★★★
Derek Tickner. The Sky Room at The Griffins. 3 Mar 2022
Producer and musically inclined comedian Derek Tickner has been an ambitious force of comic nature for the last three Fringes and in this new show brings together four of his amusing amigos for some fun and games. Adelaide vs The World is an impressive challenge, so how does it go? I thought the show might not even start when compere Eric Tinker (Tickner in batik) lost the blue clipboard that held the precious running sheets. I know it’s blue because he asked our help to find it. It was weird enough to be part of the act, like the absently left-on mic during Tinker’s timeout for a tinkle in the toilet.
The chaos and confusion never ended. This is what Fringe shows used to be like before all these slick, well organised and rehearsed professional acts with expertly trained talent took over. Maybe we need a Fringe of the Fringe…of the Fringe.
Based on a game show format with challenges and point scoring, comedians Rich Jay and Rishi Chadha represent Adelaide in head-to-head comic combat with Team World represented by multi-tasker Finn Saara Lamberg and American funny man Matt Eberhart. Tinker sat between the teams on his stool and squashed it (his joke, not mine).
The first challenge is for each comic to say three accomplishments and the other team to guess which statement is not true. Besides the humourous banter and the fact they kind of knew one another, this was a great way to foster some audience empathy. Another game guessing the city or country from a photo is entertaining, as was naming a song from only a few bars. Interspersed with the jovial repartee and the loudmouth scorekeeper were samples of stand-up by each contestant. Rich Jay had some very decent lines like “the Gold Coast is full of fake looks but real assholes.” Rishi Chadha focused on humourous reflections of his traditional Indian upbringing, while Saara Lamberg squeezed a few chuckles out of Finnish gloom (after all, they border Russia). Doing some filling in during the clipboard hunt, we aurally adduced she left her song skills in Helsinki. Matt Eberhart looking troppo in a pineapple print shirt employs a ukulele for some improvised songs which are catchy. MC Tinker chimed in with a bit of irony and droll takes, and kept the cats herded.
It is an evening of sustained shambolism, unsophistication and slapdash that at any moment seemed capable of tipping toward a rush downstairs for a beer, but lo, it didn’t, and the momentum miraculously never ceased. Underprepared and honest, it’s whacky enough to laugh out loud.
David Grybowski
When: 1 to 5 Mar 2022
Where: The Sky Room at The Griffins
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
★★★1/2
Adelaide Fringe. The Green Guys. Bakehouse Theatre. 2 Mar 2022
It is a light folly, this play by Neale Irwin.
It’s a send-up of the late King Leonard of Hutt and his famous micro-nation, Hutt River Province. This king is King Henry and he reigns over the Kingdom of Hobbes. It is actually an onion farm and an onion flies proudly on the kingdom’s flag.
The plot revolves around Henry’s rancorous twin children, Hal (short for Henry) and Henrietta. The dog called Henry has died.
The King has summoned his children home in the name of royal succession. Not that the twins are too keen to inherit the throne. They have long been estranged and now thrown together in their father’s world they have gone into some sort of manic childhood regression of jealousy and bickering.
There is plenty of fuel for laughs in this plot-line and the production has its moments.
Oddly, it is Steven Nguyen as Kenny, the kingdom’s super servile and often officious multi-tasking factotum who steals the show. He embodies the kingdom's royal herald, border guard, policeman, tourism official, immigration officer and very loyal subject. Nguyen wins laughs with his good timing and careful underplay. Similarly, David Arcidiaco’s embodiment of Prince Hal is light and bright and he impresses as a very personable young actor. These performances are in dramatic contrast to both the slovenly King, played by Mick Young and his pregnant daughter played by Nicola Grant. They both over reach for the humour with excessive volume, something director James Harvey should reign in, so to speak.
The play moves along snappily on a minimalist set of milk crates with the horrible king humming about with a walking frame.
It’s is all a bit of cheerful Fringe nonsense and an excuse to spend a precious night in the soon to-be-no-more Bakehouse Theatre.
Samela Harris
When: 2 to 19 Mar
Where: Bakehouse Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
★★★★1/2
Adelaide Fringe. Lane Hinchcliffe. Hartstone-Kitney Productions. Black Box Theatre online. 1 Mar 2022
It’s best to have a big screen and good sound for this online show because, oh my, here comes the singing doctor.
Known to his patients simply as "Dr Lane”, Hinchcliffe is a medical maestro with a mission.
As he points out, on one hand he’s a GP and on the other, he’s a musician. He’s highly trained in both arts and now is using one to service the other.
He devised this autobiographical cabaret performance as an outreach to those, especially the young, who have struggled with mental health, identity, and self-esteem issues.
He was 25 years old, he says, before he could say that he was a “gay” man. Coming to terms with it consumed a vast chunk of his emotional and psychological life and he has emerged happily married and confident, determined to be there for youth in distress. That’s his day job.
As for his night job. He is one very serious musical theatre talent.
He is a one-man package because he arranges music, plays the piano sublimely and is a gifted singer with a daunting range.
In this Black Box show directed by Amelia Ryan, he illustrates his life story in hits from the musicals he encountered, breaking them nicely into a timeline. He sings snippets of Showboat, Hair, Phantom of the Opera, Miss Saigon, Rent, Cats, and Chess.
The frustration one may feel as an audience member is that he gives short change on some songs and too much of others, which of course is the prerogative of someone telling their personal song history.
But, therein he dismisses Jellical Cats after an exquisite wee light tenor snippet and gives Old Man River short shrift having just proven that he is really at home in that bass baritone range and it is sublime on the ear.
Of course, he can’t sing all of everything and he does seem rather to like a spot of religion in his repertoire, which completes the ticket of something-for-everyone.
His costume is fancy stage scrubs and he pops some humour into his patter and a bit of medico yuk for good measure. Oddly, his speaking voice is light. But there’s a whole world in those tubes of his and one looks forward to hearing more.
Meanwhile, The Black Box works fabulously well. Tom Kitney with Joanne Hartstone have worked out the best tech for sound and image so that audiences can comfortably relish a quality theatre piece in a state of absolute domestic bliss.
It is a covid gift which can keep on giving, and for the Fringe their Black Box Theatre offers a suite of shows.
They have always been cutting edge good theatre and this comes highly recommended.
Samela Harris
When: On Demand
Where: On Demand at Black Box Live
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Adelaide Festival. State Theatre Company South Australia. Odeon Theatre. 1 Mar 2022
One thing playwright Dennis Kelly impressed upon director Mitchell Butel and the State Theatre team was that this play worked best if the audience was not forewarned about where it was heading.
Respecting his wish, this critic will try to refrain from spoilers.
Ironically, the first instinct of one who has just seen Girls & Boys is to erupt into discussion mode. One has emerged from the theatre feeling stunned and stricken. One wants to share.
This is an extraordinary work and with Butel directing the magnificent Justine Clarke, it sings tour de force in all directions. Let’s add the very pleasing aesthetic of Ailsa Paterson's design and Nigel Levings’s ever-apt lighting. The production is sleekly professional all round.
Clarke captivates her audience from the first word. She’s cheeky, provocative, and funny as she outlines meeting her husband, raising small children with eyes in the back of her head, juxtaposing her career and her husband's changing place in their world order. It’s a roller coaster, Clarke in torrents of dialogue, hilarious, smart and vivid and then, oh, so gripping.
As for the play’s curtain-drop final moment. Such a small thing. So simple. Such dramatic perfection. One of those indelible theatre moments!
Standing ovation.
Samela Harris
When: 1 to 12 Mar
Where: Odeon Theatre
Bookings: statetheatre.com.au
★★★★★
Adelaide Fringe. Interactive Theatre International. The Flamingo, Gluttony. 27 Feb 2022
From way back when boomers were babies, to those born in the 20-teens, Roald Dahl books have featured on the bedside bookshelf - or, judging by the excited responses from the audience, in the toilet!
Nerine Skinner and Robbie Capaldi as Brenda and Terry respectively are members of The Ancient Guild of Tale Tenders. If you’ve read/seen Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, you’ll get the gist of this literary preservation, although the Tale Tenders are not so dystopian. For them, forgetting is the danger. The Tenders must read the books daily, keeping them alive and on the page, preserving them for generations to come.
In this tale, Terry is the Tender and Brenda his assistant, and the books he must preserve are the works of Roald Dahl. Terry’s father and grandfather were Dahl tenders, and it would seem Terry has become, well, a little perfunctory with his charges, and not tending them as well as he should have. Challenged by Brenda to read a work, he eventually agrees with her that the Wurble Gobblers have infiltrated and taken the words off the pages while he wasn’t looking. The mission: get the words back so that children in the future can read the books!
This is a brilliantly interactive show, and the heart warmed that so many children in the audience were avid fans of books. On request, they screamed out their Dahl favourites, and so did their parents! The Twits was a big favourite and prompted an ‘ugly-off’, bringing the audience right into the action, facing each other and screaming wild insults – brilliant!
A bit of magic / sleight of hand is always welcome, and it was utilised here with notes in bottles, and words appearing and disappearing from pages. Most delightful was the improv scene created by the audience: for this performance Terry was in a boat on a red honey lake that was a hundred degrees and smelled of fairy floss!
The show obviously changes with each performance, such is the interactive nature of it, but one would hope that Terry’s “comfort song” is a constant – no spoilers here!
The venue is perhaps a little large for this production; a lot of room echo made it a little difficult to understand what was being said at times. But such are the skills of Skinner and Capaldi that it didn’t really matter; not much could have made this show any less enjoyable.
And what happens in the end? Well that would be telling, but we are left with a literary homily: A new word a day keeps the Wurble Gobblers at bay. And you can’t argue with that.
Arna Eyers-White
When: 5 to 20 Mar
Where: The Flamingo, Gluttony
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au