Cabaret Festival. State Theatre Company. Royalty Theatre. 4 Jun 2019
The premise of Peter Quilty’s celebrated quasi-bio play about Judy Garland is that there was just no stopping the superstar’s lifelong dependence on uppers and downers, despite her own better judgement and despite the efforts of her fifth and last husband Mickey Deans.
The play rings with the truth of tragedy and it sings with the pain and passion of a showbiz train wreck; bringing to life the tortuous tales of arguably the world’s most adored torch singer.
Elena Carapetis and the stupendous State Theatre production team have taken over the tired old Royalty Theatre stage with a glamorous alignment of framing lights and a stage curtain beyond the stage curtain. The lush red drapes over the old boxes add further glamour to the veteran venue.
The play is set in a luxury London hotel suite equipped with grand piano for rehearsals. While the golden drapes represent the hotel window out of which bankrupt Garland threatens to throw herself when the manager harasses her about paying the bill, they also draw back to reveal the five-piece band led by Carol Young. It is a fabulous club band, exuberant in wind and percussion and yet, able at the right moments, to melt into utter, sweet melancholy.
The curtains form a backdrop for Garland's public performances while, in rehearsal scenes, the curtains are drawn and it is actor Stephen Sheehan at the grand piano who accompanies the singing. Sheehan is in the role of her English pianist, Anthony Chapman. He’s one of her lifelong string of adoring gay accompanists, assistants, supporters, and friends. Sheehan plays the character with elegant effeminacy. His poise is supreme both in the role and at the piano. It is a sublimely nuanced and beautiful performance.
He vies for Garland’s loyalty against Mickey Dean, the nightclub manager and fiancée who is desperately trying to keep the wheels on amidst the dramatic emotional and pharmaceutical excesses and financial calamities in the last months of the singer’s life. Nic English’s handsome face seems to age right before the audience’s eyes in this role as he surmounts the carer’s psychological hurdles and hits the bottle in Mickey’s own battle of love, exasperation, and desperation.
Garland is a ravaged powerhouse, a lifelong junkie spinning through the stop-start pattern of addiction, negotiating with Mickey, and veering between washed out and wonderful. On this difficult voyage, Helen Dallimore delivers her with absolute skill and commitment. It is a rip-roaringly intense performance, exhausting to behold. And it hits the mark. Dallimore not only achieves the lilts and idiosyncrasies of the Garland accent but also the timbre of her voice. And out come all the great songs, big and loud. Thus is the renowned Peter Quilter play both a tragedy and a concert - with Elena Carapetis’s exquisitely costumed production bringing down the rafters as the audience stamps and cheers its approbation.
An entirely superfluous encore defused the perfect poignancy of the play’s ending for some purist members of the audience. Others were in such Judy euphoria that more would never have been enough.
Samela Harris
When: 31 May to 22 Jun
Where: The Royalty Theatre
Bookings: bass.net.au
DreamBIG Festival. Arena Theatre Company. Dunstan Playhouse. 30 May 2019
If being an autistic child is challenging, then so, too, is being the parents of a child on the spectrum. They not only feel the pain of their child’s battle against the odds of being different but they are burdened with the loving task of trying to find explanations and solutions for their child.
And so it goes in Robot Song.
In its DreamBig promotional material, this interesting hour-long musical creation purports to be the story of Juniper, the 11-year-old school girl who has received a spiteful hate letter from other school children telling her that she is a robot and should never have been born. While the production is delivered as Juniper’s show about her own true story, it is really, and extremely touchingly, the tale of a darling, doting dad tip-toeing his way through the emotional maelstrom of autism to find peace and confidence for his daughter. He is ever there behind her, backing off when she resists, nourishing her self-esteem and enabling her projects.
Juniper’s parents both are artists, so she comes from a free-thinking, non-conformist environment in which it is not at all peculiar to have a giant rubbish skip as a magical best friend in the back yard.
With an appealing cartoon face on its front, the big bin furnishes the stage very colourfully. When the show opens, it is mum on the keyboards and dad with a laptop and a table of paraphernalia flanking Juniper who is centre stage with a standing mike. She makes one of the great entrances as a robot blazing with lights; desk lamps and torches rigged all over her. It’s part of the dad-ingenuity world. She introduces her show in a dither of uncertainty and then, gaining confidence, lets the audience know that she is an imaginative character who loves dissecting words: there is an “us” embedded in the word music; and “eat” is in “breathe”. She tells us that she writes songs, loves robots, and knows stuff.
Performer Ashlea Pyke has a wonderful Broadway voice which gives substance to the professionalism of this beautiful theatre piece which has come from Bendigo.
It is based on the life experience of its writer and director, Jolyon James.
It is musically very strong, with its fabulous score delivered live on stage by pianist Jo Abbott in the character of Mum while Phil McInnes darts, dives, and dashes around as the devoted Dad. McInnes has a lovely stage presence and he moves with a dancer’s grace and precision.
The hour-long story evolves through added interactions with cartoon characters on a big screen, a touch of audience involvement, letters fluttering like birds, much interpretation of robots and schoolyard bullying, and a great, big spectacular denouement.
The ostracisation of the outsider is turned around with the assertion that no two people are the same, being different is not only okay, believe it or not, but it is the way of the world and is nothing less than “awesome”.
Diversity rocks. And so does parent love.
Samela Harris
When: 30 May to 1 Jun
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: dreambigfestival.com.au
DreamBIG Children’s Festival. John Bishop Room. 25 May 2019
Mary-Frances Doherty is a Belfast performer who has come here to show 12-year-olds that their joys and sorrows are pretty much the same all over the world.
She plays Katie in her nice sparkly birthday frock, hosting a party a bit half-heartedly because her best friend has gone to another school and another party and, well, she is bereft. So thanks, audience, for coming to this party for which she has piled a table with marshmallows and party poppers and blow-up toys. And thus is the performance an offbeat interactive party with audience children being asked to play Truth or Dare and do little turns or admit things. Some questions hit the right targets. One child was thrilled to expound on her sporting success. Another admitted her friends thought her too loud and “I don’t have an indoors voice”. For one very shy child, being asked to sing a song in front of all those strangers was deer-in-the-headlights hell. Talking of which, Katie has to answer the “truth” question of her most embarrassing moment which, she admits, was not getting to the loo in time. The children won’t be forgetting that little scene for a while. Pleasingly, when Katie has made a real mess of the room and starts resignedly to clean it up, little girls rise unbidden and swarm out to help her. It is a nice reflection on the nature and upbringing of our children. Despite the fact that, at the end of the 50-minute show, everyone is invited to share in the chocolate birthday cake, the children afterwards reflect that they didn’t really expect Katie and her party would be so sad. Fear of missing out and fear of being rejected by friends is common to them all.
Samela Harris
When: 22 to 26 May
Where: John Bishop Room, Adelaide Festival Centre
Bookings: dreambigfestival.com.au
DreamBIG Children’s Festival. The Last Great Hunt. Space Theatre. 25 May 2019
From the Perth-based creators of The Adventures of Alvin Sputnik: Deep Sea Explorer comes this absolute jewel of children’s theatre.
New Owner is part puppetry, part animation, part live action. Black clad puppeteers merge into black backgrounds as two little dogs have adventures in dangerous city night streets and scary scrap yards. Humans appear in scenes as life-sized characters who adopt and save or threaten the dogs. Street and skyscraper graphics fill the screen, and even a dramatic storm breaks out as the saga of little Bart, the yappy white puppy, evolves. He finds his way from the animal shelter to be companion to a lonely widow to canine love and then, move over Walt Disney, it becomes a vivid all-action against-the-odds doggy saga.
The production plays artfully with the audience’s emotions, taking them from laughter to fear to tears of joy.
As for the puppetry! It is consummate and the voicing of little Bart’s voracious enthusiasm for his food is worthy of a Tony, just on its own.
Bravo, Perth. A stunning little show.
Samela Harris
When: 22 to 26 May
Where: Odeon Theatre
Bookings: dreambigfestival.com.au
DreamBIG Children’s Festival. Odeon Theatre. 25 May 2019
Very rightly, Tutti revives this production for the Dream Big Festival. It has been a hit in its previous presentations and it is a hit again now. It is a very well-wrought and important show which brings the autism spectrum into clear and sharp relief.
Written by Emily Steel and performed by Company AT (Autistic Theatre) under the umbrella of Tutti, it tells of how a nine-year-old girl copes in an unsympathetic world of “normal” kids. They surround her with schoolyard labels and taunts, the school bully ever-ready to stick a knife in the vulnerable spots. The girl, who remains “Nameless”, has her own mass of knowledge that provides an amorphous defence. She’s passionate and encyclopaedic about astronomy. Her memory is phenomenal. Yet she wants to eat only chips and she has meltdowns in strange environments. She invents a feel-good friendship with an invisible Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton. Her parents know that she is different but, like the parents of so many autistic children, are riven between trying to see her as “normal” and accepting that she belongs on the “spectrum”.
Using shadowing actors to express the private thoughts of the parents, Steel has articulated this behind-the-scenes dilemma beautifully, embracing absolutely everyone. In the end of the day, most of us feel a bit “spectrumish” in a neuro-typical world. It’s a spectrum, after all, and the play’s talented cast, expertly directed by Julian Jaensch, all come from somewhere on that spectrum, delivering a snappy, clever, perspicacious piece of theatre which taps into the hearts and minds of young and old. And it is also entertaining and at times, funny. Long and far may it tour.
Samela Harris
When: 23 to 25 May
Where: Odeon Theatre
Bookings: Closed