SA Playwrights Theatre. Holden Street Theatres. 4 Apr 2019
It was not the chance of tonsorial genetics but a Bordertown hairdresser who was responsible for the lush glamour of former Prime Minister Bob Hawke’s hair. This is the delicious conceit of Matt Hawkins’ new play, Bordertown.
Hawke was born in Bordertown, son of a Congregational minister. He left town as a lad and visited rarely, but nonetheless he was and is the town's most famous son. It was on one of those visits purports this play, that he popped in on Patricia's hairdressing salon giving her the chance to claim her own slice of fame as the creator of the Silver Budgie’s fabulous hair-do.
With Hawke’s photo on the salon wall and magazines full of celebrity gossip on racks, star-struck Patricia obsesses that her attractive daughter should be not be trapped in small town anonymity but should dance with the stars in Hollywood. So, against her will Felicity is packed off with a stash of antidepressants to stay with an “auntie” who has contacts with the studio makeup people. Sure enough, to her mother’s satisfaction, Flick soon flirts her way into the heart of a drug-taking B-grade comic actor and into the gossip columns of New Idea. Then, suddenly, she is dead and the actor is shunning his agent’s wise advice and sneaks off to Bordertown to attend her funeral. The playwright, who appears in the play as the agent, was inspired to this crazy plot line by the true story of Hollywood’s Jim Carrey making a similar small-town pilgrimage.
But, what happens next in sleepy little Bordertown is an absolutely wild ride. Suspend the disbelief. Come on down Stephen King.
Matt Hawkins is carving a fine reputation in this hardest of writing crafts. His Frank Forbes and the Yahoo Boy was quite a hit last year in the Bakehouse. This play is a weird caper with some memorable characters, some good streaks of humour and a nice sharp barb pierced into the world’s tedious obsession with celebrity.
Its striking Maurice Hamm set with its ubiquitous checkerboard lino floor and long glamour curtains is compatible with the play’s assorted scene changes. Playwright Hawkins directs the work with the smarts that one would hope of one who knows it from conception. He also does a passable job of the slimy English talent agent. But, pivotal to the integrity of the production is the performance of Kate O’Reilly as the hard-bitten Patricia. This performance is cleverly delivered as if to a client via the mirror. She is sour, sharp, assertive, deluded. It is a recognisable and arresting characterisation. Kim Fox is simpatico as dominated daughter Flick and there is a lovely scene of her pushing her luck with lover boy in the shadows of the Hollywood sign. Chris Asimos plays the movie star, Emilio Sanchez, and he is equipped with all the charm and chutzpah to make it entirely believable. It is a gorgeous star-quality performance. Lastly, the hometown man, the handy plot-link gopher, is Dennis the taxi driver and Brendan Cooney reliably delivers the goods, however confusing they might be.
Bordertown may not quite be "the great Australian play” but it is as relevant as it is zany. Well-honed in production, it is what they say in the classics: a very nice night’s entertainment.
Samela Harris
When: 4 to 13 Apr
Where: Holden Street Theatres
Bookings: holdenstreettheatres.com
Pelican Productions. Arts Theatre. 22 Mar 2019
Here they come again, a cast of thousands of young children being reared in the art of stagecraft by the sterling Pelican Productions team.
Jen Frith, Kylie Green and Bec Schembri have been running annual school-holiday theatre camps for 15 years, recently adding an extra one to cope with demand. Young South Australians are very keen on theatre and performance skills and, as is evidenced in every showcase Pelican production, they get them in spades. It’s a rich incubation space for the future arts industry.
This version of Disney’s The Little Mermaid comes very efficiently packaged indeed, minus interval.
It is set to a recorded score with a team of cast and backstage crew getting huge sets on and off flawlessly and romping along at a lightning pace.
The costumes are stunning. Never have there been more elaborate fishtails; massive glitzy entities which rise high in the air when the mermaids dance or bow and can give quite a shimmer as a swimming motion. The girls wear black tights so their legs, technically, are sort of invisible. Ariel, the mermaid heroine, must dart and dash about with this long tail protruding behind her, until, of course, she trades in her voice to lose her mermaid tail and become mortal in a deal with Ursula, the evil octopus queen of the deep.
Ursula is another piece of spectacular costuming. Her actress, Emma Pool, is elevated high in her cephalopod-inspired ball gown with writhing air-filled tentacles being juggled all around her by little aquatic servants, Mega tentacles on painted flats adorn the stage to complete the overarching sense of the sinister octopusian world. Pool gets to sing, most competently, some of the more demanding songs of the colourful Alan Menken score. It’s an evergreen Disney musical with much loved tunes, Under The Sea being the absolute favourite. In this production, it is performed within an absolutely delicious characterisation of Sebastian the crab by one Ariel Higgs.
Alternate casts for Pelican Production performances mean that one cannot see all the talent at once. Alex Hasler as the Prince is the only principal in all Little Mermaid performances. Ariel, the sweet-singing star of the show, is alternated between Zara Blight and Jelena Nicdao. In this performance, among the outstanding young talent is Neve Sargeant as Scuttle the seagull and Liam Holland as little King Triton.
The ensemble work is superb. Aged from 8 to 19, of all shapes and sizes, the ensemble of seagulls and dancers displays absolute discipline, each individual seeming to shine with joy, notably among them Jasper Darwent, Sierra Vannini and Aisha Skinner.
If there is one flaw to this short and sweet production, it is the sound. Pelican has very high production values and has always been very professional in its technical aspects but in this show it seems a bit too heavy on the amps. Even 8-year-olds in the audience were protesting the volume. Sound at shows is becoming quite an issue these days with so many mature performers complaining of accumulated hearing damage through their stage lives, so it is all the more vital that young talent be protected as prudently as possible.
Samela Harris
When: 22 to 24 Mar
Where: Arts Theatre
Bookings: trybooking.com
Adelaide Fringe. Burnside Community Centre. 16 Mar 2019
Graeme Denton, aka Marty McBubble, has serious bubble-making pedigree. Since 2017, he has been the proud holder of the Guinness World Record for the largest free floating soap bubble (indoors).
In The Scientific Bubble Show, he demonstrates his impressive skills with an array of large, beautiful, and gravity-defying examples. In setting up each of his "experiments", Denton takes every opportunity to share his encyclopaedic scientific knowledge in a fun and engaging way. In return, his audience of mini scientists are wide eyed and eager to test each hypothesis.
This show is a wonderful hour of educational entertainment. McBubble has great rapport with pre- and primary school age children, and keeps the show humming along at a good pace. The kids are excited, calling out answers and scrambling to be a part of the onstage experiments.
The hour is gone in a flash, and everyone is smarter for attending. Highly recommended.
Nicole Russo
When: Closed
Where: Burnside Community Centre
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Fringe. Ambient Orchestra. Elder Hall. 15 Mar 2019
For some, the lack of formal structure in so-called ‘ambient music’ imbues it with a certain ennui and faux-intellectualism. For others, the emphasis on tone and impression in ambient music is mind altering, meditative and as important as any other music genre.
Well-respected American composer/conductor/academic Evan Ziporyn teams nine state-side musicians with students from the Elder Conservatorium of Music (and at least one member of the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra) to create a standard orchestral ensemble to perform music by Satie, Laraaji, Robert Fripp and Brian Eno, as well as his own composition Frog’s Eye.
The concert begins with a reimagining of Erik Satie’s ever-popular three Gymnopédies composed in the late 1800s. It is difficult to conceive of someone not having heard them. They can be heard as background music in diverse places like elevators and department stores, and in films such as Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums. Indeed, for some the Gymnopédies are regarded as a significant forerunner to contemporary ambient music.
Ziporyn experimented with both the phrasing and meter of the Gymnopédies. He broke chords apart and, with inventive pairing of instruments, he then arpeggiated them creating an interesting variant on the original.
The remainder of the first half of the concert is given over to Laraaji’s Dance No.1 which heralds back to the 1980s when Laraaji was ‘discovered’ by Brian Eno. Ziporyn clearly knows this music well, and with minimal conducting (that one could see; the real work being done before the concert even begins) he coaxes uncommon sounds from the ensemble that are light, meandering and fleeting at times, and hypnotic and resonant at others.
Ziporyn’s Frog’s Eye is lyrical and frequently melody driven, but every melody is fragmentary and soon gives way to another before it really establishes itself, and there appear to be no obvious relationships between the fragments. This is part of the composition’s appeal, but one has to very quickly get over any innate desire to ‘understand’ the music from a conventional theoretical approach. The tone bending on brass instruments is especially interesting.
An interesting reconstruction by Ziporyn’s of Fripp & Brian Eno’s Evening Star brings the generously long two hour concert to a close. Those for whom ambient music is not a new thing left Elder Hall deeply satisfied, and rested for the experience.
Kym Clayton
When: 15 Mar
Where: Elder Hall
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Fringe. Mark Drama SA. St Barnabas Croydon – Main Auditorium. 16 March 2019
The Mark Drama is a dramatic presentation of the Gospel of Mark. Every incident in the whole of Mark’s Gospel is performed in theatre-in-the-round in 90 minutes and the audience will hear nearly all the words of Jesus as quoted in Mark. Englishman Andrew Page conceived of the idea some years ago and The Mark Drama is produced all over the world in many languages. No props, lights, costumes, or even actors are required – all you need is to throw fifteen Christians to the theatrical lions. Page thoughtfully provides a guidebook called The Mark Experiment through which the participants learn each of the six key parts of Mark’s Gospel in just ten minutes. The technique of learning and staging the play is copyrighted. For the St Barnabas production, the players had six weeks to memorise their speeches, but as per usual for The Mark Drama system, they only started working together on their interactive movements - under the direction of Reverend Ben Woodd and Henry Davis –shortly before the performance. Rehearsals for Saturday night started on Thursday and finished on Saturday morning, just in time for opening the two-night season later that evening.
The interior of the cavernous St Barnabas Anglican Church is bare, like somebody took all the fixtures and stripped the walls. Seats are arranged in a circle around a tiny acting area the size of a bathroom. The house was packed on opening night. The Gospel comes to life with the exuberance and enthusiasm of the mostly young adult players. They convey the excitement of witnessing miracles and the joy of gratitude from those restored - Jesus gets a big hug every time. Wry humour resides in gossipy asides and ironic flourishes. Amusing is the laziness of the disciples and their initial failures in belief, such as the storm and the walking-on-water incidents during the several crossings of the Galilee - wonderfully portrayed with some imaginary sculling. Yet the disciples do grow in faith and respect, and attempt to protect and advise him, as the end draws near. With a cast of fifteen whooping it up, the audience gets a palpable sense of the awe and agitation created by the presence of Jesus. It’s sometimes electric as the closely packed audience provides additional crowd.
David Lang’s demonstration of Jesus’s distress and anguish in the Garden of Gethsemane, and during the torture and crucifixion, were a startling contrast to his busy and capable Jesus of earlier chapters. Though he had little chance in his role as the Son of God to demonstrate his prowess as a PhD in musical composition. The theatre arena is used very effectively when the players perambulate down the three aisles and along the rows to demonstrate a Jesus constantly on the move throughout Palestine. The production is swift-paced, fun, spontaneous and educational. An unpolished gem.
Whether you are a reader of the Gospels or not, or a believer or not, this is entertaining, grass roots theatre where the didactic discourse is delivered with zesty passion.
David Grybowski
4 Stars
When: 16 to 17 March
Where: St Barnabas Croydon – Main Auditorium
Bookings: Closed