Fire Gardens

Adelaide Festival. Compagnie Carabosse. Adelaide Botanic Garden. 12 Mar 2020

French artistic collective Compagnie Carabosse has brought their fire-scape installations to Womadelaide several times in the past few years. It’s always a hypnotic delight for design and deliberation, but Fire Gardens is the Womad act on a gigantic scale. The audience enters in four half-hour increments from 8 pm to 9:30, to meter the numbers, but the trouble was, it’s so good, it seemed like nobody wanted to leave. By 9:30, it was uncomfortably crowded and a little annoying. Simple pots of fire line a garden path and invite one to follow the Congo line queue to the far end of the fire exhibit and the exotically lit Palm House (but actually, you can walk wherever you want within the lit area).

Unfortunately, the candles in the white singlets hanging inside were spilling so much wax that entry was prohibited. By this time, the soft yet thick and slightly fragrant smoke was nearly overpowering as you are in the midst of zillions of fire pots. Shadows eerily flicker off the foliage. Once the decision was made to sit out the crowds, the experience enhanced considerably. The latter part of the circuit has the best stuff – multi-pot sculptures of pots of fire mounted on kinetic structures. Coals burn in wire boats suspended above and reflected on the pond. A double bassist dressed like a hobo plays jazz without looking up from within his tiny tent while apparitions of people transit in the distant dark haze. There are many lovely aural and visual surprises that compel exploration, or simple relaxation and contemplation whilst lying on the grass or sitting on a swinging seat. When the crowd subsided, the experience was finally magical and enchanting.  

David Grybowski

When: 12 to 15 Mar

Where: Adelaide Botanic Garden

Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au

The Carole King & James Taylor Story

★★★★

Night Owl Shows. Masonic – Phoenix Room at Gluttony. 3 Mar 2020

Night Owl Shows is a music show production company specialising in nostalgia. They have/had (some seasons have ended) nine shows at the Adelaide Fringe with singers replicating the songs and vocal oomph of Aretha Franklin, Dolly Parton, Amy Winehouse, Tina Turner, Paul Simon, The Carpenters, Nashville, a show called California Legends, and this one. Dan Clews, who leads the company, describes the shows as “show-umentary” which is an awkward conjunction meaning that the presenters reveal interesting biographical information and anecdotes when introducing the songs.

It is none other than Dan Clews who sings James Taylor in The Carole King & James Taylor Story. He does this extremely well, giving up Taylor’s nasal quality and overall sweetness, and fretting the chords like he was born with a guitar in his hand. Taylor was known in the US as “the tear ducts of America” - his melancholy chords give even hopeful songs a sense of reflection touched with regret. Must have been all the drugs Taylor used (he kicked heroin good-bye in 1983). Clews has the emotional quotient to convey all this. Phoebe Katis’ delivery is a bit breathy and formal in contrast to Carole King’s vocal power and casual breeziness, and thus not as effective a channeler of King as Clews is of Taylor. Maybe it was because she had only arrived from Paris the day before and thought she’d be ready for a show.

Taylor and King are two of the greater songwriters of their age. King’s second studio album, Tapestry, sold 25 million copies and was the highest selling album by a female artist for 25 years. Night Owl Shows I’m sure is a commercial success as many of their shows are sold out to the generation that grew up to the soundtracks of their subject matter. Following a biographic chronology, we learn King and Taylor both started their careers in New York. Carol King wrote songs with first husband Gerry Goffin (how about Natural Woman in an afternoon) at the famous Brill Building, and James Taylor’s first album was produced by The Beatles’ Abbey Road label. They relocated independently to LA and were brought together by a producer there. They were never married. But it was Taylor who encouraged King to sing her own songs which got the already famous songwriter’s performance career under way.

Taylor’s and Katis’s renditions of the famous songs – Fire and Rain, Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow, It’s Too Late, You’ve Got A Friend - unpack nostalgia for their target audience, and it’s likely if you had your first job in the 70s, you’ll be emotionally involved. And hopefully the same if the songs are new to you, or you’ve never heard them live, because they are beautifully and sensitively crafted, and in this show, performed; they don’t require emotional baggage to be enjoyed.

PS Taylor’s first Number 1 Hit, You’ve Got A Friend, was written by Carole King, in the same year Tapestry was released - 1971.

David Grybowski

When: 4 to 15 Mar

Where: Masonic – Phoenix Room at Gluttony

Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au

Dead Men Talking

★★★

Adelaide Fringe. The Spiegeltent. 7 Mar 2020

The War of Words between Andrew Barton ‘Banjo’ Patterson and Henry Archibald Hertzberg Lawson is infamous in Australian literary history. In 1892, through the pages of The Bulletin, they engaged in an extremely lively City versus Country poetic debate, and in this show the protagonists look back at the men they were then, and acknowledge a grudging respect for each other’s work.

The two men are catching up a century or so later, at the Leviticus Bar & Grill at Heaven’s Gate. Lawson is late (as per usual, apparently), and immediately the differences between the grammar school educated law clerk and journalist, Paterson and the republican socialist, Lawson were apparent.

Warren Fahey and Max Cullen have been touring Dead Men Talking since 2014 and have these characters down pat, while the characterisations are a little exaggerated, they work in this context. The relatively unscripted nature of the show sometimes leaves a gap, but they move smoothly on, familiar with all the works they need to mention.

Both give potted histories of their lives, and while Paterson refers early to Waltzing Matilda, he doesn’t recite the iconic poem until the end, and even then it’s an unfamiliar mixture of what sounded like English and pidgin, although it’s described as Aboriginal (much like Frying Pan’s Theology).

Lawson makes no bones about his alcoholism and mental health issues, and even if he wanted to downplay this aspect of his life, Paterson makes clear that this needs to be faced as part of his legacy.

The repartee is not as entertaining as one might have expected; two such remarkable wordsmiths should have had a more interesting and stimulating wordplay rather than the ‘dad’ jokes and puns that featured, but perhaps they preferred to let the poems and songs themselves do the talking. Fahey has a fair singing voice and sang/recited some crowd favourites (The Man from Ironbark, A Bushman’s Song), while Cullen’s recital of Faces in the Street was a highlight. Paterson’s response to Lawson In Defence of the Bush seems to have the effect of making Lawson’s original works stronger.

For those who have never read the works of these two remarkable writers, or who just know the very familiar poems, this production will introduce, in a very gentle way, some of the works of two of Australia’s most revered writers.

Arna Eyers-White

When: 7 Mark

Where: The Spiegeltent

Bookings: Closed

Dead Gorgeous - A True Crime Clown Show

★★★1/2

Adelaide Fringe. Madness of Two. Rumpus. 8 Mar 2020

It’s the Fringe and anything goes. Including artful lunacy.

So we have five talented actors, a mass of greasepaint, and a ukulele or two. What to do, they ask the audience as they cling to each other in a display of faux daunted ham. They throw up absurd ideas, and a banana.

And off they go trying out themes based on death and murder and, well, it is quite a busy blur. It is not the clown school of Commedia or Le Coq exactly, albeit costumes do give a nod to Harlequin and Pierrot. And there’s some classic shtick with songs, tumbling, and bumbling, some of it very funny indeed. There are some good lines and, most especially, with thanks to the clown called Wah, AKA James Hornsby, some really wonderful songs. He is quite a talent and, in this show by the new company he co-runs with Ellen Graham, he creates a beautiful, gentle clown character, large and slow, quiet and shy. Graham is his antithesis, hyperactive and athletic. She is a lithe physical-theatre exponent and very funny when needs be. Also noisy. But not as strident as the other two female clowns, Britney AKA Jasmin McWatters and Linda, AKA Zola Allen. Their high-octave girlie screaming and squealing is just too, too much and too often for this critic’s aural endurance. Like Holden Street when presenting the rock opera Ragnarokkr, Rumpus should issue ear plugs at the door. Director, Hew Param, please take note. Screaming is not inherent to clowning or, indeed, to any good theatre. This zany show has potential on too many levels to sink it with squeals.

There is yet Arran Beattie as clown Roger to mention. He can be shrill with the worst of them, but he also can ham it up fearlessly. His voice and comic presence are terrific. Indeed, there is so much that is good-spirited and original and zany in this clownish concoction that it makes a madcap contrast to a lot of the earnestly arty theatre around the Fringe. Then again, this little confection is not beer and skittles. Its slapstick silliness is underscored by some wickedly effective satire. The Under the Rug song is a standout commentary on political evasiveness and Don’t Worry is another song with revue-style substance. Behind the ga-ga-girlie shrills of this production lies a seam of seriously good creative artistry. Let us look out for what else the Madness of Two may do.

Samela Harris

When: 8 to 15 Mar

Where: Rumpus

Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au