State Opera Of South Australia. Festival Theatre. 13 Nov 2019
At their very essence, the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan were about mercilessly parodying the society for which they were written, and their ongoing success very much depends on the libretto being updated so that a contemporary audience can relate to it. The text of the current production of The Mikado by the State Opera of South Australia, which had its first outing in 2011 in Queensland, does just that, and the diverse audience that included nine year olds to nonagenarians, was in stitches of laughter throughout.
But the humour didn’t just lie in the updated and oh-so-witty text that was riddled with cutting references to the foibles of modern society, it was also due to the costuming, the stagecraft of many of the cast, the clever setting, and the razor sharp diction of the singers that expertly navigated the unforgiving technical hurdles of a score that’s riddled with tricky rhythms and tempos.
Under the tight direction of conductor Simon Kenway, a pared down Adelaide Symphony Orchestra - comprising less than twenty musicians - provided a perfect toe-tapping accompaniment. Kenway generally took a moderate pace, which the soloists found comfortable, but occasionally eased the reins such as in the ever popular Three Little Maids From School Are We. Artistic Director Stuart Maunder might have occasionally insisted on a brighter pace, complemented by more animated choreography from Siohbhan Ginty, because the production lagged a little at times, as if it were trying to become grand opera - in which it is mostly about the quality of the singing - when it is not.
Such reservations are minor when one considers the quality of the principals and the chorus. The singing was of a very high quality, with standouts across the board. Pelham Andrews was excellent as the Mikado and his brief forays into ‘high camp’ were greeted with delight from the audience. His booming but warm baritone voice suited the role, and his costuming added to his imperious stature. More exaggeration in other characters would have been welcome. Elizabeth Campbell played Katisha with controlled absurdity and used her Dame Edna-esque spectacles to great effect. Amelia Berry was the perfect Yum-Yum. Her gorgeous soprano voice cut sweetly through the syrupy text and her coquettishness had the heart of every young man in the audience ‘all a flutter’. Dominic Walsh sang and acted a perfect Nanki Poo.
The crowning glory of the cast was Byron Coll in the pivotal role of Ko-Ko. Above everything else he is a consummate actor with honed comic timing, expressive gesture, and the ability to switch on athletic and sometimes improvised physical humour at will. He also sings very well.
The production is very well designed by Simone Roamaniuk, with an inventive and flexible set expertly moved around the stage by the cast to create different acting spaces. Dramatic and colourful fly-ins add to the spectacle. Donn Byrnes’ lighting design is inspired, and uses a rich palette of colours that invokes cherry blossom and the sometimes garish spectacle of contemporary pop culture of Japan. (Think ‘Hello Kitty’.)
The State Opera have a rollicking success on their hands in The Mikado. It plays at the Festival Theatre until Saturday 23 November.
Kym Clayton
When: 13 to 23 Nov
Where: Festival Theatre
Bookings: bass.net.au
Matt Byrne Media. Holden Street Theatres. 9 Nov 2019
Writer Dan Goggin sounds like a fun guy but he has only one thing on his mind – nuns! What started out as his greeting card quips by cartoon nuns has turned into a nunsense factory initiated by his first off-Broadway musical in 1985 which had nearly 3700 productions and was translated into 21 languages. He milked the concept with sequels themed on country & western nuns, Yiddish nuns, Christmas nuns, etc. - six new musicals! – and then in 1998 this lucky seventh - Nunsense A-men! - a transvestite version that is so effectively ridiculous, it’s hard to imagine how its antecedents with female cast could possibly be as funny. Writing about nuns must be habit-forming.
The convent-cloistered nuns are putting on a fund-raising show – reasons revealed by a charming prologue video skit of a poisonous lunch – and no form of entertainment is safe from these batty sisters as they hoof, joke, jostle, and reveal their vulnerabilities.
The male cast sometimes play men dressed like nuns, sometimes nuns, sometimes men playing women, sometimes women – did I miss anything? David Gauci is a formidable addition to any sisterhood and director Matthew Byrne gave him the pivotal role of the Mother Superior. Gauci has an awarded career in professional cabaret, and in producing hits with his theatre company Davine Productions. Gauci’s penetrating deep voice is always a pleasure, even when spouting nunsense. A special bonus was his physical comedy in a sketch where Mother Superior accidentally sniffs up some amyl nitrate – his hyenic laughter was literally infectious amongst the audience. Jayke Melling played a novice nun with a fetching naivety and an insouciant smile that, well, made you smile. His ballet was a surprise but wouldn’t get him into the Bolshoi. Ron Abelita’s nun was slightly crazy and a real treat. His Sister Mary Amnesia’s ventriloquist act was also unexpected – a much forgotten art. Chris Stansfield’s Brooklyn accent and undisguised masculinity gave me the impression he escaped from South Pacific to don the habit. A warm performance and another powerful voice. Producer and director Matthew Byrne also plays convent nun second-in-command. He generously mostly inhabits an elderly nun dealing with the others’s tomfoolery. Byrne commanded the closing number and is the true mother hen as character, and likely also as director and producer. Knowing Byrne, he probably inserted a few “enhancements” to Goggin’s book.
Loose chorus work must have had choreographer Rose Vallen wonder why her simple steps were only regarded as mere suggestions by the irreverent and independent cast members.
Musical director Ben Saunders had his hands firmly on his organ and kept the others musically timed.
Nunsense A-men! is a vacuous night out of frivolity and vaudeville and not to be taken at all seriously – a perfect evening cap to a long hard day.
David Grybowski
When: 7 to 30 Nov
Where: Holden Street Theatres
Bookings: holdenstreettheatres.com.au
Hills Musical Company. Stirling Community Theatre. 8 Nov 2019
With music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim - West Side Story, A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum, Gypsy, Sweeney Todd - Assassins (1990, much later than any on the list) isn’t in the same league. It’s based on an idea by Charles Gilbert, Jr. and that’s an interesting story. Sondheim was a panelist at a script lab and liked Gilbert’s offering so much that he asked if he could borrow the idea. “Great,” said Gilbert, “I’d love to write the book.” “No,” said Sondheim, “I have somebody else in mind, so thanks. Leave it to the big boys,” or something like that.
The wings to the stage of the Stirling Community Theatre are wonderfully decorated with a newspaper collage of the bad news of the day – the assassination or assassination attempt of an American president. Large black and white portraits of the relevant presidents are quite nostalgic to see and are rendered over in a blood red spreading spot when their time comes in the narrative (Cameron Hapgood – set design and Matt Ralph – lighting design). There is a professionally fetching programme design as well.
The band, under conductor Andrew Groch, starts off a little shaky and promises a disappointing musical evening, but they improve. In the opening number, the assassins and failed assassins from Lincoln’s to Reagan’s, mill about aimlessly as if at a carnival. One by one they are invited by a carny - who appeals to their aimless nature - to buy a pistol in the motif of a duck-shooting game and make something of their lives. Megan Donald as the game handler murders her uncredited choreography, probably the directors’, Monique Hapgood and Macintyre Howie Reeves.
The granddaddy of American assassinations is Lincoln’s, so worthwhile time is spent on it, and indeed, it’s a highlight of the production. David MacGillivray delivers a fully developed characterisation of John Wilkes Booth and his obsession with his place in history as someone setting a great wrong right is beautifully dramatised in the moments before his capture. Casmira Hambledon and Bronwen James are charismatic and all too plausible as the failed assassins of President Gerald Ford, who, quite independently made their shooting attempts only seventeen days apart. That would keep the Secret Service busy. Their fictitious scenes together as common spirits needs a bit of subtlety but did provide provocations of humour. The other assassins, and wanna-bes, are more inscrutable, simply because they fit the bill of the loner sociopath and they are harder to come to grips with. Robin Schmelzkopf’s Charles Guiteau - the assassin of President Garfield – is avuncular but unfathomable and the other performers also haven’t much to work with. Yet weighing in at two hours and fifteen minutes without interval, it is enough. James Nicholson’s costumes were extremely good in defining the styles of the days of the deeds.
John Weidman’s book has the assassins and failed assassins mingle and merge as phantoms. Some dialogues between them, and monologues, is too long and tedious. The last assassination that stopped the nation was Kennedy’s and here Weidman goes off into la-la land with a scene on the sixth floor of the book depository building with the diachronous group encouraging a reluctant Lee Harvey Oswald to get on with it and join their infamy, as if his dilemma was whether to shoot himself or at Kennedy. This is very fanciful as the evidence shows that Oswald was a committed activist and highly motivated. And anyways, Oswald did not fire the killing shot. Victoria’s ex-detective Colin McLaren - in his 2013 book, The Smoking Gun – re-demonstrated Howard Donahue’s theory of decades ago that a Secret Service agent in the follow-car accidently killed Kennedy, creating that horrific head-exploding wound with the Service’s AR-15. The cynicism and black humour dominating Assassins melts away with some sombre reflections on the tragedy of Kennedy’s violent passing.
Assassinsis a strange brew of verbiage and vaudeville, and only once finds real passion in John Wilkes Booth’s final moments. While Weidman’s book is a difficult target, this production has trouble finding it.
David Grybowski
When: 8 to 23 Nov
Where: Stirling Community Theatre
Bookings: hillsmusical.org.au
Photo Credit: Mark Anolak
Marie Clark Musical Theatre. The Goodwood Institute. 26 Oct 2019
One does not share director Lauren Scarfe’s (director), Katie Packer’s (musical director) or Vanessa Redmond’s (choreographer) enthusiasm for Mary Rodgers’s Once Upon A Mattress. And yes, Mary is the daughter of Richard Rodgers, who partnered with Oscar Hammerstein II to create the wonders known as Oklahoma!, South Pacific, The King and I, and The Sound of Music. Alas, Mary Rodgers’s adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale, The Princess And The Pea, is not up to those standards - it was her first full-length musical composed at the age of 28.
Rodgers, lyricist Marshall Barer and the book team of Jay Thompson, Dean Fuller and the same Barer failed to bridge the original fairy tale to adult entertainment – it remains a pantomime in the musical form with its overly simple plot, few thought-provoking embellishments, and little sophistication. Spamalot it ain’t. Or even Camelot. Director Lauren Scarfe writes “it really holds up in the age of feminism,” due, presumably, to the strong lead comic role of the princess-to-be. Funny business aside, it’s a rather simple, straightforward story of a dysfunctional royal family with an overprotective mother thwarting her son, the prince, from marrying to keep him in her clutches of co-dependence. Her method is to have potential princesses undergo humiliating tests that can’t be passed. It ain’t Annie Get Your Gun either and not one’s idea of feminism.
The creative leadership team tries to make the most of the material but frankly there isn’t much to work with and the production never really takes off. However, 21-year-old Emily-Jo Davidson does shine brightly in the aforementioned lead comic role. Her scene of repeatedly lifting heavy weights between belts of booze was a hoot. Indeed, this role was created by Carol Burnett in her Broadway debut, and Emily-Jo’s performance reminds one of America’s greatest comic actresses, Lucille Ball. Still developing, Davidson needs to broaden her comic schtick. There were many fine voices in the cast (eg Brooke Washusen and Davidson) and Katie Packer’s orchestra was on song. Most performers failed to escape orbiting their stereotypical characters. Often the follow spot and its target were not co-spatial leaving visual focus elsewhere.
If only I had a pea under my seat to keep me from the threshold of Noddy Land.
David Grybowski
When: 26 Oct to 2 Nov
Where: The Goodwood Institute
Bookings: marieclark.asn.au
Tracey Crisp. Bakehouse Theatre. 25 Oct 2019
“The paradox of the universal being entirely personal”, writes director Maggie Wood in the program notes for Tracey Crisp’s The Forgettory; succinctly, those words sum up this charmer of a one-hander.
Tracey Crisp’s sobriquet is "the vegetarian librarian”. She is a performer known for her stories of gentle self-deprecation. She’s whimsical, witty, perceptive, and erudite and she has a glorious way with words.
This little show finds its audience among older women for whom love and grief and loss of memory are heartland issues.
The little Studio Theatre at the Bakehouse is transformed into a snug librarian’s nest for the show. There is an oversized bookcase with oversized books, a cosy carpet, a comfy chair, a cardboard box, and some very sympathetic and well-wrought lighting.
Crisp introduces her contemporary world, a 44th floor apartment in scorching, impersonal Abu Dhabi where she has to have her husband’s sanction to get a permit to have wine, the wine which gives her sanity and time to reflect in this insomniac other life so far from where her most poignant memories have been made.
She takes the audience on a gentle tour of family and memories, most movingly in the last section when she sits and knits in the chair, talking at the bedside of her failing father. And she brings old sharp memory to meet new fragmented memory; an impasse; a ubiquitous generational tragedy.
Director Maggie Wood has generated an astute sense of place and time in this production, simply by having Crisp stand or sit or move one step here and one step there. It’s artful, subtle, and effective.
And the audience sits silently rapt in someone else’s stories which, in so many ways, are also their own. Birth, sleeplessness, grief, dementia. And, as Crisp delivers her beautifully-crafted tales, speaking clearly, calmly and without casual abbreviation, they may be shedding an empathetic tear or two.
Samela Harris
When: 23 to 26 Oct
Where: Bakehouse Theatre
Bookings: bakehousetheatre.com