Windmill Theatre Company. The Space. Adelaide Festival Centre. 11 Oct 2017
He’s back - and not a moment too soon.
The Big Bad Wolf is one of wonderful Windmill’s most interesting and endearing characters and his show returns in perfect time to surprise a new brood of children.
He might be big but as writer Matthew Whittet has created him, this bad wolf is a twisted fairy tale character who is utterly vulnerable. His big bad canine teeth have given him a speech impediment and no, frightened white bunny darting behind that tree, he does not to eat rabbit. He’s a “vegemetarian”. Not only but also, he’s a poet and terrible a disappointment to his ferocious wolf mother.
So he lives alone. All he wants is a friend.
Heidi Hood wants one, too. She’s a tiny woman, dressed in Red Riding Hood red and she lives in a meltingly cute doll’s house cottage in the woods, little dormer bedroom upstairs and fussy, homely downstairs dominated by her talking armchair. She’s nervous so the house is equipped with wolf alarms.
If Patrick Graham is adorable as the marginalised wolf, twinkle-toed Emma J. Hawkins is utterly sublime as Heidi. Her light-footed athleticism is a beauty to behold. The children are bewitched.
Heidi is as accomplished as she is lonely and if she wins just one more award, a planet will be named after her. A poetry competition is announced but the dancing champion is not so good with rhyme. Until she meets Wolfie.
And thus unfolds a tale of friendships against type, of words and love and loyalty.
Matilda Bailey completes the cast and weaves the story together playing the narrator, Grandmaster Wolf, Wolfie’s first friend, the Flea from Cincinnati, Heidi's talking couch, and a TV reporter. She pops out in assorted costumes from Jonathon Oxlade’s terrific woodland set. Wolfie’s towering talking tree is standout, literally.
This gem of a revival, directed by Rosemary Myers, has a short season at The Space and should not be missed.
Samela Harris
When: 11 to 21 Oct
Where: The Space
Bookings: bass.net.au
The Bakehouse Theatre. 7 Oct 2017
Atlanta is very finely tuned, extremely emotive, delicately balanced writing by Joanna Murray-Smith. An exceptional cast is needed to play the extraordinary range of spirit, sensitivity, love and pain Murray-Smith explores through a group of friends and their interrelationships. Murray-Smith utilises young Atlanta as the focal lens we perceive them through, balanced against how Atlanta sees herself, her world. Reality and fantasy.
Director, Joh Hartog has an exceptional cast. Hartog has fashioned from them a production reaching to the very depths of human frailty – hope, passion, love, and confusion of the purest white hot honesty – without a false note played. It flows with a hypnotising ease, spun out from Atlanta’s linking monologues and thoughtful rumination.
Tammy Boden’s set married with Stephen Dean’s lighting perfectly enhances the spiritual sense of easy flowing time the production is graced with. Boden’s sea colour geometric floor and back wall, with rope criss-crossed wooden frame stage right is wonderfully ethereal, supporting Deans’s effective use of spot lighting.
Karen Burns anchors the production as Atlanta in what is rightly called a career defining performance. Her mix of assurance, vulnerability, and strength tempered with timidity is all embracing of the audience. Atalanta’s tales of her family history, blended with reflections on her friendship circle and relationship with Alex (Adam Carter) are a whole world, both real and imagined, in which she seeks to define herself and protect herself.
Her friends are offered to us in their own right; the ‘item’, Grace (Stephanie Clapp) and Jack (Patrick Clements), Jess (Claire Mansfield), Gabe (Jack Evans) and Alex. Atlanta shares each of them with us. She explores what it is about them, and her relationship with them, that fascinates or confuses her. Bit by bit, her fears and insecurities dig cracks in her vulnerable psyche. She pushes her self closer then away from them.
Atlanta is so very much about the unique beauty and reality of being human. No more powerfully is this realised than in Alex’s powerful monologue offered as a riposte to Atlanta pushing him away. Carter delivers with the equal intensity Burns gives in her performance. How would he live without her? After her. What would be equal? An easier, less complicated being?
This question is asked by all the characters of their lives. Questions about their needs, their sense of self, their notion of real self, imagined self and the world they live in or see reflected in media.
Atlanta is an experience of tears, of soulfulness, of healing, of love. It is a magnificent testament to being human, and the need to share its experience more deeply with each other.
David O’Brien
When: 5 to 21 Oct
Where: The Bakehouse Theatre
Bookings: bakehousetheatre.com
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Matt Byrne Media. Holden Street Theatres. 4 Oct 2017
Men Behaving Badly. British ‘90s comedy sitcom. You may have heard of it. Two politically incorrect blokes ‘lad’ their way through life, dragging long suffering girlfriends along for the ride. You may have seen a few episodes. Or you’d be a huge fan, own the complete series DVD collected box set and binge watch it alone with beer ‘n’ chips on sad lonely weekends.
Director Matt Byrne took on the quixotic challenge of staging four ‘episodes’ of writer Simon Nye’s series, with a video style intro per episode enhancing the televisual origins of the writing and characters.
The result is strange, but intriguing.
Rohan Watts as Gary and Brendan Cooney as Tony are a sharp, well paired set of characterisations. They, and the whole cast, rip along with exquisite comic timing. Watts’ Gary is a technically perfect all out loud and lubricous lad about town with bizarrely, a steady job. Cooney’s Tony matches up with an equally excellent loose and laid back support performance, exhibiting a generous but restrained dose of 70s easy going spirit with a whiff of the 60s.
Partnering the lads, Georgia Stockham as Gary’s girl Dorothy and Cheryl Douglas as Tony’s girl Deborah match Watts and Cooney for excellence. Stockham’s a fabulous take no prisoners performer, while Douglas offers a more demure, laid back, considered characterisation.
Boys will be boys, girls get their revenge and all’s well with a solid set of laughs to be had. Writer Nye’s 90s England is one confused place for a lad, and he plays that up fully.
Byrne’s production is an incredibly busy one. The action jumps from one room to another. Stage hands are constantly hard at work transforming the space into Gary’s bedroom, lounge to Tony’s bedroom, to Deborah’s bedroom, flat and then there’s the Crown Hotel. This doesn’t detract too much from the performance. Byrnes’s focus on trying to emulate the speed and sensibility of the shot to shot nature of television, ambitious as it is, it just manages to stay on the right side of the audience.
It is a strange production, referencing a host of comic traditions and styles from the Carry On films onwards with a dash of vaudeville thrown in. The material is of its time, past the use by date culturally but nonetheless on its surface a worthy workout for actors wanting to push their technical skills to the limit.
David O’Brien
When: 3 to 21 Oct
Where: Holden Street Theatres, The Studio
Bookings: Holden Street Theatres 8262 4906
OzAsia Festival. W!ld Rice Theatre. Dunstan Playhouse. 28 and 29 Sep 2017
Hotel
The jewel in the crown of the OzAsia Festival shines very brightly indeed.
The Singapore company W!ld Rice Theatre, with playwrights Alfian Sa’at and Marcia Vanderstraaten, have devised a Singaporean history work ingeniously centred on what happens over a century in a single room in a grand old hotel. It is unnamed but fairly clearly it is Raffles.
The play's five hours embrace eleven episodes: small plays representing different situations and characters from 1915 to 2015. Incredibly, eleven languages are spoken through the eleven scenes, English predominates and the others are translated on sur-title screens.
Hotel staff function as the chorus introducing the show with a lovely piece choreographed around rolling suitcases. Thereafter, dressed as the hotel valets and maids, they define the scene changes and complement the history symbols which also are represented in black and white photo images on the set.
The production opens with a colonial plantation owner on honeymoon with his Eurasian bride. The audience cringes at his imperialistic sexism. Ten years later in the roaring 20s, Malaysian Chinese cousins, one a hotel laundry worker and the other a servant of the rich Mrs Wong, are reunited in the room and mock the class system by parading around in Mrs Wong’s frocks. Their merriment is shattered by the visit of an Irish nun on the lookout for girls sold into service and the audience again cringes in sorrow. Between scenes, the hotel staff converge on the room cleaning traces of former guests, as indeed hotel staff are meant to do.
The 30s brings an oddly wacky scene with a shrill Indian spiritualist and very strange and spooky séance. A decade later it is Japanese occupation and a heart-rending scene with a Japanese captain and his Malay lover. So sad. But Wild Rice and its large cast, whipping from costume to costume and character to character, lift the mood to Bollywood frivolity with an Indian star who dares to want to make a “realistic” movie. This is the 1950s and the characters are over the top, the script is comical and the dancing is superb. Come 1965, the sexual revolution is suggested as the hotel room service manager woos the TV repairman. Their doomed relationship is eclipsed, however, by Lee Kuan Yew on the broken TV reading the announcement of Singapore's separation from Malaysia.
Already the company has spread its wings in the array of characters the actors portray. They’re a fine, strong and versatile cast, some of them trained in Australia. They are racially diverse and linguistically athletic. Directed by Ivan Heng and Glen Goei, they are the wondrous ethnic blend which is Singapore.
Hotel II
In the 1970s there was Singapore’s famous Bugis Street, the world headquarters for gorgeous drag queens and trannies. Hotel opens with an American army vet bringing two Bugis St beauties back to his room along with a stash of first class coke and acid. He trashes himself on the drugs and passes out leaving the girls to their own devices. The W!ld Rice Theatre actors capture their fantastic feyness to a tee. Monika takes the man's money and leaves her friend discovering the effects of LSD. And thus is the scene a wild acid trip with giant penises and a sparkling angel mother laying on a guilt trip. The scene becomes colourful high action and fun with a poignant edge.
In 1985, the story of 1945 is recalled. This scene of the Japanese businessman tracing the woman in a photo given to him by his father is profoundly moving and superbly performed. It attempts to tie up the loose ends of life.
Indeed, as the scenes of Hotel II evolve, it becomes clear that the play is intent on deeper themes within the comings and goings of the hotel guests.
Then, again, sensitive issues can get a light touch. Racial tensions, for instance, are delivered with colourful and comic treatment with the hotel room now, in 1995, occupied by a bride and her helpers changing from the wedding dress. She has the most wonderfully strict and intractable mother and a bit of a loopy new Indian mother-in-law and the big issue is which national dress she should wear. It’s a funny scene which also is not funny.
By 2005, Islam has become a more emphatically expressed force in largely Chinese Singapore. A Muslim woman, returning to the room in which she had such a delightful time as a girl in 1955 when Islam was less adamant, finds her now stricter Islamic family is seen as a security risk. Singapore has changed and so have they. And of course, the world at large is changing too and this remarkable play mirrors that.
The show wraps up with a beautifully dignified grand 2015 scene in which the hotel management and its new Middle Eastern owners are at a loss dealing with a long term guest who is on his deathbed. This wonderful man puts life, class, immigration and compassion into place.
Again, there are superb performances from the large ensemble cast as they leap from principal character to chorus and back again. These are experienced actors of strikingly different backgrounds, multilingual and, let it be said, pretty good dancers, and with the quietly changing character of the hotel room and the artful marriage of relevance with sheer ingeniousness, they bring us a five star Hotel experience.
Samela Harris
When: 28 and 29 Sep
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: Closed
State Opera of South Australia. Adelaide Town Hall. 30 Aug 2017
With the Festival Theatre being off-limits for (much needed) renovations, and for the lack of suitable venues to mount full main-stage operas, the State Opera of South Australia instead staged two one-act operas in (mostly) concert format in the pleasing acoustic of the Adelaide Town Hall.
It is a most enjoyable program, but it is definitely an evening of two halves.
La Vide Breve, with music by Manuel de Falla and Spanish libretto by Carlos Fernández-Shaw, is the story of an arranged marriage between Paco and Carmela, but Paco is in love with Salud, a common gypsy girl who despairingly takes her own life because she is denied Paco. The passion of the young lovers is made palpably evident through the beautifully played music and the well-sung arias, but the production lacks a true sense of theatre, and the gravitas of the plot is subjugated by the staging.
Director Nicholas Cannon, through necessity, staged the production largely in concert formation. The limited space of the wide and narrow thrust stage situated in front of the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra accommodates the State Opera Chorus as well as the cast and various basic items of stage properties. The whole thing is cramped and lacks a sense of intimacy and seclusion that is often required. Pelham Andrews is a standout as Tio Saravor. His rich bass-baritone voice resonates throughout the auditorium and is never intimidated by the force of the orchestra, unlike Brenton Spiteri, whose excellent tenor voice is at times drowned out by what is essentially an over-powered orchestra.
The displays of flamenco dancing and singing provide interesting contrast. Gisele Blanchard sings a convincing Salud, and Elizabeth Campbell is deeply emotional as Abuela.
Gianni Schicchi is an altogether different proposition, and the evening suddenly takes off! Puccini’s score is emotive, lush, and contains the ever-popular aria O mio babbino caro. (One can sense the audience patiently waiting for it!) The Italian libretto by Giovacchino Forzano, is based in part on Dante's Divine Comedy and is fabulously comical. In short, it concerns the antics of a bunch of relatives who are over-excited about not receiving an inheritance and who conspire to fraudulently alter the will so that they do not miss out.
Director Douglas McNicol exploits every opportunity to extract laughter and his cast is completely up to the task; their acting skills are polished – facial gesturing in particular is exemplary. Elizabeth Campbell gives an object lesson in how to create a truly three-dimensional character that only comes through a deep understanding of one’s relationship with the other characters as well as the time, place and social milieu in which the action is located. It was difficult to take one’s eyes away from her.
McNicol chose to set the action into a contemporary setting, and it works well. Sadly, there are many examples where modernising a setting simply doesn’t work. For example, I recall without fondness Gale Edward’s attempt to give contemporary relevance to Salomé in her 2013 production for SOSA by setting it in a slaughterhouse. The quality of the music and the singing was overshadowed by an execrably bad design concept. This reviewer can’t help wonder what new heights of enjoyment might be achieved if the creatives, in their attempts to modernise, went that extra step further and judiciously altered the libretto as well to remove what ultimately become anachronisms if left unaltered. However……..
Desiree Frahn again demonstrates that she has a bright future as a singer, and her rendition of O mio babbino caro is just delightful: a crystal clear pitch-perfect voice, with no unnecessary vibrato. Brenton Spiteri is a delight as Rinuccio, and his sweet tenor line this time incisively cut through the combined might of the orchestra. Conductor Brian Castles-Onion also seems to have a more refined sympatico with the vocalists in Gianni Schicchi than in La Vide Breve, which helps. McNicol also stars in the title role, and his skills at farcical acting are well on display. Jeremy Tatchell sings and acts the role of Marco with his usual aplomb.
The strong principal casts are well rounded out by convincing performances from, David Cox, Daniel Goodburn, Norbert Hohl, Greg John, Rodney Kirk, Sara Lambert, Fiona McArdle, Rachel McCall, Joshua Rowe, and Beau Sandford.
SOSA’s next production will be Johann Strauss Jnr’s Die Fledermaus to be staged at her majesty’s Theatre on 24 & 25 Oct 2017.
Kym Clayton
When: 30 & 31 Aug
Where: Adelaide Town Hall
Bookings: Closed