Adelaide Fringe. Noel Lothian Hall, Adelaide Botanic Garden. 11 Mar 2017
Joanne Hartstone has a distinguished track record in Adelaide Fringes as both a performer and an artistic director, and the excellence goes on. Here she presents an original work imagining a hopeful actress of the MGM Hollywood heyday. She tells the story of (stage name) Evie Edwards who grows up in the Great Depression in a shantytown called Hooverville where a compassionate landlady provides a strong musical influence. When she's eighteen her handyman single father takes her to Los Angeles and she finds work as an MGM messenger girl and thus gets entree to entertain the servicemen at Bette Davis' and Jules Stein’s famous Hollywood Canteen during World War II.
Hartstone has done a lot of homework about 1940s Hollywood, the star system, the scandals, the tragedies, and the mores. She imagines experiences of the young Evie which would have been typical for myriad would-be actresses of the day. She hooks her tale onto the end of that of tragic failed actress Peg Entwistle who committed suicide by leaping from the top of the Hollywood sign’s letter “H”. She weaves around Evie the studio gossip of the day and tales of the stars. There is poor Jean Harlow who every Sunday had ammonia and chlorine bleach applied to her head to make her into Howard Hughes’s “platinum blonde”, and poor exploited Judy Garland on her studio diet of uppers and downers, with only chicken soup and coffee for sustenance.
Hartstone has her character teetering on the crossbar of the “H” as she tells her story of Hollywood disappointments, of never being noticed among the other aspiring actresses, of failing auditions because she is too fat, too thin, not pretty enough, or having too flat a profile. It was tough out there, especially for poor girls with no connections.
Hartstone looks wonderful as Evie with beautiful luscious blonde locks and a stunning black frock which Evie brags once belonged to Theda Bara. She adopts not only a good midwest accent as Evie, but throws in different American accents for other characters. And she sings, song after song, in a classic 1940s style evocative of Billie Holiday.
She creates another world in the little popup Fringe venue out there on the outskirts of the Botanic Gardens. It’s a remote and hard-to find venue which suffers for the Hackney Road upheavals, not to mention Womadelaide. But it is worth the effort to be magically transported into Hartstone's faraway world of Hollywood at its ruthless fairy-story height.
Samela Harris
When: 11 to 19 Mar
Where: Noel Lothian Hall, Adelaide Botanic Garden
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Adelaide Fringe. Token Events. The Garden of Unearthly Delights. 11 Mar 2017
“Where are we now?
Where are we now?
The moment you know
You know, you know.” (Where Are We Now?, David Bowie, The Next Day)
Justin Hamilton and I are huge David Bowie fans. We were compatriots of the 90s Adelaide comedy scene, he as a rising star of the scene in this weird duo called The Bunta Boys, I as a full throttle critic of a few years old for dB Magazine.
Hamilton’s look back at the past is as comically engaging and as significant as Bowie’s own profoundly deep and introspective reminisce of his formative Berlin years.
Justin Hamilton: Bunta Boy is more than a crack-up Adelaide memoir. It’s a brilliantly structured history walk cum shining-light to this era’s young comedians, and for those who’ve followed his career, a reminder of how richly he has matured as an artist since then.
Hammo kicks off his tale with an old-man kidney stones story and accounts of his less than fabulous 2016 travails. The perfect segue into what we call, ‘in my day…’.
The 90s.
When Rundle Street was the only street in Adelaide and Boltz Bar was the home of new Adelaide comedy, run on a shoe string of sorts. It was the place where two poor, crazy guys, who made videos for friends instead of presents, discovered they could do that, and a whole lot more, to make people laugh.
That’s video cassettes kids. Not an iPhone video posted to YouTube. We didn’t have that gear.
With slick comic microphone noise technique, and a routine deeply imbued with memory, passion, self- awareness, irony and sheer joy, Hammo reaches out to audience members who weren't there in the 90s, and reminds them that the good stuff happens when you’re young and do crazy things. He was full of nutty ideas and our small city meant writing a new show - every week!
Great comedy is always low tech stand-up, backed by fierce insights and translated to reach the soul’s funny bone. It means making mistakes, overthinking, not thinking, but most importantly - as a friend said of this formative era we were deeply enmeshed in - it was not so much about the art, but ‘having a fu*king good time’.
Justin Hamilton does just that. Here he is now. Check it!
David O’Brien
When: 11 to 12 March
Where: The Garden of Unearthly Delights, The Factory
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Adelaide Festival. Adelaide Town Hall. 8 Mar 2017
What’s in a name? What does La Gaia Scienza actually mean, and is it significant that a musical ensemble should name itself thus? It probably doesn’t matter to the actual music making, but the name possibly gives us an insight into why this particular ensemble is special.
La Gaia Scienza is the title of a book by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, in which he explores, amongst other things, the idea that God – however one conceives of him, her or it – is, or should no longer be, the source of meaning or moral compass. ‘La gaia scienza’ also alludes to a phrase that has been used to typify aspects of the Provençal lifestyle from times gone by that nurtured a quest for excellence in the arts grounded in the seeming opposites of discipline and free spirit.
In a one-off concert, La Gaia Scienza presented a piano trio (Op.8, but the 1889 version) and a piano quartet (Op.60) by Brahms, and two shorter compositions by Schubert.
Opening with Schubert’s Notturno in E flat (D.897) immediately raised the audience’s expectations. This is an exquisitely melodic and moving composition, and is well known by lovers of chamber music even though it is not played enough on the concert platform. Performed on historic instruments, La Gaia Scienza got to the visceral heart of the piece and never erred on the side of oversentimentality. This was largely due to restrained use of vibrato on the violin (Stefanoa Barneschi) and cello (Paolo Beschi), and judicious pedaling on the piano (Federica Valli).
The applause from the audience after the Notturno was heartfelt and urged the ensemble to scale even greater heights of musicality, which they did in the two Brahms compositions.
Schubert’s String Trio in B flat (D.471) introduced Ernest Braucher on viola as the fourth member of the ensemble. It is an annoying piece: it is beautifully melodic and song like, which is exactly what we expect from Schubert, but it is too short and is an example of another piece by Schubert that was destined to part of something bigger but was never finished.
The inner movements of both the trio and quartet were sublimely handled. In the final movement of the quartet, absolute precision was momentarily surrendered on a few brief occasions to the raw emotion inherent in the piece, but this is what I think La Gaia Scienza is really about. When they make music, when they are deeply immersed in performance, strict discipline is only a means to an end, and that end is freedom of expression that comes only from profound understanding of what is written on the page.
This concert was an example of outstanding programming by the Festival’s directors, and the large and exuberant audience whooped and wolf-whistled their approval.
Kym Clayton
When: 8 Mar 2017
Where: Adelaide Town Hall
Bookings: Closed
Lost In Translation. Live at 5, William Margery Room, Adelaide Oval. 10 Mar 2017
Lost in Translation is Nick Fagan's vehicle for getting himself on stage. Judging by the company's first three productions including this one, Fagan has a knack for finding new high quality American plays never seen before in South Australia that involve hardboiled persons on the lower rung of the ladder of opportunity struggling with making sense of life - including their crimes and misdemeanours - with a whiff of violence or a bit of biff. The Motherf**ker With The Hat is a terribly amusing modern day farce penned by Stephen Adly Guirgis, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2015.
This is my new best show of the Fringe. Jackie returns from prison in upstate New York to the bed of Veronica, his sweetheart since Grade 8. But Jackie suspects that the motherf**cker with the hat beat him to it. He seeks anger management counselling from his parole officer, who, while he has drawn a line under his druggie past, has the moral compass of Tiger Woods. The dialogue is snappy-fast, funny and ironic, and full of New York - with more ** than stars in the sky.
Co-directors Matt Houston and Fagan have assembled a terrific cast that has crafted characters of recognised type yet are highly individualised. Fagan's Jackie is anxiously restless, struggling to break free from recidivism, yet is sweetly honest in his relationships. His angst is contrasted with Patrick Gibson's calm new age smugness as the counsellor, Ralph, and between them we see the play deepen from farce into a duel on moral relativism.
Rosie Williams is wonderful as Veronica - drug-addled and shrill but clear thinking enough to know what she wants. Ralph's wife sees the writing on the wall and her situation is very effectively and warmly channelled by Lana Adamuszek. Jackie seeks help from cousin Julio - David Salter's faux-Mexican makes this role a risible standout.
The Motherf**ker With The Hat is a ripper black comedy with a life-coaching bent. You might learn something while you're laughing. Bravo!
P.S. It's on for only one more night - Saturday March 11 - and I would not miss it!
David Grybowski
When: 10 to 11 Mar
Where: Live at 5, William Margery Room, Adelaide Oval
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Ruth Hollows. Holden Street Theatres. 9 Mar 2017
This is a 30 minute gem of a play by Claudia Osborne and Thomas De Angelis of the Sydney area, or thereabouts, and directed by Osborne. Wally, played with aching insecurity by Sam Brewer, reluctantly attends a party with his spunky housemates - or at least I thought they were housemates - created by Charlie Devenport and Grace Victoria. (I hope I got that right because for the first time in my experience, the program did not identify the actors.)
Wally isn't in the party mood - he just wants to be left alone - and his downward spiral toward anxious withdrawal is reinforced each time his mates ask, "Are you alright?" He is so much like myself, I was astonished. Sometimes at a party, I just want to disappear underneath the wallpaper.
A rather simple tale is superbly augmented by Daniel Harris's animation comprising back projection designed to interact with the performers, and with hugely enjoyable shadow play.
There is an enchanting scene where shrinking violet, Wally shifts to bug size and meets up with a couple of praying mantises urging him to return to the party and get off the grass. Bravo!
A delightful Fringe surprise that put a smile on my dial from go to whoa. Go see!
David Grybowski
When: 9 to 11 Mar
Where: Holden Street Theatres
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au