his musical and song-writing ability, and most of all, his unabashed openness to bog in, dance a jig, play the fool and give anything a go makes friends everywhere - he easily busts down the barrier of language, because music and fun are universal. While the concert is a high-quality musical event in its own right, the context Fred provides makes it a beautiful and poignant night of learning and reflecting. Nations do what they do, yet “the whiff of adrenaline,” as Fred phrases it, compels young men on all sides of conflict to take extraordinary risks and do regretful things. And still, behind the walls, are 1000 splendid suns. Double bravo!
PS Fred will reprise Sparrows of Kabul for the 2023 Adelaide Fringe 17-19 February at Star Theatre 2 on Sir Donald Bradman Drive, Hilton. Not to be missed!
David Grybowski
When: 29 to 30 Sep
Where: Prospect Town Hall
Bookings: Closed
Gilbert & Sullivan Society of SA. Arts Theatre. 24 Sep 22. Matinee
Shake off the winter blues and get thee to the theatre. Now.
For affordable ticket prices, there is a stunning, slick production of one of the great Sondheim spectaculars: Into the Woods.
G&S has long been a force to be admired and it seems only to grow more and more so with the way in which it rounds up impeccable talent.
It is hard to pick a hole in this Gordon Combes-directed production.
Into The Woods arrived on Broadway in 1987 and, with its book by James Lapine and the artistry of Sondheim’s music and lyrics, it swept into the canon of popular musicals, dissecting, as it does, the fairy tales on which we were all brought up, hypothesising on their pschyo-pathologies, and switching their fates around. Its operatic nature makes it glorious grit for the styles of the G&S Society and, as access to technological marvels has improved, its big-budget Broadway production values can be effectively emulated; superbly, as is the case in this production.
A diligent and detail-conscious team is behind this show. Gordon Combes with Anne Humphries are responsible for a panoply of terrific costumes with Vanessa Le Shirley on wigs and, of course, the tight discipline of musical director Jillian Gulliver delivering the goods from the pit. Combes also has achieved impressive effects with his set design, a series of screens illuminating views and the glory of birds which are key to much of the magic of one of the old fairy tales.
The production is tight. It is a long show, the first act veritably a show in itself, but Combes keeps it as taut as a tick with Celeste Barone enabling the snappy choreography. And the performers, in their own merit, keep the audience engaged with their characters and their destinies.
It is a large cast, too many to mention.
Some are new faces and one can’t wait to see more of them. Sam Mannix shines forth playing both Red Riding Hood’s Big Bad Wolf and Cinderella’s handsome Prince. Not only is he possessed of a wonderful voice but also the most delicious comedic skill. The simple flicking of his princely hair is enough to bring the house down. All his entrances and exits are funny. Indeed, he is funny just standing there in character. New also to G&S is Liliana Carletti, another comic talent with a great voice. Her first scene as Little Red Riding Hood evoked spontaneous cheers from the audience.
Megan Humphries is anything but a newcomer. She’s an oft-commended veteran whose considerable vocal skills are truly exercised between melodic singing and the strident cackles and screams demanded of her as The Witch. Jared Frost, playing The Baker, remains entirely appealing and an asset to the stage with Catherine Breugelmans impeccable as his wife. Then there are Emily Morris as Cinderella and Buddy Munro-Dawson valiantly embodying the juvenile Jack, both splendid, as are Danielle Greaves, Deborah Caddy, Nadine Wood, Alleysha Nicholls, Dominic Hodges, James McClusky-Garcia, and indeed, one and all. Such a strong cast. Such a great show.
Understandably, the good word is out and the G&S is packing ‘em in - so don’t delay.
Samela Harris
When: 24 Sep to 1 Oct
Where: Arts Theatre
Book: gandssa.com.au