House of Sand in association with State Theatre Company of SA. Old Queen’s Theatre. 21 Sep 2018
From time to time the term “tour de force” leaps forth in the theatre.
And, here it comes again to describe Terrence Crawford’s performance in the revival of Stephen Sewell’s 1980s play, Welcome the Bright World.
For all the fine work surrounding this production, it is Crawford’s triumph in a role he is re-inhabiting after a NIDA student production some 35 years ago.
Welcome the Bright World is a fierce foray into science and politics set in an era when computers were still clunky and office-based, and print-outs emerged as great sheafs of perforated sheets. Here we have two physicists desperately chalking out mathematical equations in the quest for the truth quark, now known as the “bottom" quark. The play is set in Germany between Wiesbaden and Berlin. The senior professor is a German Jew. The academic for whom he comes to work is a former Nazi. Around these principal protagonists are family and authority. The family descends into despair as the daughter’s beliefs swing towards anarchy and the physicists have trouble keeping their fidelities in line.
The play’s content sprawls through science, politics, religion, philosophy, culture and history, a great sweeping swathe of Sewell as we so well recall him from the 80s heyday. And, we may reflect, many things remain much the same in the ethical carnage we have come to know as politics.
It is a good thing that director Charles Sanders and his House of Sand company are magnets for bright young audiences since such samples of serious Australian theatre are wholesome grist for the cultural-future mill.
And being young probably helps audience members when it comes to sitting in the Old Queens. For all the loving attention to its restoration and use as a vibrant venue, it remains cold and physically hard going. House of Sand has supplied knee rugs which help, but beware of the nice little wedding chairs moving backwards and their rear legs slipping into the tier gaps. There were a few distracting moments for audience members discovering an awkward sinking feeling on opening night.
But, the play’s the thing and Sanders has embraced the great white cavern of Queens with a brilliant spectacle of production effects. Black and white projections bring heavy rain to great high windows accompanied by a clever omnipresence of rainy sound. It feels soothing, moody and strangely prescient. Indeed, Mario Spate’s overall soundscape for this production is nothing less than stellar. Owen McCarthy’s lighting plot, similarly, is vivid and thrilling, albeit occasionally erratic on opening night.
With the backing of State Theatre’s set and costume expertise, the production sings finesse born both of practicality and ingenious use of venue. Family living area, office and student apartments are represented on two dais stages which flank the centre opening of the Old Queen’s performance space, the back wall of which has been pleasantly transformed into a garden patio setting. The gaping high window is illuminated to frame actors for dramatic moments, particularly in the opening and closing scenes. Large clear perspex screens, cleverly edged by lights, are rolled onto the stage for the mathematical calculations of the two scientists. They work brilliantly, the actors’ faces clear and close as they dash out their symbols on the faux blackboard surface. Calculations are reiterated by projector on the back wall from time to time. The performance area is always busy with visual enhancements of the action. It even works as an art gallery as one of the characters’ has an exhibition. She is Anat Lewin, a photo artist, much conflicted and wife of the principal scientist Max, and she is portrayed with admirable emotional balance by Jo Stone. Her best friend is beautiful Fay of the stiletto heels and compassionate presence, aptly embodied by Anna Cheney. Their relationship is strained by the dubious mores of their spouses and the hormonal attachments of the Lewin daughter, Rebekah. In her first professional role, Georgia Stanley gives powerful presence to the character of Rebekah and also that of Max Lewin’s young mistress. Roman Vaculik depicts the younger scientist, Sebastian, with a certain degree of European panache, fleshing him out into states of desperate ambivalence when required. It is a strong characterisation and it is a strong cast. Patrick Frost delivers the ominous ex-Nazi bureaucrat, Dr Mencken, with a core of ice, contrasting this role dramatically in the cameo role of the dying dad with dementia. Last in the lineup, Max Garcia-Underwood is sleek and slick as the sinister factotum Herr Heintz.
Sewell writes epic plays with meaty roles for actors and in this case, the part of Max Lewin is nothing less than an entire herd of Charolais for Terrence Crawford. He soars from gentle soul to shattered madman. And, even if it’s not one’s favourite play, it brings towering performances in a very snazzy, professional production from the talented Charles Sanders and his House of Sand team.
We can only look forward to what they bring us next.
Samela Harris
When: 21 Sep to 6 Oct
Where: Queens Theatre
Bookings: bass.net.au
Flying Penguin Productions. Goodwood Theatre. 6 September 2018
Flying Penguin is airborne again with this shining night of two one-hour, one-act, one-actor plays under the title Solo – it’s a format of theatre that we are used to seeing during the Fringe that doesn't get much of a look-in the rest of the year.
Bitch Boxer
Bitch Boxer was big box office during the 2014 Adelaide Fringe when artistic director Martha Lott of Holden Street Theatres brought the show from Edinburgh, and it has the same punch in Jordan Cowan's performance under David Mealor's direction. Bitch Boxer was British performer and playwright Charlotte Josephine's first play for which she won the Soho Theatre Young Writers Award in 2012, while the Adelaide production won the Fringe Award in 2014. It's a high octane, heart-warping story of the resilience and gumption of a young lady from Leytonstone aiming to be one the first female boxing Olympians. Her trainer, her coach, her mentor, her guiding light - her father - passes away early in the proceedings and Josephine, channeling through Cowan, reveals to us a doubly determined Chloe with all her flaws warping and weaving her way to winning.
Mealor and set designer Kathryn Sproul arrange the tiny studio space at the Goodwood Theatres with the audience sitting in bleachers around a boxing ring. But Cowan left me behind as she rushed through the opening scene with unfocussed energy and blurred speech. However, she shook this off and settled into the business of having Chloe box her way out of grieving. Movement director Toblah Booth-Remmers and boxing coach Robart Rijkelijkhulzan aided Cowan in matching a boxer's moves, but the more poignant moments - found in the rituals of boxing: wrapping on the knuckle tape, strapping on the gloves and the excruciatingly tense minutes before the match - really connect. Cowan was magnificently matched against herself in a whirling fight so exciting I wanted to cheer. I miss my father too.
Sea Wall
Actor Renato Musolino is an Adelaide treasure and very likely you have already seen him in a Flying Penguin or State Theatre production. (He'll be in State's The Gods of Strangers in November.) In Sea Wall, British playwright Simon Stephens takes a simple tale of a mishap and transforms it into an ethereal and heart-breaking exploration through metaphor and meaning. And Musolino is your man to perform it. Looking diminutive and vulnerable from the onset, character Alex lets us into his life, a life with his wife and daughter so perfect that there is no need to have another child. They even holiday at his father-in-law's seaside villa in France. But something is going to happen...me thinks. Brace yourself. Musolino conveys the necessaries with direct and frank exchanges with the audience and it feels like he's talking only to you. He is wholly in the moment and drags you right down in there with him. Dramatic tension and mood expression are beautifully heightened with Quentin Grant's composition and sound design, and Chris Petridis's lighting. Director David Mealor keeps it so simple and so beautiful, focusing on Musolino's rendition. Bravo!
David Grybowski
When: 5 to 16 September 2018
Where: Goodwood Theatre
Bookings: bass.net.au
Adelaide Repertory Theatre. The Arts Theatre. 1 Sep 2018
What on earth possessed The Rep, let alone respected director Megan Dansie, to mount a production of this play?
One could ask the same of the UKs National Theatre which premiered the work in 2015.
It is a funny idea, all right. The nightmarish dysfunctional family Christmas lunch to end all nightmarish dysfunctional family Christmas lunches. And, it is embellished by a quirky comic device by which each protagonist is given a behavioural rule, Rules for Living. For example, one must keep cleaning and self-medicate to stay calm, another must sit down and eat to tell lies, and another must stand up and dance to tell jokes. The rules, supposedly some form of cognitive therapy instruction which come and go throughout the play, are crudely projected onto a screen on stage so the audience might know that they exist.
These odd requirements have their funny moments, but not enough to sustain the audience for two solid hours. The play seems very long and these behavioural games become tedious, as does the play which contains a gob-smacking overdose of trivial, quibbling dialogue. It lives somewhere between Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party on steroids and Edward Albee’s Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf on speed.
The characters, two lawyer brothers who would rather have been an actor and a cricketer respectively, the harried and alienated wife of one and the ga-ga girlfriend of the other are all having relationship issues while the long-suffering obsessive old mum tries to keep the show on the road while the turkey is in the oven and, oh yes, pervy old dad comes home from hospital after a stroke. There is a lot of drinking and cross-purposes which might have worked up to farce but only makes it to chaos. Indeed, the whole play by Sam Holcroft is a work which tries too hard to do too much and ends up simply exhausting the audience.
The sad thing is that there is a fabulous cast of actors playing this dire play for The Rep. They seem to be word-perfect in the torrents of dialogue and well-rehearsed in the blocking of their crazed action. Penni Hamilton-Smith is at her character-actress best as the hapless, drug-slugging old mum, sometimes hilarious while conducting her obsessive dusting. Jaye Gordon is an outstandingly fine actress up there slurping the wine and having neurotic marital tantrums. Chris Eaton is marvellous as the repressed younger brother and Steven Marvanek also stars as his acrimonious sibling. Norm Caddick has it easy. He just has to sit in a wheelchair and leer.
But what must he be thinking of all this repetitive verbosity and mounting hysterics?
The play builds up to a frenzy of luncheon lunacy with a series of denouements. And there’s the rub. There are so many finalising punch lines which makes one think the curtain is about to come down that, when, eventually, the cast leaves the stage and the stage lights go dark, making a quick exit is a mistake. It seems that the end of this seemingly endless ordeal is not the end. What? Oh, no. There is yet another scene laugh the ushers who have clearly seen this play before.
Having made a break for it, this critic did not turn around and return. So sorry. She simply could not see those terrific actors wasted for a moment longer.
Samela Harris
When: 30 Aug to 8 Sep
Where: Arts Theatre
Bookings: 8212 5777 or adelaiderep.com
State Theatre Company. Dunstan Playhouse. 31 Aug 2018
Ort is up his tree. In Geoff Cobham stage imagery, the tree is an austere Juliet balcony. Beside and below it, Ort’s family is illuminated behind a magical screen, blurred and dwarfed in their tiny lives.
It is a magnificent opening to Tim Winton’s That Eye, The Sky, the story which preceded the famous Australian family epic, Cloudstreet.
Here, in this State Theatre Company production, it has been adapted by Justin Monjo and Richard Roxburgh and directed by Kate Champion.
Ort introduces his family and tells of his love for his chook, Errol, and how he likes to look at the sky wherein he sees a great eye.
Ort is a teen, simple-minded following a brain injury.
The veil across the stage rises to fold into a sheltering cloud which hangs over the family. Again, a beautiful piece of theatre effect.
And there is the family marooned in a chaos of Australian desolation, their home symbolised by a series of crude tiered platforms surrounded by old tyres and assorted cast-offs. As if poverty and a granny helpless with dementia is not enough, Ort’s beloved dad has just been in an accident and is in a quasi-vegetative stage. Mum, sister Tegwyn and Ort carry him about and try to include him in family life, their hope that he will recover his faculties slowly ebbing. Their spiteful neighbours, the Cherries, are no help. When the derelict evangelist Henry volunteers his services, they are in no position to choose. And thus a strange new chemistry evolves and even a glimmer of hope for redemption from this grim life of joyless confinement.
The play is immensely sad and Champion’s evocation of its pathos elicits tears among audience members.
There is a creek beside the house. Cobham’s design has created a shallow pool across the front of the stage wherein the family swims, paddles, floats on tyres and old car parts and which also absolutely brilliantly mirrors action taking place beyond it. Another strike of lighting genius.
The cast works effectively on their characterisations. Elena Carapetis gives yet another superb portrayal of the light and dark of a complex soul as she plays the mother, Alice, and Tim Overton captures agonisingly the endearing innocence of broken Ort. Kate Cheel tears at the heart in her depiction of Tegwyn, the beautiful teenager with a curdled future. Bill Allert remains slack-jawed and blank-eyed, passive to perfection as the brain-dead dad while Christopher Pitman twitches and rants and takes the weird evangelist to vigorously disturbing heights. The supporting cast, Rory Walker, Michelle Nightingale and Ezra Juanta, are strong, each adding to the poignancy of the human predicament in this Winton world. Even the chook is good, played with immense self-control by a pale pullet.
The play is over-long, perhaps bleeding the bleeding heart a drop too many. However, this production is Geoff Cobham’s triumph of lighting and design. The sprawling set screams of despair. The lighting complements the lows and sorrows and disappointments, the shimmering promises of faith, the mystical beauty of the sky. There are some moments of extraordinary beauty and spectacle in what is a huge portrayal of a small world.
Samela Harris
When: 28 Aug to 16 Sep
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: bass.net.au
Festival Theatre. 23 Aug 2018
It felt like an earthquake, so great was the cacophonous thrill of acclaim which met the opening night performance of Priscilla Queen of the Desert.
It felt like the standing ovation to end all standing ovations.
The rafters were rocking.
It was an audience so rewarded with joy and excellence that it was desperate to give back, to let the production know that it was profoundly, almost unbearably happy.
Ah, the beauty of live theatre. Love in the room. That magical connection between stage and auditorium.
Priscilla has been around for years on screen and on stage.
Triumphantly, it has toured and been produced all around the world and then some. This critic first saw it performed by the Zach Theatre company in our Sister City, Austin, Texas.
But, here and now, in Adelaide, in this latest incarnation, in the enlightened era of LGBTIQI gay marriages, Ru Paul and mainstream drag shows, it has danced itself into some zenith of the sublime. It is a treat. A significant treat.
All the ingredients are there. It is funny, physical, naughty, pithy, poignant, loud and beautiful. It is glitter and glam and feathers and sequins. It is macho and feminine. It is satire and social history. Oh, and it is voices, all sorts of voices across a vast swathe of pop music. There aren’t enough superlatives to cover the power and pleasure of it all.
'Tis the musical to end all juke box musicals, so impeccably has it been staged, so sleek is its technology and so accomplished are its performers.
Only a few elements remind one of its vintage. No one dances, let alone climbs atop Uluru these days. But the underbelly of homophobia sadly has not vanished from the world. Those scenes remain pertinent, just like the brave resilience of the gay community.
Priscilla is not just a song and dance extravaganza. Its story line of three drag queens on a road trip from Sydney to the Alice to do a show and enable one of them to meet his young son was always nicely devised to explore and explain the lives and loves of those in the drag world, the fun and the pathos, and the purity of acceptance which exists when there is no agenda.
It’s a dear, heart-warming story by Stephan Elliott and Allan Scott. Everyone loves the three main characters - Tick in drag form known as the outrageous Mitzi Matosis, is on the quest to meet his son. With him is his edgy, faggy young friend Felicia, who symbolises the new-wave of the drag world, and Bernadette, the ageing transgender former star from the old days of Les Girls.
The costumes, the wild and wacky genius costumes from Tim Chappel and Lizzy Gardiner really shine, not to mention Brian Thompson’s bedazzling and beloved Priscilla, the bus. There’s creamy professionalism in all the production values, the sound and lighting, the wigs and makeup, the choreographers and the techs on the fly towers who make it possible for divine Divas to rise and dip and glide graciously above the stage up there in all their finery. Those voices, those floating spirits of song! Today’s Divas, Angelique Cassimatis, Samm Hagen and Cle Morgan, are nothing less than red hot mamas in the sky. Gorgeous. So’s the multi-tasking Priscilla ensemble. What a lot of handsome beefcake, athletes as well as song and dance performers. Fit and fast, fast and fit. Drilled to perfection. The girls, too. When one can tell who is who.
And then there are the character players, the stars.
Song and dance man, David Harris, plays Tick, the drag queen who is secretly a dad. He's a complex and conflicted soul. Harris evokes his many layers in a consummate and credible characterisation.
Euane Doidge embodies bitchy and outrageous Felicia. He’s fabulously athletic, a sensational singer and the absolute favourite among the many youngies in the audience.
Robert Grubb is a classy, seasoned Australian actor and he renders a strong and simpatico Bob, the outback mechanic who joins the road trip. No wonder Bernadette falls for him. Lena Cruz is absolutely hysterical in the uber-cameo role of his mail-order bride, Cynthia. She brings the house into a torrent of spontaneous applause.
Cruz is among those who have performed in earlier productions of Priscilla. Performers seem to get attached to the show once they get a taste of it. Hence Tony Sheldon. He’s clocked up 1750-plus performances and been bestowed with countless major awards around the world in the role of Bernadette. Like the supreme showbiz pro that he is, he plays his part with immaculate freshness. He is the glowing heart and soul of the show. His stage presence is magical. He never steals a scene, but he continues to draw the eye simply with his grace and meticulous underplay. It is a privilege to be in the room with him.
Finally, there’s just one more behind-the-scenes facet which makes this show the exceptional Australiana experience it has become. It’s Simon Phillips, a luminous director if ever one there was.
Bravo.
Samela Harris
When: 23 Aug to 15 Sep
Where: Festival Theatre
Bookings: bass.net.au