Dunstan Playhouse. State Theatre Company SA. 16 Nov 21
If we needed a covid tonic, here it is: gusts of glorious laughter as the battle between vaxxers and anti-vaxxers unfolds in an alternative community school in Berkeley, California.
State Theatre’s programming of Jonathan Spector’s Eureka Day was an act of perhaps unprecedented prescience since the play was slotted into the 2021 season long before the pandemic immersed us. It is not about Covid but about a school board’s response to an official medical edict when a case of mumps breaks out among the students.
The school board is a politically correct feast of ethnic diversity and is, oh, so ardently woke. Indeed, it is contemplating ever more specific racial sensitivities such as “inter-racial adoptee”.
Californians always did take self-righteous alternative nuttiness to the passionate extremes of irrationalism and Spector has written their desperate neediness into a swiftly-flying narrative which opens with ruthless parody and, after some genuinely thought-provoking revelations, arrives at a denouement of comfortable irony. It is a lovely exposition of oppositional logical processes, albeit over-peppered with unfinished sentences which hang in the air.
The play is set in a primary school library, well observed by designer Meg Wilson to feature all the clichéd refinements down to those impossible bean bags. The board meets there in well-spaced chairs, occasionally sharing scones which can only be served on environmentally correct plates.
Don is the senior, the facilitator, the chair, the socks-and-sandals softie who likes to close meetings with meaningful readings of esoterica from Rumi. Glynn Nicholas embodies this man with absolute perception and impeccable comic timing. It is as if he was always meant to play the part which even encompasses a soupçon of mime, expertly reminding audiences of whence came this fine stage presence.
Don is very much under the thumb of domineering, manipulative, and highly strung Suzanne, a stereotypical “Karen" of insistent alternative beliefs. Caroline Craig makes a meal of this character, sometimes so frenetic that it is exhausting to behold. Yet, in a solitary pause in her annoying hyperactivity, she presents an expression of such profound vulnerability and defeat that it may never leave the mind’s eye of this audience member. That is acting.
In contrast is single mum Meiko, played by Juanita Navas-Nguyen, is quietly inscrutable as she sits knitting. She has secrets to keep but when her time comes, she is a powerhouse of agendas. Matt Hyde plays Eli, ever with a somewhat dazed look in his eyes, either because he is a two-timing hypocrite or because he is riding high on the zeitgeist of wokeness. Even in tragedy, he is somewhat unpleasant but apparently very rich.
Into this group comes the new board member, Carina, an African American lesbian mum with a special needs child. She would be perfect for the board’s diversity, except that she reveals herself to be rational. Sara Zwangobani is pitch-perfect in this role. She is a joy to watch, nuanced in character interpretation and, of course, on the side of the angels when it comes to an informed and mask-wearing State Theatre audience.
The high spot of this work is very high indeed. As Don takes to the Internet to confer with the school community on the issue of vaccine mandates, a dropdown screen plays out the text conversations and comments of the participants which soon become a deluge of wacko anti-vax theorists versus exasperated dissenters. It is one long, heavenly, and much-needed belly laugh.
Thus, with a fabulous cast in the hands of Rosalba Clemente, plus slickly professional lighting from Mark Shelton, fine audio-visuals from Chris Petridis, not to mention well -coached American accents, this production with its serendipitously pertinent subject matter, is a top notch hit show for State.
Applause. Applause.
Samela Harris
When: 12 to 27 Nov
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: ticketek.com.au
State Opera South Australia. Her Majesty’s Theatre. 11 Nov 2021
Australian Lindy Hume’s impressive opera and festival directing career has her directing three operas this year in three countries, and this one is a huge celebration of invention, colour, comedy and music. The overture alone will captivate the least of the opera-goers among you with its medley of famous melodies. Conductor Graham Abbott explains that after signing a contract to deliver an operatic score in three weeks in the run-up before Christmas, Rossini recycled some previous material to save time. Legend has it that the composer wrote this, his 17th of 39 works for the stage, in 13 days that December in 1815. This production was created in 2016 for the 200th anniversary of opening night in Rome.
The overture is followed by the equally familiar self-introduction of the barber spruiking himself as the social facilitator of Seville. The designers have Morgan Pearse exhibit the off-beat swagger and self-importance - complete with makeup and costume - of Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean. His sonorous baritone voice navigates the rippling syllabic challenges with astonishing aplomb. Bravo!
If you haven’t been to opera for a while, the days of the non-dieting diva standing statically still like a statue while hitting the high Cs are over. A great operatic voice only just gets you in the door now. Operatic performers are triple threats highly skilled in movement and acting as well. And this we see in abundance in the performance of Katie Stenzel as Rossini’s Rosina. Along with John Longmuir’s Count Almaviva, they are the couple madly in lust. Their gropes at the fortepiano, with faces and bodies wishing for more, all tensely taking place literally behind the back of her guardian, Dr Bartolo, is very amusing and a highlight. Bravo!
The set is as coloratura as Stenzel’s soprano voice. Designer Tracy Grant Lord and lighting designer Matthew Marshall saturate the set with doors and windows, and colour and costumes. Bravo! Associate choreographer Carol Wellman Kelly and director Lindy Hume also keep the eyes interested by mobilising every nuance with complementary and/or farcical business and anachronistic delights. There are a lot of repetitive bars that stretch the story to nearly the three-hour mark, so you have to do something. And of course, there is the heard-but-not-seen Adelaide Symphony Orchestra which sometimes is ungratefully assumed to be a given for their consistent quality. While all these assets were a delight, an hour less would have been fine, but tradition still means something. Go Figaro.
David Grybowski
When: 11 to 20 Nov
Where: Her Majesty’s Theatre
Bookings: stateopera.com.au
Joh Hartog Productions in association with Bakehouse Theatre. Bakehouse Theatre. 29 Oct 2021
What a very clever confection of a lateral-thinker’s play. It’s a wild Irish gamble which comes off as a triumph. No wonder it won an Olivier Award during its four-year London run.
Written by Belfast-born playwright Marie Jones, Stones in his Pockets depicts a couple of impoverished Irish yokels working as extras on a Hollywood movie being shot on location on their home turf. Jones’s script demands of the two actors playing these roles that they embody the Hollywood film star, the film crew, and several of their fellow locals. Thus, being a massive quick-character-change challenge, it depends on the astute casting of two strong and versatile actors. These director Joh Hartog has found in Brendan Cooney and Scott Nell.
They are onstage for two 50-minute acts in which, in a torrent of quick and often funny dialogue, they zap to and from fifteen diverse characters with assorted accents. It is exhausting just to think about it and even more so to watch, in utter amazement, as the actors actually do it - and well.
Phrases such as “tour de force” and “bravura performance” spring to mind. Then again, one can’t help thinking “ham” and “over-the-top” when it comes to some of the characters in the mix. It is all these things and also something of an actor’s masterclass, directed, as it is, by a noted drama lecturer.
For a play which is fundamentally oddball and satirical, it has a sad thread of suicide. The stones in his pockets refers to a local lad who drowns himself by weighting his pockets with stones. The where’s and whys of this would be plot-spoilers but it is so artfully embraced in the overall storyline that the work retains an upbeat spirit - and the audience leaves the theatre smiling. After all, everyone knows how pretentious film people can be and how they think the world revolves around what they are doing and what it costs. And, everyone can think of vapid Hollywood prima donnas. It’s wholesome to laugh about them and to explore the odd world of hapless extras.
There’s time for a titter about accents, too. Cooney and Nell have to turn on regional Irish accents, non-regional accents, American accents, English accents, and even how-to-do accents. If one thinks for a moment that they don’t have their accents quite right, it’s such a wild melange and quick-change party that one stops caring. Token character changes are executed by putting on and taking off caps, reversing them, popping on headphones, a scarf around the neck, all at lightning speed.
Fortunately the actors have the professional acuity of veteran lighting guru Steven Dean to have the lights playing in perfect co-ordination with their quick changes along with designer Tammy Boden’s clever costumes with their braces and big pockets. All this as well as the extremely agreeable and deceptively simple set convincing one that there is lots of room on the Bakehouse stage and that there are even green fields.
It’s all very nicely done. It’s a fast-and-furious quirky play featuring two of the most fearless, fit, and able actors in town. Unforgettable will be Brendan Cooney’s gorgeous physicality as a huge, beefy security guy.
Catch it if you can.
Samela Harris
When: 29 Oct to 6 Nov
Where: Bakehouse Theatre
Bookings: bakehousetheatre.com
OzAsia Festival. The Space. Adelaide Festival Centre. 27 Oct 2021
Wayang Kulit is an ancient tradition of Indonesian shadow puppetry usually telling the beloved sagas of the Ramayana or Mahabharata. They are usually performed with beautiful, intricate leather shadow puppets held on sticks and the plays are usually rather long.
This new variation on the theme of Indonesian shadow puppetry certainly does feel long.
It is a cross cultural phenomenon, a “contemporary Asian-Australian” production with images devised by celebrated artist Jumaadi and music by Michael Toisuta. It features silhouette cutouts illuminated via projectors onto double screens in the theatre; quite straightforward. Beside the screens, a group of musicians with a wild wealth of assorted instruments plays live onstage.
The show opens with an introduction sung perhaps pedanda-style by a dignified elderly Indonesian gentleman who then joins the band and features on classical Indonesian percussive instruments. There in the band is a female singer who is also an exquisite violinist and a snappy twister of a ratchet rattle. She occasionally translates Bahasa Indonesia snippets in song form. Two guitar-playing multi-instrumentalists are with her, focused and intense. Much of the music is earnest and meditative and interestingly cross-cultural. One becomes fascinated by the daunting array of assorted instruments.
The performers are both Australian and Indonesian. The name, Perahu-Perahu, means “boats” and the story idea is to represent boat voyages between Australia and Indonesia over the very many years. It does, grimly, depict refugee boats and their drowned passengers. But, with very little in the way of written explanation, the audience is left to decipher what the hour of assorted enactments represents. There are charming village folk at work and people climbing over mountains. One thread depicts the Dutch invasion of Indonesia and the subsequent struggles of the dreaded “Da Da” colonialism. Another seems to be about the importation of mangoes and durian. The scene of fruit harvesting is charming. There is a sudden streak of politics with the portrayal of Australian cattle whose fate will be ill-treatment at the hands of Indonesian slaughterers. The show ends with lots of exuberantly celebratory music; “Opah Opah” cry the musicians and it is, of all things, a pineapple wedding. Strange, indeed.
It is a perplexing show. Is it cultural usurpation or is it brave new art? It sends one off to ponder the point. Jumaadi’s art, briefly shown onscreen at the opening of the show, is bright, lively, idiosyncratic, and highly appealing. There is a strong sense of his delightful designs in the Perahu-Perahu cutouts but, of course, they are shadow and rarely coloured. They also are highly reiterative. And, the storyline feels muddy.
As one who is au-fait with the traditions of wayang kulit, Perahu-Perahu comes across as an interesting interpretation of the genre but less fun than the real thing. There is no clown and the couple of gags slipped into the show are unfunny. It is certainly not “immersive” theatre as advertised but slow and, dare one say, obfuscatory for many.
Hence, while much of the music is interesting and the musicians clearly have a really good time, the message of Perahu-Perahu leaves one just a bit “bingung", as the Indonesians would say, or confused.
Samela Harris
When: 27 to 30 Oct
Where: The Space
Bookings: bass.net.au
The South Coast Choral and Arts Society. Victor Harbor Town Hall. 23 Oct 2021
Never underestimate the showbiz acumen of the out-of-towners. Yet again a fabulous show pops up under lights in the Victor Harbor Town Hall, this one not only showcasing some shining stage talent but also a seriously promising young director, one Jonathan Ogilvie.
For this beloved musical, he has drawn together a huge ensemble of experienced performers in musicals, many of them teachers, dancers, and tertiary students of the performing arts. Hence, there is no weak link, lest it be the limitations of the dear old Town Hall itself, something promised to be remedied in the one-day-maybe plan for a Victor Harbor Arts Complex.
True theatre troupers just get on with things - to which end, Ogilvie has tiered an excellent band of musicians over the top of the stage and assembled a classy chorus of press characters at cabaret tables around the stage’s catwalk with further vaudevillians onstage. No inch of space is wasted.
It is a vast cast of singers and scantily-clad dancers and it is clear that, despite the stringent masking rules which must have dominated through rehearsals, Ogilvie has worked this cast into ensemble quality. Everyone is cue-ready, in tune, facially expressive, word perfect and, blow me down, spot-on with American accents.
Perchance, one of Ogilvie’s secrets is collaboration. One notes from the impressive glossy program that, while he is director and designer, there are no less than three musical directors acknowledged as well as a choreographer and an assistant director.
While Ally Miller, in the principal role of Roxie, is an accomplished song-and-dance performer, alongside her as the fellow Chicago murderer Velma Kelly is young Shannen Beckett, an emerging talent and a specialist dancer with an extremely agreeable singing voice. Both performers deliver their prison inmate characters with verve, focus, and agility. Beckett, particularly, has some of the toughest dance challenges in the history of musicals as Velma and she braves them with panache.
Meanwhile, there’s the coveted male role of the sleazy, charming lawyer, Billy Flynn. Jon Grear strides down the theatre aisle, throws his mandatory mask to one side as he steps onto the stage and then, effortlessly, takes charge - just as his character is meant to do. Grear is no stranger to these audiences and they, rightly, love him. His voice is easy on the ear. His character nous is astute. If there is one comment a persnickety critic might make, it is that he could do with more eye makeup.
Perhaps also so of Chris Stevenson, a particularly gifted performer whose face is hidden behind a massive fuzzy beard. Oh, dear. He plays Roxie’s hapless husband, Amos, the man who sings that most poignant of all musicals' songs, Mister Cellophane. It is one of the treats of the production albeit he restrains his power throughout the storyline, to become a character so pitiable that the audience is sighing and moaning for him.
Georgia Martin embodies Mama, the prison matron. She is smooth, cool, commanding and possessed of a beautiful voice. Kiara Wiese is cast in the other featured part of Mary Sunshine. Once this was a drag role, now it is represented as a quaint female character which, with a powerful soprano range and lovely stage presence, is delivered by Kiara Wiese.
Chicago, with its book by Fred Ebb ad Bob Fosse, music by John Kander, and Lyrics by Fred Ebb, is not a short show. It only seems so, since it is rich with so many fabulous songs, such wild and sensual choreography, and such a ridiculously scandalous storyline. It enthrals and engrosses when, as here, it is well done.
Perhaps one could argue for some more oomph in the intros to a few solo numbers. Perhaps one could jog the lighting tech to enliven a slowish cue. Or, perhaps one’s attention has been so diverted by the energy and spirited commitment of the classy ensemble that flaws are rendered unobtrusive
All one can say, in the end of the salty-air Victor Harbor day, is that this Chicago production is worth the drive. If only there were tickets left to buy at the end of it.
Maybe it calls for a Fringe revival for the city audience.
Samela Harris
When: 23 Oct to 6 Nov
Where: Victor Harbor Town Hall
Bookings: Sold Out