Reviews:
July-September 2007
               
          

By the Light of Stars That Are No Longer

Cats

Closer

Creche and Burn

The Glass Menagerie

Hansel and Gretel

Keep Everything You Love

A Large Attendance in the Antechamber

The Love of the Nightingale

L'Orfeo

Micro-trip

Miriam Margolyes in Dickens' Women

Miss Saigon

Please Like Me

Post Office Rose

Red Cap

The Reunion

Sailing South

Walking by Apple Tree Creek

Ying Tong - A Walk with the Goons



Dance

International Gala

Music

Barb Jungr

Beyond Glamour: The Absinthe Tour

Broad

Broadway in Concert

Crossing Roper Bar

Pig City

We Don't Dance For No Reason

William Barton in Concert

Women in Voice 16
Earlier reviews
Creche and Burn  
Centenary Theatre Group (Chelmer Community Centre)

By Elise Greig

We should be grateful to the Centenary Players and Eric Scott in particular for securing the opportunity to produce Elise Greig’s 2005 comedy Crèche and Burn for amateur performance, thus ensuring a wider audience for this locally written play. La Boite Theatre, which premiered the play, has always championed the work of new Australian playwrights and it is good to see an enterprising amateur group also showcasing local talent. In November the group will continue in this vein by mounting the first production of Sister Kenny, a play by Brisbane writer, actor and director Paul Sherman.

Crèche and Burn is great fun; it follows the trials of a young woman showing up on the first day of her job in a childcare centre only to find that the rest of the staff have fallen sick and she must soldier on alone. The children present few problems, but the parents are another matter, displaying all the self-centredness of tyrannical three-year-olds. The absolute low point of Miss Sarah’s day comes when a divorced father, whom she has tried to help become more assertive, barricades the centre and refuses to let his appalling ex-wife take possession of their child. The police become involved and Sarah is forced to act as negotiator in a situation that can only end in unhappiness for the well-intentioned father. By the end of the day calm is restored, the children (resilient as always) have thrived on the excitement, and Sarah can leave, more than ever aware of the complexity of a teacher’s role in society.

Elise Greig’s play is full of very funny characters and situations which every parent and teacher in the audience can immediately recognise and relate to. The children make brief appearances (represented here by delightful, bizarrely coloured, life-size dolls) but it is the parents and Sarah’s two unconventional helpers who dominate the action of the play.

The over-protective mother, the foul-mouthed bikie mum, the breast-feeding earth-mother, the business-woman terrified of babies, the opinionated grandma, the ex-wife from hell and the well-meaning but ineffectual father all make an appearance, each demanding something different from the teacher and facility to which they entrust their child. The rough-as-bags volunteer helper and the flakey girl Social Services have provided add to the microcosm that the play presents.

Lizzie Ballinger as Sarah comes across as a capable and credible teacher who is only occasionally overwhelmed by the responsibility thrust upon her on her first day at work. It is easy to see why she is at pains to help the uncertain Robert, played sympathetically here by Glenn Borland. Brooke Dziuma drifts delightfully through the play as the spaced-out and totally clueless Kym who is left onstage at the end of the play, reflecting what a warm and loving place the crèche provides. The other characters are all doubled and the four actors have a ball, each given the opportunity to portray two totally contrasting characters. Kyle Lobo as the tough bikie babe is unrecognisable as the pathetically nervous mother who is sure her child will stop breathing, as is Lucy Moxon doubling hilariously as the hippie Damask Rose and the blokey Di. Joanna Oliver’s obnoxious grandma is contrasted wonderfully with her well-observed police sergeant while Annah Lane’s beautiful but monstrous bride is far removed from her coolly elegant young executive.

Although the characters may appear to be stereotypes, they each reflect some of the dilemmas facing young parents trying to juggle family life and work commitments and therefore in need of reliable child care. Beneath the comedy some very serious social issues are raised in the play and it is the director’s role to find the right balance, ensuring that neither element overwhelms the other. In this regard I would have liked to see the director tone down some of the over-playing for laughs, trusting the audience to pick up on the humour and allowing the more sombre notes to emerge.

However, this production is a good ensemble piece of theatre in which all the elements contribute to the total effect. The set is terrific, the props and costumes just right, the ‘children’ a triumph and the pace brisk. Brisbane audiences are lucky to have had the opportunity to have another look at this play, which I am sure will quickly become a popular part of the Australian repertoire. Well done all round!

Directed by Eric Scott

Playing until 6 October 2007: Fri-Sat 8pm, Sun 6:30pm

Running time: 2 hrs including 20 min interval


— Maureen Strugnell

(Performance seen: 29th September 2007)
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Broadway in Concert  
Gold Coast Arts Centre

GCAC by special arrangement with APRA

Amateur

Sometimes it is quite difficult to say whether a production is amateur or professional. Sometimes it is a mix, and sometimes it just depends on whether or not the participants get paid. This quite lavish production of Broadway in Concert announces itself as amateur, even though both its director/choreographer, Robert Young, and its musical director, Mark Turpin, have been working professionally in the business for many years, and many of the performers have had, at least on paper, substantial training and/or experience. So it’s a bit of a hybrid, and it shows.

The show bills itself as a celebration of great Broadway hits, and the scene opens with the orchestra upstage against a backdrop of the New York skyline with old-fashioned advertisements highlighted: Oxydent toothpaste, Chevrolet and Richfield Oil, which clearly state that we are going to start in the early days of the great American musical, with 42nd Street no less from the early 1930s. There’s an occasional faux Yankee voiceover which provides a bit of an introduction to some pieces, but there didn’t seem to be any consistency about this.

The only possible song, of course, to open the show is “Lullaby of Broadway” with the mandatory white tie and tails and lots of rather lavish white or black gowns. The volunteer backstage people must have been working very, very hard to have produced so many costumes — several changes each for a cast of 24. From 42nd Street it was quite a romp through Babes in Arms, South Pacific, Hello, Dolly!, The Sound of Music, and so on and so on. They’re mostly all there right up to Mamma Mia and The Boy from Oz.

Most of the cast get a solo or two, and some of them are knockouts such as Lucy McIntosh who belted out “Hello, Dolly!” and “The Diva’s Lament” from Spamalot. There was a rather lavish use of the backing choir, particularly in the South Pacific segment. Some songs just don’t go down well with the angelic hosts in the background. My really big complaint about the sound, however, is that the lapel mikes didn’t seem to have been tuned to individual singers, because a few of what might have been quite pleasant voices became unpleasantly screechy in the higher registers (what my mother-in-law used to call the squawking jenny voice). I also began to wonder how many of the singers had actually had proper voice training, because some voices couldn’t keep up with the demands of various songs. A particular example was Lawrie Esmond who has the most amazing deep bass voice, with loads of tone and richness, but who faltered unhappily at times. Training would eliminate that and allow him to capitalise on what is an amazing gift.

Having 24 amateurs on stage (even with heaps of talent and significant experience in some cases) must have been quite a problem for the choreographer, and I found the first half particularly fairly wooden and limited in the range of movement. I would guess that not many of the cast had experience as dancers, and this was quite evident. The second half was much more adventurous both in costume and routines, with “All that Jazz” a highlight. The show finished with a well rehearsed encore of “I still call Australia Home”, uplifting stuff, but the large Australian flag which appeared from the flies was perhaps a bit of overkill.

The media release for this show promised that it would have “audiences dancing in the aisles.” With an average age of, I would guess, about 70 at the matinee performance I went to, I would think that dancing in the aisles would have been unlikely, particularly when the elderly members of the audience would already have had to negotiate GCAC’s unfriendly stairs. Accessibility is not the strong point of this building. There are no escalators and only a one-person lift, as the person next to me complained, saying that she had just had a knee replacement. Nevertheless the audience was tremendously enthusiastic and obviously appreciate the regular musical offerings that the Centre puts on.

Director/choreographer: Robert Young.

Playing 27, 28, 29 Sept, 4 Oct 8pm. Matinee Sat 29 Sept 2pm. Twilight Wed 3 Oct 6.30pm.

Duration : 2hrs 30mins (including 15min interval).


— Barbara Garlick

(Performance seen: 29th September 2007)
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Miriam Margolyes in Dickens' Women  
Andrew McKinnon Presentations (Powerhouse Theatre)

Professional

I have a weakness for one-person shows, and I’ve seen a fair few of them, ranging from Edgar Allan Poe to Dickens and back through the circle of nineteenth-century greats via Mark Twain and Henry Lawson (and his Mum Louisa) to Dickens again. I’d also include in the list Roy Dotrice’s wonderful Aubrey in Brief Lives and possibly even our own fictional Monk O’Neill played by, among others, Max Gillies and Barry Otto in A Stretch of the Imagination

as beginning and ending parentheses. Of course, there are lots more, and theatregoers will have their own favourites. Sometimes they are done as plays in themselves, such as John Astin’s Edgar Allan Poe — Once upon a midnight at the Adelaide Festival some years ago (Astin, by the way, was Uncle Gomez in The Addams Family. Is that suitable casting or what?) or Steven Berkoff’s Poe. Sometimes they are monologues done in character, and sometimes they are readings or enactments with a linking script, which is often thematic. This is the route Miriam Margolyes has taken.

Margolyes had a huge success with her Dickens in America, and here she entertains us again with a panoply of Dickens’ women (first put on in Australia in 1992 at the Sydney Festival), her wonderfully mobile face and expressive body taking us through quite a few of the more grotesque characters, and unfortunately too few of the little battlers and the strong but admirable (rather than vicious) women. But with so many amazing subjects to choose from, there are bound to be ones you wished she had “done.” The big surprise and one of the most moving portrayals, startling in its modernity, was that of Miss Wade from Little Dorrit, orphan victim of a brutalised childhood, who preaches rebellion to the vulnerable Tattycoram, and who through Dickens’s words becomes a bitter avenging angel. Margolyes places her Miss Wade upstage with a single spotlight, making rather ominous shadows and, more importantly, helping to create that optical trick of a halo, the aura of the mesmerising single person on stage. Here Miss Wade becomes someone who attempts to explain why she has become what she has, the result of endless humiliations, her sexuality battered and damaged beyond repair. It’s quite a showstopper.

The program opens with John Martin at piano playing a few Victorian parlour songs like “I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls” and “Come into the garden, Maud”, just for a bit of a singalong. Then onto the stage with a strange mincing step comes probably one of Dickens’ most memorable grotesques, Mrs Gamp from Martin Chuzzlewit, the so-called nurse with her imaginary acolyte Mrs Prig of the Prig school of nursing. Mrs Gamp loves laying out corpses, terrorising old men by shaking them which is “highly beneficial to the performance of the nervous system” (see Mrs Prig), and stealing the coppers from dead people’s eyes. Margolyes just needs a twist of the body, a roll of the eye, a sideways slip of the chin, and Mrs Gamp’s venality is obvious, “Gamp is my name and Gamp is my nater.” It’s a trick of history that we only remember her now by her umbrella, because there are plenty of venal members of our society who could wear her name with good cause. Perhaps we should revive it.

It’s quite an opening, and the portrait of Dickens that builds up through letters, readings, and a wealth of more characters, is one of a man for whom women were immensely important, but who nevertheless had a very problematic relation with them, particularly with his mother and his wife, Catherine. We also hear about his sister-in-law Georgina, who chose to stay with him when he separated from her sister, and his mistress Ellen Ternan. The story Margolyes tells is roughly chronological, although his memorialising of the women in his life emerges randomly throughout his writing life. There is his grandmother whose stories delighted him as a child in Mrs Lirriper, or his first love Maria when young as Nora Spenlow in David Copperfieldand then, devastatingly, when old as Flora Finching in Little Dorrit. Flora Finching is a gem, all flirtatious giggles accompanied by snorting, girlish tossing of the hair, artlessly “running into nonsense again” and in whom the lovely flower of youth had blossomed into a very full-blown peony indeed.

Most of Dickens’ pet hates can usually be seen in his portrayals of women, such as all of the demoralising and cruel teachers representative of the education system of his time, like Mrs Pipchin who terrorises Paul Dombey even while he is looking at her with “rapt interest.” And then there are all the 17-year-olds, the pretty, ineffectual ideal heroines whom Margolyes finds “rather icky.” So did Oscar Wilde who wrote that one would have to have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing. Lots of spinsters too, like Miss Tox also from Dombey and Son, those forlorn old maids so common in the 19th century who are seldom vicious but who are not comely enough to warrant anything but the caricaturist’s pen.

One of the funniest encounters immediately after the interval — Margolyes believes in the value of a great entrance — is between the Matron and Mr Bumble from Oliver Twist. She plays both parts, with Mr Bumble perhaps being the pièce de résistance as he courts this creature of “such parochial perfection.” It was hilarious. She confessed afterwards that she loved doing that part with its “sexual greed and economic greed in the same scene.” This is physical theatre at its best, acting with the whole body, seen most clearly in Miss Moucher, the dwarf who always carries the Prince’s nail cuttings, in what must be a physically draining scene.

So this is a chauvinist Dickens, using women to express his anger about certain aspects of his world, but who can provide an unexpectedly tender and sensitive portrait of someone caught up in the toils of a bureaucracy gone mad, gentle Miss Flite who every day expects a judgment in Chancery in Bleak House. This is how the show ended as the stage slowly darkens and the spot narrows to just a circle of light round Miriam Margolyes’ head speaking Miss Flight’s sadly hopeful words. I’m not altogether sure that I agree with Miss Havisham as a Dickens figure, and I would love to have seen a Margolyes Infant Phenomenon or even a Lizzie Hexam, who’s a young girl who is not “icky” at all. The Powerhouse Theatre acoustic is not all that good with whispers and the lower registers being sometimes hard to hear, and the lighting occasionally produced some odd effects. And while I’m quibbling, how about that strange garment which looked as if the dresser had seized on some old Victorian curtains? But this is a wonderful evening, full of all those human emotions of which Dickens would so much have approved.

Directed by Sonia Fraser

Playing 26 Sept to 6 Oct, 2007. Sun 30 Sept, Sat 6 Oct 3pm. Tues 2 Oct-Fri 5 Oct 7.30pm.

Duration : 2hrs 20mins (including 20min interval).


— Barbara Garlick

(Performance seen: 26th September 2007)
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Barb Jungr  
Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts

Professional

Barb Jungr, where have you been all my life? In the UK, Europe and America Jungr has been developing a dedicated following for the past 10 years or so, but has so far only been to Australia once, and that was last year to the Adelaide Cabaret Festival, where she gave master classes and made so many good friends that one of them, the wonderful Matthew Carey, came with her on this trip round the country as her pianist. So far she has been to Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, the Gold Coast and Katoomba. She’s watched whales, seen the Three Sisters, and made many more friends, and after Brisbane, she’s travelling back down the coast to Canberra. Busy lady, and it’s precisely that energy, enthusiasm and ability to engage with strangers, i.e., her audience, that makes this one of the most exciting shows I’ve seen in a long while.

In an interview with Andrew Ford on the Music Show (Radio National on Saturday morning), Jungr spoke about the term cabaret and how it had been debased by someone like Simon Cowell (the grumpy judge on American Idol), and how, because of these pejorative overtones, she prefers to call herself a jazz singer. Nevertheless she needs to connect with her audience in an old-style cabaret way, and it was therefore interesting to see the layout of the Judy performance space last night. Almost a quarter of the space at the front was taken up with tables and chairs, dimly lit with candles, and inhabited by, presumably, the more expensive ticket holders, most of whom were tucking into wine partially disguised in frosty buckets. A nod to a nightclub atmosphere, I guess. The rest of the audience were in the raked area behind, and it was full to bursting. This layout allowed Jungr to be very close to at least some of the audience, but her personality certainly leapt beyond those chosen few as the little girl from Rochdale (Lancashire not Queensland) chatted between songs, her accent veering excitedly from broad north country to transatlantic, with a little bit of estuary thrown in for good measure. They were stories we all relished, from anorak-clad Brits (possibly from Peckham) to her godmother in Melbourne who warned her about going out alone on those violent streets. Occasionally she’d fling in a French phrase with a sardonic grin, referring back to the long years of touring doing Piaf, or play out her tongue-tied meeting with Jeremy Irons who had chosen her version of the Bob Dylan song “I want you” on Desert Island Disks. It’s hard to believe that she could ever have been tongue-tied, but there we are. It was a good story too, because she’s a great mimic and actor.

And then there’s the voice, and what a voice. At one stage in her interview with Andrew Ford he asked her whether she ever improvised. Her reply was — with a dirty laugh — whatever a song can allow. And it’s that quality of spontaneity that marks her performance, from the anecdotes to the songs themselves. You feel as if she is singing these very well rehearsed pieces for the first time, and with an accompanist like Matthew Carey who allows her some soaring flights of fancy, just as she is happy to sit and listen to him improvising in the middle of a song, it becomes a very fresh and direct engagement with the audience. Added to this is her conscious desire to renew familiar pieces, so that her version of “Heartbreak Hotel” doesn’t even make the merest of gestures towards Elvis’s swivel hips. Instead it is full of yearning and loneliness, with a lower register growl as she repeats “I’m so lonely.” It’s a quite amazing new look at a song which has become so identified with a person, a place and a time. Similarly with the Richard Thompson classic “The Great Valerio” which she laments has usually been dirge-like in various versions, she presents it as a soaring, driving hymn to achievement and love.

Her Dylan songs are some of the most sheerly beautiful, like “It’s all over now, Baby Blue” and “I’ll be your baby tonight”, but the big surprise is her version of “Don’t think twice, it’s all right” which is so firmly fixed, in my mind at least, as a Joan Baez classic, that to hear it suddenly emerge anew like a butterfly from a chrysalis is quite mind-blowing. One reviewer on the flyer available in the foyer (no programs in cabaret) said that “Barb Jungr turned this reviewer into a Bob Dylan fan” and I know precisely what s/he means. It’s as if Dylan’s lyrics come into their own when they’re not accompanied by that gravelly voice. So that “If not for you” from his “little happy phase” (according to Jungr) she sings with relish for what she calls its “salty taste” and she belts out his gospel song “Ring them bells” as if she’s leading a Harlem choir.

There are so many high points, but I particularly liked her anecdote of Sandy and Hugh in Amsterdam as a prelude to Brownie McGhee’s “Rainy Day” and then her segue from this into a reference to one of those iconic Edward Hopper paintings about the loneliness of the city and the Dylan song “I’ll be your baby tonight” mentioned above. And then there’s her 78-year-old friend Ernest who prompts a lovely meditation on memory and how a small thing can bring back all the joy of a love affair, which leads into the Jacques Brel song “Marieke” with its mesmerising repetition of “between the towers of Bruges and Ghent.” I haven’t mentioned her new translation of “No regrets” or “Ne me quitte pas” for which she had to apply for permission to make the translation to Mme Brel who controls the estate. Or the little story about Colonel Parker who didn’t want Elvis to include “In the ghetto” on any of his recordings. Jungr’s version of it is a revelation, yet again. She opened the evening with one of her own songs “Beautiful Life” and that together with the gentleness and hope of Eric Bibb’s “Heading Home” in the second half summed up what I might call the philosophy of her performance.

The delightful “Dirty old river” or “Waterloo Sunset” by Ray Davies, founding member of The Kinks, was her encore, specially for Luke somewhere in the audience. Lucky Luke.

Playing Brisbane 22 September 2007, Coffs Harbour 25 Sept, Kincumber 27 Sept, Brunswick 28 Sept, Canberra 29 Sept.

Duration : 2hrs 25mins (including 25min interval).


— Barbara Garlick

(Performance seen: 22nd September 2007)
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Post Office Rose  
Dogs in the Roof Theatre Company (Roundhouse Theatre)

By Linda Hassall

Professional

The subtitle of Post Office Rose is “love, loyalty and patsy cline” which is as far from the truth as you could imagine, unless, of course, your ideas of love and loyalty particularly are merely based on Oprah-reality. The play is part of La Boite’s Roundhouse Theatre Presents initiative this year, aimed at helping smaller companies by offering them a venue in return for a weekly fee paid out of the box office profits. It’s a great project, a professional theatre space with the expertise and the promise of all the audience goodwill that goes with it. I didn’t see the first production of Post Office Rose four years ago at Metro Arts, but in a recent article in the Courier-Mail, Helen Cassidy, one of the original cast members, says that only minor changes were made. I wonder how the transition from proscenium to the La Boite space might have affected the current production, in which Cassidy as Patsy Cline (and occasionally other characters) moves around the stage in her stiff petticoat and rhinestone cowgirl hat, encircling the warring “friends” and representing more of a malevolent than a benign presence — perhaps it was her Ambush perfume, which the girls copied to hide the smell of pigs and blood. This is Outback Gothic, folks, and perhaps I’m being overly influenced by that brooding atmosphere. It’s all about the past and what went wrong there, no glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel, only a lazy ceiling fan casting shadows.

The set is as dour and grim as the past and present of the characters: a central square filled with what looked like sawdust that the old butchers’ shops had on their floors to soak up the blood (more of that later) or the pub floors of a previous generation when the 6 o-clock swill still dictated the timetables of people’s lives. On the fourth wall were a corrugated iron bar and a juke box against the wall. Two tables with chairs, a wooden stage and a bowl of limp chips, a guitar hanging on the wall which holds the dread Secret and a Tupperware container with Eddie’s mothers ashes and some paper roses in it, and that’s about it. Not much of a future for Eddie (Caroline Dunphy) who now owns the Post Office Hotel and is the keeper of the Secret. Mind you, it’s not much of a world to have lived in all your life with the pigs squealing outside, the stench of the abattoir, and the customers with permanent blood under their fingernails. It’s no wonder that the three friends try to escape into the world of Patsy Cline as 18-year-olds by forming a girl band, the Paper Roses, to play in the pub and earn some money to get out of it all. The other solution might be to run away with the handsome stranger with the guitar, but only one between three of them? Not enough handsome strangers to go round.

So the past and the present intersect and overlap when Charlie (Jessica Veurman-Betts) comes back after 15 years for a reunion of the band. All long legs, silver strap shoes and Dukes of Hazzard brief denim shorts, nerves and a bag full of pills, and, as we learn later, a dysfunctional childhood of, dare I say, Gothic proportions. Eddie is comparatively gentle with her compared to Louie (Kathryn Lister) who has been coming back each year and arrives late, with venom on her tongue, but then she’s the catalyst for the build-up to the revelation of the Secret. Lines like “we couldn’t shave our legs till we got our rags” come thick and fast. Nostalgia comes to life as the spot lights opposite sides of the set and various combinations move back to their 18-year-old selves, softer perhaps, but always on the edge of violent confrontations.

The singing of the Patsy Cline standards is good both by Helen Cassidy and by the girls who join in with her, and frequently the songs make an ironic comment on the action. In fact it’s a very well staged and acted piece by them all: Louie’s brittle domineering beauty, Eddie’s tough-guy survivor pose, and fragile Charlie who can shout with the best of them when she is revved up enough to want to set the past right. But it’s an ugly play, and it’s not all about love and loyalty, just about surviving. I was intermittently reminded of a fine old movie called Doing Time for Patsy Cline, and thought that inspiration is a funny thing. It can take you to the heights or the depths. In terms of this play, I guess Patsy Cline has a lot to answer for.

Directed by Shaun Charles

Playing: 20-29 September 2007. Previews 18, 19 Sept. Mon-Wed 6.30pm, Thurs-Sat 8pm, matinee Sat 29 Sept 2pm.

Duration: 1hr 30mins, no interval.


— Barbara Garlick

(Performance seen: 20th September 2007)
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Women in Voice 16  
Playhouse

Creative Producer: Annie Peterson

Presented by QPAC in association with Queensland Folk Federation and Annie Peterson

Professional

This season marks the 16th birthday of Women in Voice and as Annie Peterson, its founder, says in her program note, turning sweet 16 is “a milestone that we are all extremely proud of. One that we hoped for but never expected.” It promises to be an unusual party, a big dollop of nostalgia, some exotic strangeness, a bit of continental sophistication, some hard-driving guitar, and some of the funniest opera parody I’ve ever seen, all supported by the brilliant musical backing of Jamie Clark on guitar, John Parker on drums and percussion, John Rodgers on violin, keyboard and guitar, Stephen Russell on piano, and Helen Russell, who’s also the musical director, on bass. It’s a big night, and to celebrate we have not one but two Kransky Sisters. First is Annie Lee as the MC for the evening who initiates the audience into the journey into the imagination that she’s going to take with them. Is it a bedtime story or a racy hometown history? And speaking of the audience, there’s no subdued hum here before the curtain goes up. The loyal WIV following is noisy as a swarm of chattering magpies and colourful as a flock of birds of paradise. They all know each other, it seems, and they also know how to party.

Annie Lee, in a high-necked long dress and looking like a cross between a Victorian governess and a brothel madam, chose the path of the innocent, and against a gentle bell-like sound, she sang the Beatles’ song “Because the world is round” followed by a small, knowing grin and a bit of cheap philosophy: we sing songs to help us remember, and to help us forget. Then comes a little riddle and the arrival of the second Kransky sister, Christine Johnston, she of the amazing jawline and the seriously strange world in her head. Tonight she resembles Rachel Roberts in Picnic at Hanging Rock with a dash of Turn of the Screw for good measure, but the “child” turns out to be an epidiascope, which she wheels on as if in a pram. After singing “Good morning, how are you” and conducting the three backing singers (all in short black outfits like gym slips) in “What I like about you”, all this exaggeratedly and parodically enunciated, she projects a list of Latin names of plants, which she then chants as if in church, morphing at last into the same intoning of familiar phrases like “stiff cheddar” or “don’t come the raw prawn with me.” There’s no way to categorise an act like this. At one moment she plays with her hair comb so that the shadow looks like jagged fingers on the screen, she lets her hair down, she picks up a bow and a musical handsaw and sings absolutely seriously in ballad style the lovely “Wild is the wind” (recorded memorably by Nina Simone amongst others) with the keening of the saw mimicking the sound of the wind, and then she admonishes the schoolgirl backing singers to take notes as there will be questions tomorrow. It’s very exhilarating.

Jackie Marshall, Chapter 2 of Annie Lee’s story (perhaps a pillow book?) belted out a couple of her own songs, the most memorable being the quirky “The Ugly Man”. Her chat about singing of pain, boozy sessions, and talking to a stranger all seemed a bit contrived, and she’s got some clumsy moves on stage, but there’s no mistaking her power as a guitar player. Leonard Cohen’s “Bird on the Wire” (a k.d. lang special) was a disappointment, and the huge sound she and the band made overwhelmed the emotion and power of Cohen’s lyrics.

I was disappointed too in Annie Peterson’s set, mainly because she wanted to remind us all of the early years of WIV, so we were treated to the cowgirl song complete with bull’s horns and Peterson and Christine Johnston teaming up with their hobby horses. It might have worked in the intimate setting way back then, and certainly the yodelling was great (the real reason for wanting to get up on stage in the first place), but in the Playhouse that old-fashioned charm and nostalgia fell pretty flat. So much so that the gentle, beautifully sung Irish folk ballad “As I rode out one bright May morning” which was her tribute to the Woodford Folk Festival and all their support over the past few years, and the equally iconic Queen ballad “Somebody to love” seemed to shout incoherence in the set rather than range.

With Annie Lee’s promise of selling love potions at interval, I was wondering whether the second half would pick up again or whether the desire to remember was bogging down the exhilaration that Christine Johnston had engendered earlier. When Lee returned with some more hokey philosophy and a quote from Poe, however, it was time to bring on Alison St Ledger and her Australian in Brisbane slideshow, capturing the girl herself in French-looking gear against some vaguely Parisian-seeming structures like Park Road Eiffel Tower and the Wickham Terrace Tower. Scatty but endearing, but when she began to sing, Piaf and Jacques Brel, it was another world completely. “La vie en rose”, “Padam Padam”, “Ne me quitte pas” and finally one of the fastest and most brilliant versions of “Carousel” I’ve ever heard; after all, its French title is “La valse à mille temps”.

What can one say about Carita Farrer, the last of the women? She was an hilarious MC last year, and this year she is the ultimate opera diva who was born on the stage during Madama Butterfly; opera is her life, and she lives life as opera. The glove puppet dog who fossicks in her ample cleavage as Butterfly’s child, the Wagnerian sword that’s too big to fall on — she also plays Siegfried — the axe in the head, out of all this she creates mayhem on stage, while all the time belting out magnificent arias. Her tour de force is to play both main parts of the Phantom at once, arriving on a boat wreathed in dry ice, in white satin for Christine, then, not always deftly, turning to her other side for the mask and black satin as the Phantom with a growling voice to match the part. It’s an inspired piece of comic disorder and frenetic overkill.

So there we have it, another year, possibly not quite as brilliant this year as last, although there were moments which surpassed anything before. As bubbles rained down and they all sang “They say that I’m crazy”, I thought that it’s not too long to go before number 17. Bring it on, girls.

Directed by Karen Crone

Playing 12-22 September 2007.

Duration : 2hrs 20mins (including 20min interval).


— Barbara Garlick

(Performance seen: 14th September 2007)
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The Reunion  
Sue Benner Theatre, Metro Arts

By Daniel Evans and Rebecca Meston

Performing as part of Independents 2007, Metro Arts

Professional

When I read the notes by Saffron Benner (as dramaturg) in the program, my heart sank a little. This is “a play by and for young people.” Perhaps I should leave straight away: there was a bit too much dry ice floating round for my liking, and the music was really, really loud. Added to that was the voice which told us all to turn off our mobile phones. It was one of those detestable laughing voices which advertise things you’d never dream of buying, even if you desperately needed them, simply because that voice made it all seem so jolly and easy, and you knew you couldn’t really afford it. I believe that such voices make a comfortable living in the voiceover market. Even the ABC uses them. I looked at the audience, a few bald heads around (surely they couldn’t only be ten years out of school), I liked the set — standard metal school lockers disgorging dubious treasures with pin-ups inside the door, even some just inside the auditorium as you went in — so I settled in. A wise choice.

The laughing tones were followed by a more sober male voiceover with a quick rundown of the headlines during those ten years from high school formal to reunion: American high school massacres, Howard on Australian history, Port Arthur, the death of Diana, hijacked airliners, a tumultuous turn of the millennium. A neat piece of exposition, setting the scene of those intervening years. The laughing voice turned out to be Angela (Belinda Heit), ex-school captain, organiser of the reunion and hyper-organiser, laughing manically from sheer nerves as she arranges the name tags for the tenth anniversary of the end of high school.

From then on, the five 1997 and the five 2007 characters intermingled, sometimes enacting teenage adventures and trials, sometimes those of their late twenties, and sometimes, as the play progressed, coming to painful terms with their younger or older selves. Puzzlement and confusion led to strange resolutions, and couples shifted alliances in a quite dazzling way at times. The strength of the script, the heaps of one-liners, the startling and very funny confrontations, all remind me of Daniel Evans’s strange one-act play which was on at Metro Arts last year, Holy Guacamole. It too displayed an inventive approach to what works on stage, a quick wit and some marvellous, laugh-out-loud lines, particularly from old Granny. Evans has already been awarded a QTC Young Playwright’s Award for his first play called Opening a Fuzzwollop’s Frame of Mind (with a title like that I wish I’d seen it), which went on to be published by Currency Press, and he now has several other plays to his credit. He is obviously a talent to watch, with a wonderfully quick ear for smart dialogue which is much in evidence in this piece. Here he has a co-creator (their term) in Rebecca Meston, and from her biog in the program, I would imagine that she probably contributed, if not as many words, then certainly a good deal of the choreography and the imaginative use of the small Benner Theatre stage which ensured that its size limitations were never a problem.

However, many a good piece of theatre has been spoiled by a lacklustre cast, but thankfully everyone at and in The Reunion was excellent, and the 1997 kids really did look younger than their 2007 counterparts. Their fundamental quirks and obsessions were still there, but over the period of ten years, these had mostly been successfully assimilated into the mature self. In the case of the stud Anthony@17 (Tim Dashwood) though, nothing much had changed: a more subtle thrust of the crotch perhaps, with the same reliance on macho charm and the old come-on lines, which we see being enthusiastically tried out by the lover boy of year 12, were still being trotted out by the real estate agent of the 21st century (Matthew Filkins). By contrast Angela@17 (Judy Hainsworth), the sexy, uninhibited, no-holds-barred school captain, best girlfriend of Anthony@17, had matured into the Angela@27 who questioned her love for and marriage to Anthony, and lacked confidence both in her appearance and her ability to bring off a successful reunion.

The other “couple” were the odd ones, the nerdy Morris (Daniel White) who always wore a cycle helmet and thick glasses, was intimidated by Mummy, always being bullied by the young Anthony, but devoted to the other oddball, Zoe (Natalie Trent) who taught him about real modern music and wondered if the school was ready for “Kurt” (yes, it is a long time ago) which she was constantly in tune with through permanent headphones. She’s an outsider whose mother, we learn later, always packed a bible instead of tampons — who wouldn’t be twisted, especially when you menstruate in a white dress at the year 12 formal? Their modern counterparts have matured quite unexpectedly into Morris@27 (Chris Power), a quiet, possibly dull, social worker committed to good works, and the elegant, rather threatening Zoe@27 (Jess Loudon), who appears to be either a high-class whore or someone who likes extremely rough sex and whose sole aim seems to be to destroy her old self, to the extent of attempting to strangle her and dispose of her in a cellar. Zoe@27’s promising to have it off with Anthony@27 and then quite spectacularly seducing Anthony@17 sets in motion all sorts of recriminations and action, including a fight with Morris@17 who kicks Anthony@17 when he’s down in return for all the pain and humiliations he suffered in high school. Anthony@17 is later also given a satisfying kick by Anthony@27 who had himself fancied his chances with Zoe@27. Sorry for all the email addresses. I’m just copying the program, a neat way of conveying the intricate convolutions of the action.

The real hit of the evening are the two Gretels, Gretel@17 (Tammy Weller), a sweet, round-faced, innocent, always eager to help, worried about her plumpness, and Gretel@27 (Natasha Yantsch), a TV “personality” who has seen and done it all, thin as a rake, strawblond hair, a wonderful line in repartee, likes a tipple, and not one to be trifled with by anyone. Gretel@17 finally appears at the formal in a pink wig and dressing gown eerily coming on and off stage at random like a ghost at the feast, until she finally throws the dressing gown off revealing a skimpy fringed dress and performs the Wilson Phillips hit “Hold on for one more day” (the Wilson Phillips girls are incidentally thanked in the program). This was a real high point. In no time at all the two Angelas and the older Gretel join in, and it becomes a powerful hymn to sisterhood, with Gretel@27 (the ex-Dancing with the Stars star) choreographing their at-first reluctant steps.

The neat ending sees the 27-year-olds farewelling the school kids as they graduate and step out on their life’s journey, a strangely endearing moment. A lot has happened, but nothing much has changed: Angela will leave Anthony, Zoe will continue her lone path, Morris his, and Gretel will probably burn out early, but always with a sassy line on her lips. A great evening and an overload of talent.

Directed by Daniel Evans and Rebecca Meston

Playing 5-22 September 2007. Tues – Sat at 7.30pm.

Duration : 2hrs (including 20min interval)


— Barbara Garlick

(Performance seen: 8th September 2007)
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A Large Attendance in the Antechamber  
Visy Theatre, Brisbane Powerhouse

By Brian Lipson and Sir Francis Galton

Professional Production

Sometimes you leave a theatre really grateful that you were able to spend a fleeting portion of your life engaged by a brilliant performance. You feel a shift in your thought processes, you feel challenged by a production, and it is exhilarating and fulfilling. As the applause died down after Brian Lipson’s one-man show, the man next to me breathed ‘I’ve never seen anything like that before’, and there were similar comments from others nearby. Lipson’s performance had enthralled the audience and we shuffled out of the theatre in a state of awe. Indeed, I felt panicked at the prospect of having to write about this play, which had consumed me to such an extent that I felt muddled and overwhelmed afterwards.

A Large Attendance in the Antechamber is about Sir Francis Galton (1822 – 1911). Google this man and you will see the enormous volume of work he produced in the fields of anthropology, geography, meteorology, genetics, and psychology, among others. The cousin of Charles Darwin, Galton was a child prodigy who could read by the age of two and made remarkable contributions throughout his life, but he is now remembered mainly as the pioneer of eugenics (the science of improving a race through selective breeding). The principles of eugenics have since been used most notably by Hitler during the Holocaust, and also to justify other atrocities—ethnic cleansing projects, KKK activity, and the removal of ‘half-caste’ Aboriginal children from their parents, to name a few. Galton’s ideas arguably sprung from an idealistic impulse to perfect and strengthen the human race, but are now regarded as responsible for some of the most appalling acts of the modern world.

So, why see a play about him?

Primarily, because he is insanely interesting as a figure of destructive genius. And also because the eugenic legacy lives on—both in the residual trauma of past eugenic projects and in the fierce debate that rages still over questions of genetic engineering. Having expected a play about history, I was instead confronted with a show that, in fact, has as much to do with slippery present issues as it has to do with the past (stay alert for a momentary but pointed reference to 9/11).

This past/present duality is skilfully woven into the play’s writing. Lipson doesn’t just take on Galton’s character and ask the audience to suspend disbelief—he plays Galton being channelled through the body of Lipson from beyond the grave. Galton thus scoffs at, and gradually removes, Lipson’s costume. He draws attention to the inadequacy of the actor and the theatrical mode as a whole. And, ultimately, the show works towards a frenzy in which Lipson and Galton do battle in the same body, blurring the lines between one another as they try to outwit and undermine each other’s message. A truly bizarre spectacle, matched only by the eccentric character of Galton himself, who works furiously, constantly, obsessively at various whimsical inventions throughout the show.

Worthy of mention also are the props and set. As well as performing it, Brian Lipson wrote and designed the play, and this unity of purpose is evident at every turn. The stage is reduced to a cramped little cube from which Galton hauls object after object, constructing apparatus for demonstrating his theories. It is a claustrophobic puppet box of sorts, coffin-like, but also designed to play on notions of puppetry (at one point a white screen transforms it into a modified Punch and Judy shadow-puppet show) and control. Is Lipson controlling Galton, or is it the other way around? And is the notion of play-acting a real historical figure in a theatre any more than a puppet-show spectacle anyway?

From time to time an animated Galton climbs out of his box to interact with the audience. While audience involvement often runs the risk of falling flat or being cheesy, the audience in this case was delighted. Lipson really is a top-class actor and he excels in the improvisational moments that the script demands. His performance is inspired and deserving of the critical acclaim that it has garnered on tour.

A Large Attendance in the Antechamber hurls many questions into the ether. One could write essays on the scientific and philosophical conundrums it poses. Aside from its intellectual challenge though, it is seriously FUN. It has the quality of a sort of magic show—unpredictable, furiously paced, hilarious, ridiculous—and yet, haunted particularly by a projected composite photograph of Jewish boys, it simultaneously holds immense power to chill and disturb.

Directors: Lucy Bailey, Phelim McDermott, Susie Dee

Playing until 9 September 2007: Tues – Sat 8pm, Sun 9 September 6pm

Running time: 90 mins


— Casey Hutton

(Performance seen: 5th September 2007)
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Walking by Apple Tree Creek  
La Boite Theatre

Professional production

Apple Tree Creek is a real place, a tiny village very close to Childers on the Bruce Highway. It’s famous for its dance hall, but there’s not much else to see, and most tourists only stop there because of Max Blochliger-Jabs’ Exotic Jam Factory, where they can buy conserves and jellies made from jaboticaba, cab-sav grapes, rhubarb, or strawberries with cracked pepper.

For the Grey Nomad (“Adventure before Dementia”) Brigade, therefore, it’s an optional stop, but Del and Stan Holloway (Carol Burns and Bob Newman) find themselves stranded there in their old Winnebago, because her longed-for adventure has morphed into his dementia, and there’s nowhere to go except back into the past.

This is an exceptionally fine new play by Brisbane’s Ian Brown, driven by character and situation rather than plot. In fact, it’s more of a monologue for female actor, because Del has the only dialogue, to which her sad husband, rendered speechless and unresponsive by Parkinson’s disease and dementia, cannot (or chooses not to) respond.

To give all the dialogue to a single character is a dangerous dramatic device, risking the possibility that the play will come across as one-sided, but Bob Newman is marvellous here, for it’s never clear whether Stan is deliberately not responding to Del’s constant nattering, or whether he is subtly punishing her for some unknown reason. There’s just enough ambiguity in his behaviour, whether it’s in the lift of the eyebrow or his awkward stance, to make the audience uncomfortable, and he’s the perfect foil for Carol Burns’s outstanding performance. If he were not there, the play would be little more than a brief sketch, hardly worthy of the full production it’s been given.

Credit must also be given to Bruce McKinven’s design, simple but never simplistic, where the beat-up rusting motor home sits as awkwardly as its owners, and provides the perfect foil for the sad winding-up of their active lives and, possibly, their marriage. The set underpins and also enhances the theme of the play, as does Jason Organ’s brilliant opening lighting sequence, where a back-projection makes us scarily experience Stan’s all-over-the-road driving technique. It’s one of the cleverest opening scenes I’ve seen in a long time.

None of this is meant to detract from the pure genius of Carol Burns’s performance though, for she shows here that she is the consummate actor. As they age, many female actors take on roles that are more and more stereotyped, but in the last two years alone Burns has given us Queen Jocasta in Oedipus Rex, an average suburban housewife in The Goat, the neurotic southern belle Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie, and now this older, sadder, more realistic character whose independence is slowly and inexorably slipping away from her.

Del is the kind of person we see so often in documentaries and television current affairs shows, the faithful if not always happy wife who has stood by her husband through thick and thin, who realises that ultimately loyalty is in itself a kind of love, but that when her partner is rendered helpless by age or illness, then even her unexciting lifestyle is threatened. It’s the tragedy of the ageing married couple, and Burns captures both the poignancy and the frustrations of the situation.

I think that this in itself is enough, and that the dramatic revelations and the obligatory Big Speech at the end of the play detract from its power to unnerve us. For the sake of those who like unexpected bits of dirty linen to come out of the clothes basket, I won’t give away the ending, but the last ten minutes of the text are extraneous to the real issue, which is strong enough to speak for itself. The play is not like a mystery where we need to have all the pieces fitting together to bring it to a satisfactory conclusion, for it’s not about moving towards an explanation, a resolution or an ending. The tragedy lies in the situation itself, which is beyond redemption and has its own dramatic integrity. But I suppose that without the last ten minutes we would be left with a one-hour monologue, not big enough for a main-house production, but more of a television event.

In spite of these niggles it’s a play worth seeing, as an opportunity to see portrayed in fine dramatic form an issue that gets very little theatrical attention. For the older members of the audience it provided a shudder of recognition of an inevitable fate and, for the younger ones, an opportunity to see that the old have their tragedies too, and that powerful relationships don’t have to be between the Romeo-and-Juliets of this world, or even the Anthony-and-Cleopatras. Ordinary old age and its problems can be just as traumatic, and just as appropriate as a theatrical issue.

Director: Jean-Marc Russ

Playing 30 August – 15 September 2007, Tue & Wed 6.30pm, Thu – Sat 8pm Matinees Wed 29 August, Tue 4 & 11 September 11am, Sat 15 September 2pm

Duration : 70 minutes, no interval


— Alison Cotes

(Performance seen: 30th August 2007)
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Ying Tong - A Walk with the Goons  
Queensland Theatre Company (Playhouse)

By Roy Smiles

Professional production

Everyone has a favourite Goon line, I’m sure. Or at least everyone over a certain age. Neddie Seagoon fronts up to the customs desk: “Do you have anything to declare, Sir?” Neddie: “What a wonderful day it is today.” Comedy is a funny thing, though. It often doesn’t transplant very smoothly, neither across the years nor over the oceans, and there are Goon fans and people who can’t stand the Goons everywhere. It’s pretty clear though that without the anarchic brilliance of the Goons, Britain might not have had Monty Python, and without Monty Python there might not have been the Goodies, and so on, right up to the repetitive bad taste of Little Britain. None of these programs, however, has contained such a huge number of one-liners, the breathless madness of plots, the sheer delight in the quirks and craziness of language, year after year after year. So thank you Roy Smiles for writing this play about Spike Milligan’s writing of and adventures in the surreal world of the Goons. And thank you to this brilliant cast which made this the funniest and the most moving night out in the theatre in recent memory.

It’s hard to realise that Milligan was writing the Goon scripts over a period of nine years, for most of the 1950s, with a little help along the way from people like Eric Sykes, and much ad-libbing from his fellow Goons. England was in the grip of rationing still, it was an austere post-war country with high unemployment, disaffected and damaged ex-soldiers, the grim realities of whole bombed-out city blocks and thick air pollution from coal fires. Into this fairly bleak world in 1951 the BBC suddenly launched the radio program called at first Crazy People, then, by the end of year, simply The Goon Show. By 1953 the shows were beginning to have a single plot each time, so that people could just mention a title, say, The Affair of the Lone Banana, The Great Tuscan Salami Scandal or Ten Snowballs that Shook the World, in order to conjure up a whole half-hour of mayhem. During all this time Milligan’s mental health was precarious, damaged by the brutal horrors of war and the loneliness of a disrupted Indian childhood: “we gave India three things, railways, rifles and herpes.” He had had his first breakdown in 1952 when he tried to kill Peter Sellers with a potato peeler, and from then on it was a bumpy ride to get the scripts both written and recorded.

Roy Smiles teases his audience with a non-chronological vision from inside the madhouse, or loony bin, of Milligan’s mind in which his three fellow comedians - his rival and equally comic genius Peter Sellers, the loyal dependable Harry “Neddie” Secombe with the deep-chested and thrilling voice, and Wallace Greenslade, announcer and ringmaster extraordinaire — all appear to him in various guises which both suggest plotlines and dialogue and play out the tensions of their conflicting roles in the show. The set is simple: two BBC microphones in front of the curtain, and behind the curtain a vast, crypt-like space receding upstage in which the hospital iron bed and a metal desk for his doctor (alias Greenslade) are the only props. Two doors lead to the outside world but usually only allow entry to the delusions of his mind. The chipped institutional green tiles and peeling paint represent the nightmare of an antiquated and crumbling health system. This might sound as if the play is unrelievedly sombre, and this is where the real strength of it lies. At the same time as you are having belly laughs at the brilliant one-liners and the side-splitting antics of the four characters, another part of you is registering the pathos of Milligan’s dilemma and his fragility. It says much for Geoff Kelso’s portrayal of Milligan that he never lets things slide into sentimentality, yet even at some of the funniest moments a puzzled frown or a slight grimace indicates the pain. As Greenslade as the doctor makes a mildly amusing comment, Kelso snorts, “A shrink with a crappy sense of humour. It’s going to be a long breakdown.” It’s as if he finds it impossible to suppress the quick, throwaway comment. His comic muse is insatiable, both enemy and necessary friend. “Not another bloody flashback,” he laments. It’s a brilliant and subtle performance.

While Kelso spends most of the play in his pyjamas (regulation stripe), Jonathan Biggins as Sellers and David James as Secombe have a vast number of costume changes as they play out both themselves and the figments of Milligan’s imagination. Biggins particularly sometimes changes so rapidly that you’re left wondering who the fifth character is. Mind you, the first change where he appears at the door in bowler hat and nothing else except an A4-size folded newspaper held over the genitals asking if Milligan knows a good tailor, doesn’t require too much finesse except to maintain a non-wobbly-buttocks walk as he turns his back and exits with great dignity. The arrival of the midget leprechauns, first Sellers, then Secombe and finally Greenslade (Tony Harvey) as the Jewish Irish leprechaun Shamus Bernstein — “they’re multiplying like bloody rabbits” — is the high point of the first act. They must have worn powerful kneepads, because they stomped around the stage, with huge golden shoes appearing from under their green gowns (to cover the back part of the legs), encouraging Milligan as they all outdid each other with the Irish jokes, “I applied for the Irish navy, but the dinghy was full,” “Have you heard about the Irishman who wore two condoms? To be sure. To be sure.” I wish I could have remembered more of them. The trouble is that you are laughing so much that it’s easy to miss some of the great lines.

Milligan’s rivalry with Sellers is one of Smiles’s major themes, with Milligan reassuring himself that Sellers (the comic genius who never speaks in his own voice, his own sign of manic depression) cannot “do” him. It’s somehow a sign of Milligan’s own reality, just as Secombe always does the raspberry (the radio sound effects) to prove he is real. The pain of comedy is ever present with them all, and Milligan finds that he can almost relax when he is in the straitjacket. The various manifestations of the past in Milligan’s mind are prolific and with one exception are all very funny. Biggins is amazing as Sellers as a manic psychiatrist-cum-Dr Strangelove figure complete with red pompadour quiff, smoky glasses and black mechanical hand which he manipulates in a dazzling display of rhythm and dexterity and whom Milligan attacks, throws on the bed and attempts to feel if his “dick has a helmet” because he knows he’s really Sellers. An absurd crazy sequence, and you could never take folk dancing seriously again after seeing Biggins and James as Morris dancers. One of the strangest manifestations, though, is when a tall woman who is obviously Greenslade (Harvey) in drag walks on through the vaulted upstage area, receiving the expected giggle from the audience, only to play the scene absolutely straight as Milligan’s wife June who is leaving him and taking the children. His anguished cry of “I will not die here. I will see my children grow” is a measure of how deftly Smiles has shown us the pain of being Milligan.

The final sequence is a new Goon script (by Smiles), Journey to the Centre of Milligan’s Brain or The Search for Milligan’s Marbles, where they take the number eleven bus to the epicentre and then try to trace the marbles to Greece — we took theirs, now we’ll search for mine. In the process Milligan has to kill off all his characters: Hercules Grytpype-Thynne, a sleazy, well-educated and scheming cad, is killed by gay Vikings; Major Dennis Bloodnok, a corrupt military cad, is killed by killer bees; with Eccles, Bluebottle, etc, etc, all purged. Hardest to kill is the lovable Neddie Seagoon, but Milligan finally manages it, they all sing the Ying Tong Song (idle-i-po), and then to the tune of Lili Marlene, Kelso sings about the men who survived Italy, the lucky D-Day soldiers.

And there you are, a brilliant piece of theatre, brilliantly performed, and if you want to learn more, listen to Radio National at 5.30 on a Friday morning. It’s worth it, and you can always go back to sleep afterwards.

Directed by Richard Cottrell

Playing until 8 September (Tues at 6.30pm; Wed – Sat at 7.30pm, Wed matinee at 1pm, Sat matinee at 2pm)

Duration : 2hrs 20mins (including interval 20mins).


— Barbara Garlick

(Performance seen: 23rd August 2007)
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Cats  
Harvest Rain Theatre Company (Playhouse)

Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, based on T S Eliot’s

Amateur/Professional

Let me say from the outset that this is a thrilling production. I saw the original Australian production in Sydney in 1985, and I can’t remember laughing out loud at all, can’t remember being excited with that adrenaline rush that a really good stage musical gives you. That was a fine production, of course, in the sense that the choreography, the costumes, the music were all professionally superb, but this present show by Harvest Rain had us hooting with delight, and picking up more of Eliot’s own words than way back then. I can’t imagine any company bettering the intelligence of this version and the sheer energy of all the performances.

Director Tim O’Connor had the brilliant idea of setting it in London during the Blitz in 1940 in the ruins of a bombed theatre, which tied in nicely with the eventual story of Gus the Theatre Cat. The bomb site was not only evocative of a civilisation being destroyed - Eliot’s book was published in 1939 when it was obvious that Europe was falling to the Nazis—but it also provided some wonderful spaces on which the cats could hide and sneak and leap from. As the audience came in, various paws would suddenly emerge, scratch and retreat again, and it was the air raid siren which woke them all up as the performance began. From then on it was non-stop action, colour and sound. Spectacular costumes and set (Josh McIntosh), musical direction (Dale Lingwood), lighting (Toni Smith) - I couldn’t fault them. And what dancers! I’m going to run out of superlatives, particularly when you consider only six weeks for rehearsal and the comparatively small stage that they had to work on. Callum Mansfield’s choreography was tight, imaginative, athletic, with each dancer having a principal’s moment to savour. He himself was a lithe and charismatic Mr Mistoffelees, the Original Conjuring Cat, and the audience were totally entranced with his magic tricks.

It’s difficult to highlight particular numbers because there were such continuity and uniformity of excellence. In the first half I was delighted with Rum Tum Tugger (Wade Colbran-Thomas) as a big tom cat in a bomber jacket who emphasised the individualistic anarchy of Eliot’s cat, with some of Growltiger’s characteristics creeping in there too, but with the most playfully lecherous grins and hip swivelling I’ve seen in a long time, perhaps not since Elvis. In the second half, by contrast, the Railway Cat Skimbleshanks (Conrad Lange) was a perfect timetable cat with the broad PR smile and the neatness of the company man, looking as though he cleaned his teeth at least three times a day and scrubbed his nails before going to work. And there was a wonderful bump and grind routine from Demeter (Alex Feifers) and Bombalurina (Amanda Richardson) as they searched for Macavity the Mystery Cat, the Napoleon of crime. I was a little disappointed in Grizabella (Angel Dormer), although the pathos was still there as she was ostracized by the rest of the Jellicle Cats because of her lurid past. Memory, usually the highlight of the show, was melancholic to the point of inertia, but the lovely voice of Danae Stewart as Jemima in the final duet lifted it to the point where Grizabella’s apotheosis was genuinely moving.

One of my favourites is Gus the Theatre Cat, at his prime in Victorian and Edwardian times who laments what “modern productions” have done to the theatre. Gus once understudied Dick Whittington’s Cat, played in that hoary old Victorian favourite East Lynne, and knew seventy speeches by heart. The gallery once called him back for seven curtain calls, but his greatest triumph was as Firefrorefiddle the Fiend of the Fell. It’s Gus who initiates the explosive theatre sequence of Growltiger’s Last Stand which almost looks as if it’s a parody of Les Mis at times.

This Cats has plenty of these unexpected moments of humour, and it’s in Gus’s part that you can see most clearly Tim O’Connor’s keen sense of theatre and his ability to make fun of theatrical pretension - via Eliot, of course. Old Deuteronomy was also a gem with a superbly resonant voice and a gravitas that made him the still point in the ever-turning world of the Jellicle Cats. Other delights? The diminutive and delicate Kimie Tsukakoshi as the acrobatic Victoria, all in white with blue ribbons, the great voice of Sharon Stoodley as Jennyanydots, and just the stunning look of so many of them from the marmalade cats to the aloof Burmese. Lycra never looked so good.

To paraphrase Eliot himself, I had the experience and I enjoyed the meaning. So how does one go about learning how to address a cat?

Before a Cat will condescend
To treat you as a trusted friend,
Some little token of esteem
Is needed, like a dish of cream;
And you might now and then supply
Some caviar, or Strasburg Pie,
Some potted grouse, or salmon paste -
He's sure to have his personal taste.
(I know a Cat, who makes a habit
Of eating nothing else but rabbit,
And when he's finished, licks his paws
So's not to waste the onion sauce.)
A Cat's entitled to expect
These evidences of respect.
And so in time you reach your aim,
And finally call him by his NAME.

Directed by Tim O’Connor

Playing until 22 September 2007: Wed-Sat 7.30pm; Sat matinee 2pm.

Duration : 2hrs 10mins (including interval 20mins).


— Barbara Garlick

(Performance seen: 17th August 2007)

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Broad  
Maiden Australia Productions (QPAC Concert Hall)

Devised by Deborah Conway

Professional

For just one night the Concert Hall came alive to the sounds of five broads singing mostly their own songs and playing a bewildering array of instruments (did I see a theremin in there at one stage? And was that a melodica?), and later backed up by the testosterone element in the form of Max on bass, Jonathan on percussion and James Black on everything else. It was an exhilaratingly big sound. I must confess to a lingering dislike of the term “broads”. Too many overtones of Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack, I fear. But with Deborah Conway as den mother, with her frequent allusions to the mighty oestrogen level on stage, the performance soon did away with any patronising hangovers in the term. So broads it is, and broad they are in their range and talents. And this is number three Broad, travelling on mainly one-night stands to Canberra, Sydney, Darwin, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth after Brisbane.

The stage is dark, with five white/gold silhouettes on banners which move lazily in the air currents. The instruments are the sole light-coloured and shining objects until the performers walk on and five spots illuminate them. It’s a dramatic moment, and the big sound that follows continues the drama. Later the lights begin to illuminate the intricate pipes of the Concert Hall organ, and the space resembles a modern cathedral where the worship is all about women’s music.

Unlike Women in Voice, Broad does not do cabaret. All five — Anne McCue, Sally Seltmann, Jade MacRae, Abbe May, and the formidable Deborah Conway remain on stage the whole time, each singing usually one of their own songs in which the others join in along the way, all exploring and tasting the blend of different vocal styles and themes. It’s all pleasantly sororial, and Conway even pays homage to a previous broad, Clare Bowditch, who was one of the Broad sisters in 2005 and whose marriage prompted Conway to write the lovely ballad about love in the Middle Ages, with the less than ancient line “I might have cold feet, but, baby, my heart is warm.” In between songs, Conway encourages the others to introduce themselves and to make what are sometimes hesitant comments on their career and their desires. This is not always very successful. We learn that McCue sees herself as an outsider, Seltmann as a loner, MacRae, amongst other things, has a strong social conscience, and May had a bad time at school. But these women are all singer-songwriters, and what you find out in these rather stumbling, almost embarrassed bits of autobiography is as nothing compared to the raw, driving, passionate effect of their own songs. We learn everything we need to know, for instance, in McCue’s first number, “From Bakersfield to Saigon” with her accompanying brilliant acoustic guitar. Now living in Nashville (probably temporarily, given the theme of the song), she has also taken the long road “from Campbelltown to Beirut.” Yes, she’s a little Aussie sheila, whose home is wherever she lands and where the music is. It’s a wonderful song and deserves to be a hit in the great tradition of the travelling song.

Sally Seltmann records as New Buffalo and will tour as support to Paul Kelly immediately the Broad tour finishes. She plays a delicate keyboard, and you can hear her classical background lurking in the deceptively sweet melodies and rhythms. Her lyrics are strangely intimate, private, plaintive, often repetitive, which creates both a spoken and musical rhythm. She doesn’t have a strong voice, and yet her musicianship is unmistakable in songs like “Cheering me up and I’m thanking you” and “It’s True.” At one stage in the between-songs chat, she tries to explain how reluctant she felt at first at the prospect of being part of a touring chick band (as Conway calls the group), and her segments are noticeably more individualistic. However, what is so marvellous about this show is how these different styles do blend and rock the hall.

The New Zealander Jade MacRae has been frequently likened to Beyoncé and to the greatest R&B singers, and she certainly packs a punch, both with her voice and her stage presence. A wonderful talent, and still only mid-twenties, and she can also play the violin. And there’s Abbe May, this year’s winner of Western Australia’s Best Female Artist and front woman of The Fuzz, almost a Suzie Quatro sound-and-lookalike, and with a wonderfully melodious whistle with which she opens the second half, alone on stage singing the ukulele song (which is really called “Storm”), until the others join her down the aisle, all whistling and playing ukuleles as well. Is she twenty yet? McCue’s “little ditty” about the Ku Klux Klan sort of set the tone for the second half after that, with its amazingly atmospheric screeching cadences of the victims’ screams. Deborah Conway came into her own as well much more in the second half as she quoted Jule Styne, the Tin Pan Alley great, “Without the rendition there is no song.” The evening ended with the Tom Petty “No, I won’t back down”, led by Conway and followed by a wonderful encore, the Bob Dylan anthem “You gonna have to serve somebody” with finally a short, haunting a cappella piece which showed off the blend of voices perfectly.

Playing Brisbane 17 Aug; Canberra 18 Aug; Sydney 19 Aug; Darwin 20, 21 Aug; Melbourne 23, 24 Aug; Adelaide 25 Aug; Perth 26 Aug.

Duration: 2hrs (including 20-min interval).


— Barbara Garlick

(Performance seen: 17th August 2007)

www.STAGEDIARY.com: Queensland's Online Stage Magazine
Closer  
23rd Productions (Metro Arts Theatre)

By Patrick Marber

Professional production

Closer is the inaugural production of a new, self-funded theatre company on the block, and I wish it well, because there were buckets of energy and skill in all aspects of this first show. My reservations are mainly about the chosen play, a very 90s narcissistic exercise by Patrick Marber, who among other things wrote the screenplay for that unpleasantly discomfiting film Notes on a Scandal starring Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett. The play has been hugely popular since its first production at the National Theatre in London in 1997, first in the small Cottesloe then in the Lyttelton, finally transferring to the West End and thereafter in little and state theatres all over the place, a fixture for both amateur and professional companies. It premiered in New York in 1999 and was made into a film in 2004, directed by Mike Nichols and starring Julia Roberts, Natalie Portman, Jude Law and Clive Owen. What a cast! The play promises to be another Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Edward Albee), which was also later made into a film and directed by Mike Nichols, always being revived because it has four really meaty roles, but still somehow a dated version of lovers tearing each other apart (in Albee’s case the 1960s). Marber himself has been a comedian, director, poker player, playwright/screenwriter and also, according to one interview, has some experience of all-out romantic warfare.

I didn’t see the film, but I might eventually get out a DVD when there’s nothing else on the box. Marber himself has said that it’s all in the dialogue, which is clever, in many cases memorable, and very theatrical, so I wonder whether it is also successful cinematically as Virginia Woolf was. Mind you, Taylor and Burton could flay each other verbally, and the sexual potency of their relationship would still leap off the screen. Jude Law and Clive Owen are no mean shakes in the bad-boy sex department either, so I shall look forward to the DVD eventually.

Let me first comment on the set designed by Kitty Taube. It was spare: white on white minimalist screens which reminded me of some wonderful Lee-U Fan paintings in the Queensland Art Gallery. On the back screen explanatory information was occasionally projected: “St Bart’s” (the hospital) in the first scene where Dan (Christopher Sommers) has taken Alice (Jackie Mison) after her accident; “London”, same scene, just in case we didn’t know where St Bart’s was. The screen was most effective though in the silent scene between Dan and Larry (Norman Doyle) where they sit at opposite sides of the stage and engage with each other in a chat room called London Fuck, Dan pretending to be a woman called Anna. Their silent conversation is projected on the screen as they type on their laptops, and the only noise comes from the rapid clicking of the keys and the giggles and gasps from the audience as the “chat” becomes raunchier and more intimate and outrageous, all this punctuated by two very brief phone calls to Larry and his monosyllabic replies (he is far too caught up in the sexy messages coming out of his laptop to want to prolong the calls). The rest of the set was taken up with a few cubes which served as seats and tables, and a rumpled bed which was rarely used except as a seat and seemed to mock the attempts as closeness of the lovers.

This is a very talky play, and the talk is clever. There’s much talk of euphemisms, most amusingly flagged in the first scene when Dan confesses to Alice that he writes newspaper obituaries for a living, although he has ambitions beyond that. In this “Siberia of journalism”, a phrase like “He valued his privacy” means that the deceased was gay, “He enjoyed his privacy” means that he was a raging queen, and “He was a convivial fellow” means that he was an alcoholic. Euphemism and ambiguity is in the soil of the battleground where the interacting lovers try to find out just what love is, and muddle and miscommunication mark all their meetings. When Larry meets the real Anna (Kathryn Fray) at the Aquarium in an encounter which Dan has deliberately set up in the chat room, the identity confusion adds some spice to the eventual coupling. Anna, the photographer who sees herself as a critical observer of the human carnival, nevertheless is still concerned to create beauty in her portraits of sad people, and implicit in all her relationships is this sense of the voyeur. Contrasted with the ambiguities are searing moments of accuracy and self-knowledge: “Have you ever seen a human heart? It looks like a fist wrapped in blood”; or “I’ve spent a lifetime fucking and never known how to make love.” In all this, the cop-out of the age is “I chose to be selfish.” And so on.

I suppose this was what I found tedious in the play: the endless betrayals and deceit, the selfishness, the choreographed and constant testing and anatomising (pun intended) of relationships. As my favourite teenager would say, “It’s all so last century.” Sexual politics, I think, have moved on, and maybe, as Hugh Mackay has said, we are moving out of the dreamy, self-obsessed years of the last quarter of the twentieth century. The action spreads over 4 years, and sometimes it is only half way through a scene that the passage of time becomes clear, and the intensity and repetitiveness of yet another lovers’ quarrel become just another meaningless game. In these games Jackie Mison as Alice and Kathryn Fray as Anna are superb. They both articulate the complex dialogue crisply and clearly, and they look wonderful and have great stage presence. I can’t say the same about the men, who not only threw away quite a few of the good lines, but also were often clumsy on stage compared with the girls. I don’t know why Christopher Sommers as Dan had to be quite so shambolic. I guess a writer of obituaries might wear a daggy jumper, but the whole effect made me think that Alice and Anna needed their heads read to be turned on by him. Likewise for Norman Doyle as Larry, who seemed to think that the shout and the rant are all you need to express your passionate self. Yes, the language was strong and repetitive and might have offended some of the audience, although I didn’t sense any ruffled sensibilities, and I did love Alice’s shiny red wig.

Directed by Mark Conaghan

Playing 8-18 August 2007.

Duration : 2 hours (including 20-min interval).


— Barbara Garlick

(Performance seen: 15th August 2007)

www.STAGEDIARY.com: Queensland's Online Stage Magazine
International Gala  
Queensland Ballet (QPAC Playhouse)

Each year the Queensland Ballet reminds us in its International Gala that dance is truly the universal language.

This year was made particularly special as it was the last performance of the great Australian ballet dancer, Lisa Bolte, in her home town of Brisbane.

Local dancers were joined by artists from the Korea National Ballet and from Deutsche Oper am Rhein, Dusseldorf.

The International Gala presented ten short pieces in the space of one fantastic evening.

Queensland Ballet principal dancer, Rachael Walsh, shone in several pieces throughout the evening. Brisbane audiences know the fluid grace of her dance but her versatility shone through with a muscular, staccato performance in a new work “Breath of an Angel” by Korean choreographer, Young Soon Hue. This powerful piece started and finished with figures walking in a stage dramatically illumined by a single orange light.

The Korean dancers, Kim Joo-Won and Jang Un-Kyu, gave a moving rendition of the pas de deux from Giselle Act II. Giselle is the story of the triumph of love over death. The Korean peninsula has seen much death throughout the 20th century. In the 21st century, it is the most likely flash point for the beginning of World War III. This magnificent and graceful performance gave cause to believe that hope and beauty might triumph over the dark side.

It was great to see also a new work, “The Gathering”, by internationally acclaimed Queensland choreographer, Natalie Weir. Zachary Chant and other dancers from the Queensland Ballet gave us an elemental piece with a sense of Middle Eastern cosmology.

Amidst an evening of great beauty, it must be said that this was Lisa Bolte’s night. She danced with Tristan Message of the Australian Ballet, the pas de deux from “At the Edge of Night” to the music of Sergi Rachmaninoff “Preludes, Op. 23, No. 4”. This work demanded great balance and virtuosity. Her expressive performance touched all in the audience.

Later in the evening, Lisa Bolte and Tristan Message danced the pas de deux from Raymonda Act 1 – a sublime performance from the homecoming queen.

The strength and depth of the dancers of the Queensland Ballet made this a night to remember.

Choreography by Stephen Baynes, Young Soon Hue, Francois Klaus, Marius Petipa and Natalie Weir

Playing 3 to 5 August 2007 Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes (including 20 minute interval)
— Matt Foley

(Performance seen: 4th August 2007)

www.STAGEDIARY.com: Queensland's Online Stage Magazine
Miss Saigon  
Miss Saigon Pty Ltd (Lyric Theatre)


By Alain Bublil and Claude Michel Schonberg

Professional production

Perennially sceptical about advance publicity though I am, I have to admit that, for once the promotional hype for this production is well justified - this is a stunning show which doesn’t disappoint.

Audiences look for different things in musical theatre and, while it may seem fanciful to compare a show about the tragic aftermath of the war in Vietnam with Aladdin, for me, a musical has to have many of the same elements as the English pantomimes which were my introduction as a child to ‘big shows’. There has to be a story worth telling, pleasing and effective music, good singing from the leads, a talented and versatile chorus, comic interludes, amazing sets and spectacular technical effects. (I could always do without the blue jokes and cross-dressing.)

Cameron Mackintosh’s production of Miss Saigon has all of these ingredients in spades.

First of all, the story. The antecedents are fascinating – an 1897 story, based on a French popular novel about the betrayal of a geisha in Nagasaki, led to an American play which was produced in London in 1904 and seen by Puccini who went home to Italy to write Madama Butterfly. In 1975 the composer Claude-Michel Schonberg, saw a photo, taken just weeks before the fall of Saigon, of a Vietnamese woman giving up her child at the airport in the hope that a new life would be possible for her daughter in America. This reminder of the ‘collateral damage’ inflicted on native populations by war led Schonberg and his collaborator Alain Boublil back to Puccini’s opera and Pierre Loti’s novel - and Miss Saigon was the result.

Their story is set, not in Japan, but in Vietnam in 1975 at the end of the American involvement in the war. It opens in a brothel where the battle-weary GI Chris is given a present by his friend John of the services of Kim, a fresh country girl new to the game, who has come to the city in order to survive. They quickly fall in love and undergo a form of marriage, planning a future together in America. But Kim is pursued by a man to whom she has been promised who threatens her future.

With the sudden fall of Saigon and the rapid evacuation of US troops from the city, Chris is forced to leave and Kim, unable to get into the American Embassy grounds to join her husband in the helicopter evacuation, is left behind to survive as best she can. Three years later she is supporting herself and the child she had by Chris when she is found by her pursuer, who has now become an officer in the victorious army. Discovering the half American child, he tries to kill him and in desperation Kim shoots her tormentor dead. With the unscrupulous pimp Engineer she escapes Vietnam and is eventually traced to Bangkok by an American aid agency now run by Chris’s friend John. When Kim learns that Chris has found her she envisages a happy future for herself and her child, only to discover that Chris is now happily married to an American girl. Aware that there can be no happy ending for her and caring only for the welfare of her child, she kills herself, knowing that this will enable him to have a future with his father in America.

This updating of the old story works remarkably well. To the account of the suffering and heartbreak that follows any war is added a depiction of the opportunism and degradation that often accompanies the struggle to survive. There are no real villains here; all are victims in one way or another. Unlike Pinkerton in Madama Butterfly, Chris is no cad and we never doubt his love for Kim, his despair at losing her, his genuine attempts to find her, or his love for his new wife. The post-war anguish and guilt that many veterans feel is embodied in John who has dedicated himself in civilian life to helping the totally innocent child victims of the occupation and conflict. Even the reprehensible Engineer can be seen as an enterprising provider of whatever the market demands.

The music that supports the story is easy to damn with faint praise. There are no hum- able tunes or chart-busting songs – but throughout the music is appropriate, with some lovely lyrical moments and dramatically apt effects. Schonberg is subtle in his evocation of the world in which the story is worked out with no jarringly fake orientalism or syrupy sentiment. The love duets are much closer to opera than pop balladry and are sung quite beautifully by the Laurie Cadevida and David Harris.

The days when singers could get by onstage with only a good voice to recommend them are long gone. Nowadays singers must not only sing well, but move well, act well, dance if required, and look fantastic. Laurie Cadevida is heartbreakingly lovely as Kim, with a soaring, powerful voice that belies her tiny size and fragile appearance. In David Harris she has a good-looking and sympathetic leading man whose voice not only blends beautifully with hers, but who looks totally convincing as a battle-fit soldier. Juan Jackson as his friend John is equally convincing – he has great stage-presence and a superb voice, perfectly suited to the moving reminder that “They are all our children too” – a highlight of the show.

Indeed, one of the joys of the production is the credible look of the cast, whatever their role. The soldiers are big, blokey and muscled, handling weapons as if they knew how to use them and wearing their combat gear confidently. The women are gorgeous; sinuous and also well-muscled in all the right places. The chorus work is demanding, requiring cast members to morph from bar girls and GIs to peasants and soldiers and back again. The opening scene set in a brothel is perhaps the least satisfactory in the show, requiring the girls to twist and gyrate provocatively throughout the long scene – ultimately proving too much of a distraction from what is being said and sung. There is only so much crotch clutching, gratuitous groping and simulated sex that I need to watch before getting the point about the locale, and one can only feel sympathy for the lead characters struggling to retain the audience’s attention amidst such competition.

A far simpler and, for me, more memorable chorus sequence is the huge Viet Cong parade complete with flags, ribbons and a powerfully athletic dance. The simple set for this number, with its beautifully lit brazen image of Ho Chi Minh in the background, typifies the imaginative sets used throughout. In a professional production one expects good work from designers, but the scrupulous attention to detail in both setting and costume design must set new standards in this show. Every aspect of the American equipment is apparently authentic and the Asian sets have been researched down to the minutiae of which bamboo is appropriate for particular locales.

Some of the sets are full of detail; others such as the hotel room with its draped bamboo bed and simple chair are achieved with the minimum of props. This simplicity allows the meeting between Kim and Chris’s wife Helen (a lovely performance by Sophie Katinis) to take place in all its stark and painful reality.

The setting for the Engineer’s “American Dream” sequence is equally imaginative with its effects achieved by the use of blonde showgirls, a staircase for them to dance up and down and evocative back-projections. Leo Valdez’s Engineer is superb in his boundless energy and criminal inventiveness, and this number gives him plenty of scope to shine. Loathsome though he is in many ways, it is the Engineer’s comic determination to survive and start again in America that throws into focus Kim’s desire for a better life for herself and her son. His version of the American dream is the opposite of hers, but we have to accept it as equally valid. Valdez makes the character memorable by making the most of every comic opportunity, but also allowing us glimpses of what failure can mean for even the most determined.

When it comes to special effects of course, everyone is waiting for the chandelier to fall (sorry, wrong show!) – I mean of course the helicopter to land and take off. In the original production this was a show-stopper, and rightly so. In this simpler production, which still requires nearly 50 technical staff, the effect is just as dramatic with superb 3D computer-generated animation and awesome sound. These are used to complement the tricky choreography of a scene that involves taking the audience both within and outside the Embassy gates as chaos reigns and we see re-enacted one of the most memorable moments of the whole sorry war.

The world of Miss Saigon is not the fanciful Orient of the Aladdin of my childhood pantomime days, but the theatrical magic of its evocation is just as powerful. Experience it for yourself if you can.

Production by Cameron Mackintosh

Playing until 15 September 2007: Tues-Sat 7:30pm, Sat 1 Sept 8pm, Matinee Wed-Sat 1:30 pm, Sunday 3pm.

Running time 2 hours 40 minutes including 20 minute interval

— Maureen Strugnell

(Performance seen: 26th July 2007)

www.STAGEDIARY.com: Queensland's Online Stage Magazine
Please Like Me  
Token Events (Visy Theatre)

Written and performed by Josh Thomas

Professional production

How could you not like him? I’m sure every mother in the audience (of whom there were many, some accompanied by their teenage sons, to their everlasting embarrassment) wanted to take him home for a cuddle. He’s so sweet and endearing, with his smooth baby face and awkward body language, that you immediately fall in love with him.

But this is dangerous ground for mothers. Josh Thomas’s show is about growing up (he turned 20 this month) and becoming a man, and the narrative revolves around his sexual development, especially his reaction to his mother’s questions about the size of his testicles (she’s egged on by his older brother) and her insistence on buying him two packets of condoms to take to Schoolies Week.
BR> “Two packs! That’s twenty-four condoms! And the expiry date is the end of the year! What does she think I am!” muses Josh, whose main ambition in life is, along with every other teenage boy, to get some action without his mother knowing about it or showing any interest.

For Josh, Schoolies is the third of Life’s Great Disappointments, when your naïve hopes and beliefs are shattered. First you learn that there’s no Easter Bunny, then that Father Christmas is really your Dad, and finally you come to the realisation that Schoolies isn’t entirely populated by girls who just want to get down and dirty and make out with a Harry Potter nerd.

Oh yes! Harry Potter. He appears, as a kind of touchstone for working out which girls are worth making the effort for – Josh asked one prospective fumbler what she thought of the latest book, to which she replied, “Oh, is there a book? I thought it was just a movie.” Another one to cross off his list, which was distressingly short in the first place.

There’s a lot more of this kind of thing, for Josh Thomas’s 50-minute stand-up is basically a coming-of-age saga, only funnier and a lot dirtier than most. He may seem like a typical bumbling teenager, but the persona is carefully created, and the script so cleverly crafted that there are no loose ends at the surprise conclusion.

This young man is extremely talented, and his award for Best Newcomer at this year’s Melbourne Comedy Festival is well-deserved. It’s such a pity he only did three shows in Brisbane, for each was booked out before the season opened, and the audience, whose ages ranged from 14 to at least 60-plus, loved him, especially his shy disarming audience-interaction segments. With a bit of word of mouth he could have filled the Visy for a week.

So you’ve missed him this time round, but if you want to find out more about him, check myspace.com/mynameisjoshthomas, just to see what he’s up to.

By the way, girls, he’s single and looking for friends.

Played 3 and 4 August 2007

Duration: 50 minutes


— Alison Cotes

(Performance seen: 4th August 2007)

www.STAGEDIARY.com: Queensland's Online Stage Magazine
L'Orfeo  
Queensland Music Festival and Queensland Conservatorium (Masonic Memorial Temple)

By Claudio Monteverdi

No, it’s not the first opera — or fusing of music and drama — to have been performed in Europe, as the advertising in the Queensland Music Festival brochure states so baldly. That honour should probably go to Jacopo Peri’s Dafne, privately performed in Florence for the first time in 1597, and his Eurydice, performed three years later in 1600. But who has ever heard of those “operas” - or of Peri for that matter? Or the group of Italian musicians in the last quarter of the sixteenth century calling themselves the Camerata who sought to create this new art form and who paved the way for Monteverdi’s glorious expression of that fusion of music and poetry. As Paul Grabowsky says, much less dogmatically, in the program for Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, “opera emerged pretty much fully formed in Mantua in 1607” with the first production of this amazing version of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. And most people, except the most pedantic of opera lovers, agree that Monteverdi’s is the first opera masterpiece. So, let’s celebrate this 400-year anniversary production with all due praise and respect.

This joint production by the Queensland Music Festival and the Queensland Conservatorium is a bold venture, particularly in the Masonic Temple in Brisbane, which resembles more the type of playing space or court setting in which many of the newly fashionable music dramas might have been performed in the seventeenth century than the proscenium stage we normally associate with opera nowadays. In the main, the production used the space with imagination and occasionally with real excitement when the Arcadian hippies leapt up the aisles into the audience, or the infernal spirits posed against the top side walls with torches under their chins just as we all used to do as children, making deathly skull-like dark hollows and grimaces on our faces. With an enormous golden lyre as a portal through which the main singers could pass (and, later, tangle with laser beams as they did so), the orchestra at the inner end, and the audience ranged on tiers along each side, the full length and breadth of the Temple became the stage on which the drama was played and in which the audience became intimate partners. At times the air became uncomfortably choked with dry ice which the Temple didn’t cope with very well, probably because it is a space more used to the arcane mysteries of the handshake and the apron than to the whiz-bang effects of the modern stage, so that the perpetual haze and gloom, not helped by some poor, over-elaborate lighting choices, were distracting and annoying.

Unfortunately, for the whole run of three nights Greg Massingham as Orpheus was suffering from laryngitis and was only able to act and lip-synch — both of which he did brilliantly. His part was sung by Trevor Pichanick, who also sang the parts of the second shepherd and Eco. Strangely enough this worked rather elegantly, with Pichanick standing at a lectern to one side of the orchestra while he sang as Orpheus and then joining in the fray for his other roles. His Orpheus, one could believe, was capable with his lute of making “trees and the mountaintops that freeze” as his lovely lyric tenor voice imbued the figure on stage making all the mistakes with a passionate gravitas (are the two incompatible?). The distance between voice and actor, in a quite post-modern way, worked to sustain rather than belittle the legend, as the fatal discordance between the supernatural power of the voice and the urgings of the physical body were thrown into high relief, seen and heard most poignantly in the scene when the Messenger arrives with the news of the death of Eurydice, and then in Orpheus’s importuning of Charon to ferry him across the Styx. Both were highlights in this unexpectedly successful way of recouping what might have been a significant blow to the production.

The orchestra strings, percussion, and interestingly enough both harpsichord and organ, were supported by period instruments like the theorbo (like a long-necked lute), cornetto and sackbut, and the lovely little organ-like regal. It was altogether a big, beautiful sound, and the subtle melodic lines were ably interwoven with the drama being enacted. Margaret Schindler as La Musica, posing demurely within the lyre-portal and dressed in a ridiculously extravagant, flower-bedecked eighteenth-century-style gown and wig worthy of Peter Greenaway, sang the Prologue magnificently, flirting with the audience (someone muttered that it was death by a thousand gerberas) and looking as if she had stepped out of a Grand Guignol production with her white face as she threw a length of white tulle passionately to the floor. Monique Latemore as La Speranza was as grandly attired and bewigged in eighteenth-century fashion, but looked more Versailles than Grand Guignol, and sang more decorously accordingly.

It would be difficult — and carping — to fault the musical aspects of this production. With minor exceptions, the singing was bold and glorious. Most of the chorus are still students, and there were enough of them to produce a big, wonderful sound. The principals were, without exception, strong and completely at one with their roles. I particularly liked Samuel Sakker as the first shepherd and Apollo. His voice promises much, and he has a formidable stage presence. My main criticism is of the design of the production, which, if the director’s notes in the program are anything to go by, was meant to highlight the timeless aspects of the “journey to self-knowledge.” Op-shop tat for the nymphs and shepherds of Arcadia with dreadlocks and bikinis was merely distracting, although irresistibly reminiscent of where the wild things are. Eurydice’s costume with the lower half like a teddy-bear suit topped by a sequinned corselette with nipples and navel outlined, matched by Orpheus’s similarly glittering and outlined pecs and six-pack, was all a little odd, but when it came to Charon’s golden fat suit and the white decontamination suits of the “post-apocalyptic roadies” (??) and the absurdity of the design aesthetic (if I can dignify the mishmash in that way) just got in the way of appreciation. So much so that when Pluto and Proserpine appeared on the balcony in white tulle, I wondered what other design absurdities could possibly top that. Apollo at the close in a long, silky blonde wig was a restrained delight after the previous incongruities.

The Brisbane Music Festival and the Con are to be congratulated on giving Brisbane L’Orfeo. It was only one of many highlights of the Festival, but it is one which illustrates the very strong musical tradition and home-grown talent available here.

Directed by Caroline Stacey. Musical direction by Marshall McGuire.

Playing: Mon 23, Wed 25, Fri 27 July 2007, 7.30pm.

Duration: 2hrs (including interval).


— Barbara Garlick

(Performance seen: 23rd July 2007)

www.STAGEDIARY.com: Queensland's Online Stage Magazine
Crossing Roper Bar  
Australian Art Orchestra (Brisbane Powerhouse Theatre)

Musical directors: Benjamin Wilfred for the Wagilak songmen; Julien Wilson for the Australian Art Orchestra

Amateur/Professional

With its emphasis on “Our State of Play,” the Brisbane Music Festival this year was aiming to highlight the diversity of Queensland music, and of the performances and collaborations which seriously set about breaking down barriers. Crossing Roper Bar was one such project, and as its title suggests, it refers both to a geographical crossing point where it is possible to ford the Roper River in south-east Arnhem Land during a few short months in the year when the Wet is over, and also to a crossing of cultures and particularly of musical styles. The remote town of Ngukurr, isolated completely during the Wet, is the cultural gathering point for different outlying tribal groups who come together under the name of Yugul Mangi, speaking Wagilak and, over millennia, developing song cycles for eternity called Manikay Songs.

On an interview on the Saturday morning Radio National Music Show, the musical director for the Australian Art Orchestra Julien Wilson spoke about how he found a way into the music of the Wagilak songmen. He was inspired firstly by the collaboration for "Ruby’s Song" between the AAO and Archie Roach and Ruby Hunter. From this the members of the orchestra moved into a period of intensive listening and learning how to move from the indigenous vocal to Western instrumental musical patterns, and how to assimilate the very structured demands of the dances and choruses. The AAO has in the past engaged in a number of different collaborations such as with Indian and Balinese groups, but this meeting of cultures demanded a different approach. All members of the orchestra were enormously enthusiastic about the project, and Julien Wilson was anxious to stress that this was not just a collaboration but more a willing connection to the more profound aspects of another culture, not just a pilfering of a didgeridoo or a pair of clap sticks, but a sharing of experience in which respect and understanding were the guiding forces. The Wagilak songmen were willing to adapt and transform their traditional ceremonial songs, which under normal circumstances would never be seen by a western audience because of the strict protocols attached to them, and in their turn the members of the AAO learned to experience with their eyes, ears, hearts and minds and bring all these sensations to their music.

The set was a large sand pit surrounded by an ochre-coloured patterned edging. At either side was a paperbark humpy in one of which sat the narrator who explained his country and the responsibility his people felt towards the land as their mother. He spoke of stories of travelling, of how the spirits go back to their own tribal land, and of the necessity to show respect for all peoples. The songmen and musicians sat outside the other humpy, and the dancers, two women in ordinary skirts and tee shirts, and four men in quite elaborate feathered costumes, danced in the sand pit. The orchestra, which comprised brass (sax and trumpet), electric guitars and percussion, were in the gloom of upstage, although Julien Wilson might casually move to the songmen’s humpy for a word or to the other side of the stage for a solo. The impression was one of improvisation, flexibility, intimate decisions about direction and emphasis. The most successful dances were those in which the most charismatic of the dancers mimicked a bird or an animal, prancing round the sand, shedding feathers, enjoying the comedy of his own performance. Some of the lighting was effective, the low light in moments of morning calm, the morning sounds of the orchestra before the dance and the song began as the sun came up.

There was an enormous amount of ambitious goodwill in both the conception and the performance of Crossing Roper Bar, so I am hard put to it to say why I was let down. Visually I think it was a disappointment, and I would like at some stage just to listen to a CD of the whole show because there were some magic sound moments, at times which resembled an exciting new style of jam session. The narrator’s speaking voice particularly had a musical richness to it that was striking. The visual performance though was disconcertingly dull. Perhaps these dances are just too private, or too much the product of moments in time when the performers are improvising with their friends. And the incongruities of mikes strapped to their backs (unnecessary, I’m sure, in such a confined space), plastic water bottles outside the humpies and a brief nod at a fire-pit added to the sense of unease. It’s silly to talk about authenticity, because a music performance such as this makes its own rules as it develops a new type of authentic creation, but in this new space the dances were almost an anachronism.

Playing Fri 20 July, Sat 21 July 2007

Duration : 1hr, no interval.


— Barbara Garlick

(Performance seen: 21st July 2007)

www.STAGEDIARY.com: Queensland's Online Stage Magazine
We Don't Dance For No Reason  
Arts House Victoria (Brisbane Powerhouse Theatre)

Conceived by Aaron Choulai for Queensland Music Festival

Pro-am production

The 2007 Queensland Music Festival has been celebrating “Our State of Play” over the two weeks of the second half of July, and highlighting the diversity and the important links between not only metropolitan and country areas, but also the links with our close neighbours, in this case with Papua New Guinea.

Aaron Choulai, who was the 2006 young jazz pianist of the year, conceived of this production as bringing together two very important communities in his life: “The first is VADA, a collective I have been involved with, and have written for since high school . . .The other is the choir from Tatana, my village near Port Moresby.” Choulai grew up as a mixed-race child in Papua, “living between the village and the city, speaking English, Tok Pisin and Motu, being part of tradition and culture on a day-to-day basis.” As a high school student at the Victoria College of the Arts in Melbourne, he developed close collaborative connections and friendships with a group of musicians who have been playing with him professionally since then. When he began to develop the project which would combine the choral tradition of Peroveta Anedia or Prophet Songs with modern jazz, he and other members of VADA travelled to Papua and auditioned young people for the choir and worked on the exciting collaboration which became We don’t dance for no reason.

As the choir in costume walked on silently and the musicians took their places behind their instruments—piano, brass, percussion and double bass—slides were shown on a large screen of aspects of Motu culture and the genesis of Peroveta Anedia which arrived some generations ago with the Polynesian United Church missionaries. There were shots of life in the village, showing ancient net-fishing techniques, but with rusting hulks of military ships looming behind in the harbour. There were explanations of village government and land ownership with the skyscrapers of Port Moresby on the distant horizon, contrasting eloquently with the stilt houses of the village perched over the water.

The slides were never distracting, however, and often counterpointed, say, a scratchy elegiac percussion solo which sounded like rain or the ending of a culture, or a haunting brass piece. As the slides continued, there were shots of AIDS signs, and Dame Carol Kidu, the Community and Development Minister and now the only female member of the PNG parliament, told us that 300 of the 2500 villagers were victims of the disease. One of Choulai’s own mesmerising piano solos played under pictures of sea and sun, children mugging for the camera, the village pigs, a school with no lights or windows. All the time an increasingly urban existence and the consequent unemployment were co-existing with the watery world of a village on stilts.

It was not too hard to grasp the ambiguity of the project title, We don’t dance for no reason, as the singers of the Tatana Village Choir moved rhythmically and continuously as they sang their prophet songs. Singing became dancing in the historical development of this form of worship as their early pastors took over as heads of the community in the absence of any government control; a form of celebration using both body and voice. The most restrained song was an unexpected version of “When I survey the wondrous cross,” startling both in its simplicity and its familiarity.

Throughout the performance the singers and the musicians moved about the stage, making contact with each other. Choulai particularly at times seemed to wander, almost trance-like, as if he too were captivated by the glory of the singing. I loved this show. It was thoughtful, the music was exciting and wide-ranging, and the singing was a delight. I hope it has a longer life than its short run at the Festival.

Directed by Aaron Choulai

Playing Wed 18 July, Thurs 19 July 2007, 7.30pm.

Duration : 1hr 15mins, no interval.


— Barbara Garlick

(Performance seen: 19th July 2007)

www.STAGEDIARY.com: Queensland's Online Stage Magazine
Sailing South  
Centenary Theatre Group

By Judith Prior

Amateur production

When scientists wish to know more about the health of a stretch of waterway they are often just as interested in the strength and numbers of the smaller fish in the backwater as they are in the bigger fish that cruise the main stream. If we apply this analogy to Brisbane theatre it is very clear that, regardless of how the mainstream theatre companies are faring, local community theatre is thriving out in the suburbs.

On any given night of the year there will be a theatre group somewhere in Brisbane planning, rehearsing or performing a play for family, friends, neighbours, and fellow enthusiasts. Whatever the competition from larger better-known companies, seats are sold, halls are filled and ambitions are realised.

Centenary Theatre Group has been operating in this way in the western suburbs for more than 30 years now; an indication of a commitment to offering amateur actors an opportunity to follow their love of performing, and to offering local audiences the opportunity to see a wide range of plays.

Recent offerings of this group have included dramas such as Ring Round the Moon, Harp in the South and Shadowlands, but they have tackled a wide range of comedies too, from Dimboola to Victorian melodrama. Their latest offering is a foray into the theatre-restaurant genre and undoubtedly on the lighter end of the scale.

Judith Prior’s piece lays no claims to depth or subtlety – it is described in the publicity as “a rollicking romp of unlikely proportions set on the high seas on the way to Australia” – so no-one need expect sophistication. There are two main scenes, one set in a court of law as various felons are sentenced to transportation, and the other on board the transport ship, with the Judge turned Captain and the convicts as crew. The text is larded with songs (audience participation compulsory), limericks, slapstick and one-line jokes.

All of which seems much funnier than it deserves when one has eaten a delicious dinner washed down by a little wine. The ‘restaurant’ side of this theatre-restaurant experience was a huge success and the group is to be congratulated on excellent catering and superb organisation – something not always achieved by every group who attempts it. All of which contributed to an atmosphere of warmth and conviviality, giving the actors every chance to relax and enjoy themselves.

In a relatively large cast (four men and seven women) there is bound to be some unevenness in performance. As is often the case with untrained voices there were some problems of audibility, caused sometimes by lack of volume but more often by limited breath control and projection. Some, like Michael Lawrence as Judge and Captain, Aaron Marshall as Clerk and Bosun and Pam Alick as Lavinia, demonstrated plenty of vocal energy but needed more help with pace and attack to make the most of their comic impact. All contributed to the fun of the evening but particularly noteworthy was the comic duo of William McCreery Rye as Toby and Alexandra Davison as his side-kick Ben. These two actors played off each other and were constantly working to inhabit their characters and further the action whether they had lines or not. Without attempting to dominate the stage, they nevertheless engaged the audience’s attention by their confidence and commitment.

Clearly the cast enjoyed themselves and the director was proud of what she and they had achieved. Sue Watson and her team devised a very attractive set, the costumes looked good, the music contributed to the atmosphere and the audience was delighted and appreciative. This is, of course, what amateur theatre is all about. While actors line up to perform and audiences keep coming back for more (as they have for 30 years for the Centenary Players) something must be working. Coming up next for this group is Crèche and Burn by Elise Greig, then a world premiere of a play by Brisbane writer Paul Sherman. It looks as if this particular backwater is brimming with activity and life.

Directed by Norma Braddock

Final performance 29 July 2007

Running time (including meal and intervals) 3 hours


— Maureen Strugnell

(Performance seen: 29th July 2007)

www.STAGEDIARY.com: Queensland's Online Stage Magazine
Micro-trip  
The Independents 2007 (Metro Arts)

By Nick Backstrom, Delene Butland, Sean Dennehy, Nigel Poulton, Jo Thomas

Amateur production

Assembled by a team of playwrights, producers, directors and performers, Micro-Trip is a series of seven short plays staged in 70 minutes.

Kale and Verona, a story of two flatmates, opened the evening with strong performances and giggle-worthy situation comedy. It was followed by the distinctly Brechtian It’s Hot, which got most of its laughs from the randomly rhyming dialogue, and the twist in its tail.

Next up was Grace which, although about a deeply disturbed woman struggling to find a way to live with enormous grief and confusion, still managed several laughs. The story unfolded over three episodes during the show, with Jo Thomas stealing the show as the title character with an effective use of silence and amusing turns of phrase like “deady-byes”.

Sean Dennehy pulled out a nicely subtle Irish accent for his turn in 10 Commandments, a hilarious scene in a Catholic confessional between a guilt-ridden congregant and the man on the other side of the screen. It was also a good use of different space in the theatre, as it was performed on the balcony.

Moving Fast gave the audience a sharp satire of politics from every side — party politics and activism — that was invigorating in its simplicity. Nigel Poulton was fabulous as the man at the centre of the maelstrom, managing to develop a character from depressed and unemployed to depraved and power mad, while all Delene Butland had to do was stand around looking shocked. Poulton gave a similarly wonderful in the next piece, In the Park, which was billed as 30-somethings talking about dating but was really much more interesting than that.

And then came the jewel of the show, A Trip down Brunswick, an hilarious, energetic romp through one man’s psychedelic experience, complete with space travel, affectionate cauliflowers and talking apes.

All in all, Micro-Trip was what it is supposed to be: great light entertainment. The first half had its flat moments, but overall, the show was the type to leave you smiling for days afterwards.

Designer: Kitty Maud

Sound: Brian Cavanagh

Played 11 – 27 July 2007

Duration : 70 minutes, no interval


— Sarah Jansen

(Performance seen: 14th July 2007)

www.STAGEDIARY.com: Queensland's Online Stage Magazine
Pig City  
Queensland Music Festival

Professional production

Inspired by Andrew Stafford’s history of Brisbane’s music scene, Pig City: From the Saints to Savage Garden, Pig City the concert was staged as part of the Queensland Music Festival. On one of the University of Queensland’s sports fields, QMF had set up what seemed very like a mini-Woodford of recent years: music, a crowd of multiple demographics, beer, and several little stores where you could buy useless trinkets and novelty gifts.

Given that the music stage was housed in a tent, the acoustics were fabulous. Actually, the sound quality was generally great: all instruments were clear and the overall sound was crisp and well balanced, even at the back about 60 metres from the stage. The big top where the music stage was set up was impressively large and well equipped, as only a state-run venue can be, with lights fixed in every possible direction in every possible colour and an enormous stage protected by an army of security guards.

Six-piece group The Apartments opened the gig strongly with a solid, well rehearsed set of fast-paced rock tunes. With three guitars, a trumpet, keys and percussion, they had the crowd of old rockers head-bopping along in no time. Screamfeeder was up next with a new drummer, Steph Hughes, pounding out some more crowd-pleasing rock numbers. With two front people, you could expect that there would be some competition or unbalance, but somehow it worked for Screamfeeder. All band members are strong performers, and they looked way cool in the glow of the hundreds of lights and multimedia screens showing the band’s name in a super-edgy font, and the crowd loved their messy, fun style.

The Ups and Downs served up a more rhythmic, fast-paced flavour of rock, led by the vocalist’s smooth tenor and backed up substantially by the three guitars and drummer, but one of the highlights of the day was Kate Miller-Heidke singing a Go-Betweens’ tribute backed up by the Brisbane Excelsior Band, a 20 piece orchestra. She led with the strong, finely textured vocals we have come to expect, and was accompanied by a butter-smooth trumpet (who also had a gorgeous solo) and beautiful, unobtrusive classical guitar. Towards the end of her set, KMH broke out her opera voice - very QMF but not real rock concert - which added an interesting dimension to a Go Betweens’ tune.

And in case anybody had doubted it, The Saints still know how to rock, all eight of them. They had the obligatory guitars, bass, drums and singer, as well as a trumpet, trombone, and sax. The thumping bass and drums got the crowd pumped and the powerhouse vocals and showmanship from the front man kept it that way.

While, according to QMF 2007’s Artistic Director Paul Grabowsky, Pig City was “an opportunity to bring back those glorious days of anarchy and alcohol”, the reality of the concert had very little to do with anarchy and everything to do with regulation. The festival grounds were overrun with scores of security guards and police preventing anything that looked like rowdiness, presumably to minimise public liability. There were miles of barricades - too many to be useful and just enough to get in everyone’s way. It was a completely non-smoking event, which may be healthy, but just seemed odd, and the crowd kept sedate by an abundance of strictly enforced rules cheered when The Saints’ front man introduced one of their last songs with “the last time we played this song here we got kicked out”.

Although everyone seemed to be having fun, there wasn’t much chance of anyone being inspired to do anything gloriously anarchic enough to get kicked out of anywhere.

Duration: 9 hours


— Sarah Jansen

(Performance seen: 14th July 2007)

www.STAGEDIARY.com: Queensland's Online Stage Magazine
William Barton in Concert  
Australian Festival of Chamber Music (Cultural Complex, Townsville)

Professional production

William Barton is the flavour of the month in musical circles – perhaps even the flavour of the decade – and not just in Queensland. He’s in demand on the concert stage almost everywhere in Australia, and audiences have lauded him in countries as far apart as Turkey and Paris, where he has played at the 90th anniversary Anzac service in Gallipoli and with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, while later this year he will perform at the Venice Music Biennale. Not bad for a boy from Mt Isa who blows a great didge, and is still greeted there by his old mates as Willy.

William Barton was only a toddler in the bad old days of 1985, when the Performing Arts Complex was opened with a concert attended by the Duke and Duchess of Kent (known to the radicals as the Rent-a-Kents), which featured a didgeridoo performance as the opening number. Premier Bjelke-Petersen overrode the decision of the producer, who quite properly wanted an Aboriginal didge player, so the number was performed by a white fella with not an Aboriginal dancer or musician within coo-ee. Those were the days, my friend.
BR> Today, almost single-handedly, William Barton has raised the didgeridoo to the level of a serious concert instrument, and during his astonishing career he has developed the range of music available for it and commanded a new respect for Aboriginal music among serious music lovers. I’ve admired his work for years, and one of the great treats of my life was last year during the Australian Chamber Music Festival in Townsville, when I accompanied him and a youthful string quartet on an outback tour to Mt Isa and places north and west, all the way to the Gulf. They played in a huge front-loader at Mt Isa Mines, at a nursing home for old Aboriginal people in Normanton, and a concert on the lawns of the pub on the beach at Karumba, and as well as playing solo didge music in a way that sent shivers down your spine, he also played with the string quartet in adaptations of the music of the divine Johann Sebastian Bach as well as music so ultra-modern that I’d hardly heard of it, and pieces he had composed himself for string quartet and didge.

There are many things that strike me about William Barton’s music. First is its pure quality, which in its ethereal way combines two cultures, those of indigenous Australia with that of the settlers from Europe, and harmonises them into a style of music that on a very lofty level is another example of reconciliation. He doesn’t dumb-down the European classics into a more popular form, nor is there any attempt to fit Aboriginal concerns into the pop country-and-western tradition that we so often hear on indigenous radio. His is spare, perfectly controlled music, which on that tour spoke to everyone from underground miners to tribal Aboriginal elders to high-brow white Australians to drinkers at the pub in Karumba.

This year Barton was again a featured artist at the Australian Festival of Chamber Music in Townsville, and his talents have expanded even further, as have his followers, so much so that the 2007 Outback Xstrata Tour which precedes the Festival was booked out, and again Barton was one of the stars.

Indeed, he seemed to be the star performer all through that first weekend. Everywhere you went, there he was, entertaining greedy guests at the Chefs in the North Dinner, along with Piers Lane, Cheryl Barker and Peter Coleman-Wright; playing a solo at the Opening Concert and improvising with Brett Dean at the Governor’s Concert; and giving a special performance of his own in the Cultural Centre at Townsville’s Reef HQ.

This was, for me at least, one of the highlights of the AFCM. The Cultural Centre, for those of you who haven’t been to Townsville for a while, is an indigenous space containing a small shop, some craft and activity rooms, and a big auditorium for performances, and here William Barton, with the help of the divine voice of his mother Delmae, and the talents of the Hamer Quartet, gave a concert to a rapt audience which was comprised of local families of all ages ranging from babies to elders, and concert-lovers from all over Australia.

It was the breadth of the material and Barton’s mastery of the concert that impressed me most. Leaving aside his maturing skills as a performer, and his exciting new forays into different styles of music, the sheer professionalism of his approach and his easy interaction with such a varied audience demonstrated that he has developed not just into a world-standard musician, but the complete professional performer. He spoke to all of us, black and white, with such ease and control that we knew we were in the hands of a master, and when he began to play the full range of music that he has been working with over the past couple of years, it was impossible not to be moved.

Some of us whitefellas appreciated the way in which he blends the ancient tones of the didge with the sounds of early European masters, everyone was blown away by his total command of the intricate rhythms of the instrument in its traditional setting, and even those members of the audience who were hearing European music that was foreign to their experience showed their delight at what was going open.

This was one of the most joyful concerts I’ve ever been to, a harmony of two cultures not just in music but in spirit, and once again, but more strongly than ever, William Barton has proved himself to be a consummate performer as well as one of the greatest ambassadors for his country and his people as one could hope to find.

When are they going to make him Australian of the Year?

Played 6 July 2007

Duration: one hour, no interval


— Alison Cotes

(Performance seen: 6th July 2007)

www.STAGEDIARY.com: Queensland's Online Stage Magazine
Red Cap  
La Boite Theatre Company (with the Queensland Music Festival and Mt Isa City Council)

By Janis Balodis

Professional production


I think you really have to be a True Believer to make much sense of this show (I can’t really call it a play), because even for a tired old Leftie like me for me it didn’t work on stage either as entertainment or as agit-prop, in spite of the undoubted talents of cast, director and composer.

I don’t think that anyone would deny the political importance of the miners’ strike at Mt Isa Mines in 1964/65, or of the role played by the controversial and ambiguous Pat Mackie and his trademark red baseball cap (he still wears it in the nursing home, I believe, more power to his elbow), but converting this material into meaningful drama is a different matter altogether.

This kind of thing can be done, whether as musical drama or semi-documentary, and I was immediately reminded of the 1969 musical Oh! What a Lovely War! which, although not dealing with individual characters, used the historically specific setting of World War I to tackle the issue of armed conflict in the form of comic cabaret. In stage drama, it was I am Work, a drama about mining magnate Essington Lewis that I was reminded of; and the recent television documentary Bastard Boys also resonated when I saw Red Cap. But in all those shows, there was a theatrical magic that raised them above the level of pure politics, a magic that was sadly missing in this show.

It’s such a pity, for the ingredients are all there. There’s a delicious score from Iain Grandage, with echoes of everyone from Kurt Weill to Sondheim and even the dreaded Andrew Lloyd Webber - “Do you hear the people sing?” from Les Miserables kept niggling at the edges of my mind – and it’s all sung beautifully by the Brisbane Canto Coro under the baton of Mark Dunbar, while Iain Grandage’s nifty little five-piece band gave the score everything it deserved.

There were good performances, too, from Brisbane super-stars Liz Buchanan, Sandro Colarelli, Sally McKenzie, Peter Marshall and Daniel Murphy, but the directing decisions were rather too tricky, with the red cap passing from one actor to another, so that Pat Mackie is played principally by Peter Marshall, but (I think) with Colarelli and McKenzie also assuming the role for a few minutes. This adds nothing but confusion in a show where there’s very little characterisation in the first play. It’s not really a play about Pat Mackie, as the director’s notes make clear, but about the workers and the bosses, but the characterisation is as slippery as Mackie himself, and in a reversal of the old trick of one actor wearing many caps, here it’s many actors wearing one cap, so we find it hard to focus on the key issues.

This may be a deliberate directorial intention, but I speak here purely as an audience member, and if I had walked into the Roundhouse Theatre last night knowing nothing about the issue, I wouldn’t have had a clue what was going on. My companion certainly didn’t, and even having read the background to the show I was only one step ahead of her, while the wall-projections of dates and times didn’t help much either, merely giving the same-old same-old disputes and speeches a chronological definition.

This is an object lesson of the danger of single-issue theatre, especially political theatre, that it’s so easy to ghetto-ise a potential audience. If you need to be a card-carrying member of the AWU, or even a share-holder in MIM, before this show can really speak to you, then I suggest it doesn’t belong in main-stream theatre. Certainly it’s good fun, and there are lots of nice little character cameos and some really good singers – has Sally McKenzie ever considered moon-lighting as a husky torch-singer? and Sandro Colarelli would give my old swoon-machine Dean Martin a run for his money – but I’d like to see them, and all the others, in a more tightly-structured and clearly-differentiated piece.

One could argue that, as part of the Queensland Music Festival, a show like this has more license to experiment than a main-season production, but there’s so much wasted potential here, in the way of engaging an audience, that I can only grieve for an opportunity lost. It’s a gripping story, with many subtle moral dilemmas inherent in it, so why was I constantly looking at my watch?

Director/designer Sean Mee

Composer/musical director Iain Grandage

Playing until 4 August 2007: Monday – Wednesday at 6.30pm, Thursday – Saturday at 8pm, matinees Saturday 28 July and Saturday 4 August at 2pm

Duration : 90 minutes, no interval


— Alison Cotes

(Performance seen: 20th July 2007)

www.STAGEDIARY.com: Queensland's Online Stage Magazine
The Love of the Nightingale  
Opera Queensland/Brisbane Music Festival

By Richard Mills

Libretto by Timberlake Wertenbaker

Professional production

Respected Australian composer Richard Mills boldly thrusts opera into the 21st century with his The Love of the Nightingale. As society is daily confronted and desensitised by graphic brutality on television, cinema and computer screens, why should we expect opera to remain in safe territory of the lush but escapist timbres of Wagner, the delicacy of Debussy, or the relatively censored violence of a Wozzeck or Salome? Mills tackles a gritty tale from Greek mythology and challenges us with dissonant sound pictures of dark, disturbing elements – ritual slaughter, infanticide, rape, patriarchy, murder and exploitation of women as mere chattels.

Inevitably, being Greek, there is a running commentary from the chorus; firstly a modern executive-clad male-female pair gives contemporary perspectives; later the Thracian women, rather reminiscent of dark crows, flutter, weave and wail. As it’s Greek mythology there is a play within a play in which a rather unconvincing Aphrodite (with a touch of Queen of the Night bravura) plants lustful seeds of “I did it for lurve, blame lurve, it wasn’t my fault” into an otherwise upstanding warrior, Tereus of Thrace, liberator of Athens. In gratitude for his valour the Athenian King’s eldest daughter Procne is parcelled off to lonely Thrace with him. Lost and out of her element Procne pleads for Tereus to fetch her sister, Philomele. Big mistake.

Again, as it’s Greek mythology, revenge rates high after innocent blood is spilled or, rather, cut, in the form of a young virgin’s hymen, for all-powerful Tereus proves impotent when raping his wife’s sister, Philomene. It’s all the more potent that this revenge spirals into infanticide from a pack of inebriated Bacchanalian women who revolt against the lies, rape and abuse they’ve suffered. Their justification is “You bloodied the future for all of us. We do not want it. Monsters, fiends! I will kill you all.”

Metamorphosis is another major theme; after the barbaric portrayal of the violence in the first act, it’s a relief when the music melts into lyricism as the chief characters are transformed into birds, Philomele into a nightingale, her sister Procne a swallow and Tereus a hoopoe. The protagonists are translated into an idyllic final scene, presumably happy-ever-after in their after-life. Having thrown off their black weeds for pristine contemporary white gear, the women explain their dire actions in killing Itys, son of Procne and Tereus: “We had to become different or it would have gone on and on. Revenge and again revenge. We had to transform…” The musical textures mirror a complete metamorphosis from the first act’s barbaric, disjointed phrasing and ambiguous tonality into the respite of subtlety and harmonic resolution.

Another major recurring theme is how characters communicate or do not; the chorus frequently cautions characters to “be careful” and expresses frustration (“there are no words; we do not have words”) that they cannot prevent events they foresee. The final scene shows a transformed Philomele encouraging her nephew Itys to ask questions, yet unable to answer. “Didn’t you want me to ask questions?” he puzzles. Where earlier Tereus justified the dire step of cutting out Philomele’s tongue, as “I loved her I silenced her. She only mocked. She was dangerous; I had to protect my kingdom” now finally he concedes some token of culpability: “It stopped the questions; it was wrong to stop the questions.” He justifies that how could he know what love was – “who was there to tell me?” To the question “did you ask?” he falls back on the lame mantra “I had no words.”

Overall, the libretto by Timberlake Wertenbaker is gripping and effective. At times repetition slowed the drama but sudden touches of humour mercifully lifted it: “It did not happen so quickly, it took months of discourse. That was the gist of it.” There’s a sizeable degree of social justice in the text but still we’re left with defeatist bewilderment: “What is right?” At times the tone becomes self-righteous, as when it suddenly translates into the present: “Why are little girls raped and murdered in our parks?” Thanks, we got the message.

In astute direction by Lindy Hume, simple but effective staging changes spaces by wooden rises rolled out to create platforms, which indicate a stage and a ship, under which our eyes are mercifully spared the actual rape scene. However, the blood-spilling in the murder and tongue-cutting might have challenged the younger members of the audience.

Mills is a master orchestral colourist, creating a quite exhausting, gruelling roller coaster of sound, through which Richard Gill capably steers The Queensland Orchestra, who are generally equal to the challenges. By interval, the audiences felt almost numbed, drained by the sheer energy and often quite brutal timbres that continually surge from the orchestral pit. Effective woodwind cascades capture a stormy wind at sea and Philomele’s aria “Catch the moonlight with your hands; tell me the secrets of the wine-dark sea” gives welcome relief from all the Sturm und Drang.

Generally the cast cope with the challenge to learn and pitch often-tricky intervals, though with occasional resulting intonation issues. McNicol as Tereus projects a resounding voice, while Campbell’s trio of characters and Annabelle Chaffrey’s duo give rich tone.

Apart from a cacophony of nightmarish sound to signal the murder of the lad Itys, the second act compensates with truly effective lyricism, especially in the magical moments where the final nightingale song, beautifully nuanced by Kenneally, resolves into a sense of cadence. This virtuosic aria was masterly in its control and technique, with luminous tone matched by the ethereal green backlighting. Birdcalls reflected from the orchestra with the help of pre-recorded sound samples and the orchestration includes synthesiser. It appeared that there was also pre-recording of voices in many of the cries and drones.

If your taste is the gossamer sheen cast over Grimm’s Fairy Tales, choose Hansel and Gretel. The Love of the Nightingale is not your easy-listening night out, but disturbingly thought-provoking and certainly worth hearing.

Directed by Lindy Hume

Played until July 18 2007 at 7.30pm

Duration: 2 hours and 20 minutes, 20 minute interval


— Ruth Bonetti

(Performance seen: 16th July 2007)

www.STAGEDIARY.com: Queensland's Online Stage Magazine
North of the Border  
Brisbane Music Festival (Visy Theatre)

By Gerry Connolly and Robert Davidson

Professional production


Remember how comedian Gerry Connolly had Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen down pat to the last nuance? How his astute eye captured the very garbled action and his convoluted verbiage was more Joh than Joh? The audience which booked out North of the Border largely comprised those of us of a certain vintage who lustily sang 60’s Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, marched for the right to march and railed against Vietnam conscription and the police state inflicted on Queensland. Thus the satire in North of the Border required background knowledge, and younger generations might have missed of the point.

Connolly as front man directed a mix of music, visuals via power point slides, and words which range from poetry to comedy. Composer Robert Davidson has for some years fused words and music, capturing the tones and rhythms of the spoken word in effective interpretations of Gough Whitlam’s dismissal speech. He extended this concept by meshing tape recordings of Queensland poets Judith Wright and David Malouf reading their poems with the quintet Topology’s interpretation. While the timbre of Wright’s voice is not particularly mellifluous in scratchy old tapes, overall the nuances are effective and extend the theme of revealing Queensland’s cultural and historic diversity, and I especially enjoyed the string harmonic timbres depicting Malouf’s Stars. Davidson’s composition features driving minimalist rhythms, pulsing energy and solid tone as in his “Landscape” which paints evocative textures of the Glasshouse Mountain regions. At times there’s a Klezmer gypsy flair from Topology’s quintet, typically tightly performed, of Robert Davidson on bass, Kylie Davidson on piano, saxophonist John Babbage, Christa Powell on violin and – on this occasion – Michael Paterson filling in as violist. They resuscitated from Queensland’s early music archives hilariously cringe-worthy songs which they performed with relish and audience sing-along. The 1920’s Billy Malone songs revel in aboriginal place names such as In-doo-roo-pilly and Coolangatta.

It was an uneasy opening, during which Connolly rather laboured his explanation of Davidson’s modus operandi of translating speech rhythms and pitches into music. He baffled rather than clarified in his rather condescending explanation of musical tonality but this gave him an opportunity to whip off the opening phrase of Greig’s Piano Concerto. It’s reasonably flashy but Connolly made no bones in the festival program notes that “Gerry is – or rather was -¬ a gifted pianist” but “did not make the effort!” His singing voice is pleasant but not always reliable, with some unfortunate misjudged attempts at notes outside his range. And the rap with violist Michael Paterson pounding percussion out of the microphone would have been more successful if Connolly had memorised the lines.

There were dollops of cringe with a slide show of Queensland icons – the Big Pineapple, Peanut, Strawberry, Pumpkin, Mango et al, and the over-sized road-side animals (cow, bull, pelican, cane toad etc) – all rather folksy and good for a giggle. There was real belly laughing in Connolly’s performance on “Rum-a-phone,” a traymobile of pitched Bundaberg rum bottles, which he played with two spoons. “Oh, one is out of tune: just a minute while I fix that”, he muttered as he took a swig.

Where Davidson’s fascination with speeches and politicians derives from social conscience, Connolly plunders them for their comedy value, and it’s here that he’s in his element. (“Canberra, capital of the ACTU.”) He has updated his material with a take on Kevin Rudd; John and Johnette Howard rate a mention; and he updates us with Paul Keating’s latest spray: “If you don’t come from Sydney, you’re camping out… Melbourne’s the poor man’s Sydney – even the Myer Music Bowl is the Sidney Myer Bowl.” There were many hilarious moments and one-liners but also times when the pace lagged. However, Connolly’s experience as a comedian came through in his audience interaction, rubbishing latecomers and playing to the home-crowd with his local-boy-returns line.

It was a lively and fun performance overall, but with technological glitches. Whereas Topology are a respected, experienced and tightly fused ensemble who perform innovative repertoire, in this production it seemed that too much hung on Connolly who, when I saw it on the second night, fumbled far too often. There were revealing slips of insecurity, even of identity crisis as reflected in his last line: “If you liked me, I’m Gerry Connolly; if you didn’t, I’m Billy Connolly.”

This lack of identity was reminiscent of Peter Sellers, who could play anyone except himself. There’s a sense that with the passing of Joh and the fading of Queen Elizabeth to the republican movement, so too Connolly’s star has waned. He’s a great talent in need of a revamp.

Directed by Robert Davidson, one gathers. With no program, it wasn’t clear.

Played Friday 13 and Saturday 14 July 2007 at 7.00pm

Duration: 90 minutes, no interval


— Ruth Bonetti

(Performance seen: 14th July 2007)

www.STAGEDIARY.com: Queensland's Online Stage Magazine
Keep Everything You Love  
Brisbane Arts Theatre

By David Brown

Amateur production


Susan O’Toole can be congratulated for taking on a challenging script that addresses a difficult issue, rather than the frothier fare often offered up by amateur theatre groups. Keep Everything You Love charts the journey taken by Emma and Brett, two teenagers devastated by the suicide of their friend Jack.

I must admit to feeling nervous before the show began. A script such as this, in the hands of inexperienced actors, could quickly turn into agonising melodrama. But, thanks largely to the committed gutsy performances of its young cast, this production pulls it off. Susan O’Toole, with assistant director Declan Dickinson, appears to have collaborated closely with her actors and the mutual trust and confidence shines through in the show.

In the first moments of the play, I had my doubts about Tom Yaxley, but he soon settled into a convincing, sensitive portrayal of Brett—the ‘super-jock’ who struggles with unanswerable questions left in the wake of his mate’s death. Anna McGahan gives an assured performance as Emma, the ‘retentive’ over-achiever we can all recognise. Although these characters are, in some senses, stereotypical, both actors succeed in imbuing them with real subjectivities which endear them to the audience. Both Yaxley and McGahan give impressive performances for young actors - they really listen to each other onstage and this ensures that their characters’ interactions are believable and textured. Vocally, both can be heard clearly (except, at times, when they had to compete with recorded sound, but I’ll get to that shortly), though McGahan needs to guard against her tendency to become overly shrill during emotional scenes.

The actors’ work is made difficult by two main factors. Firstly, the production uses projected sequences of animation and words to facilitate the now-absent character of Jack. While the visuals - from the original production of the play - succeed in giving the audience an idea of Jack, the reckless, charismatic artist might have been like, unfortunately the repeated use of the same music over the images grates. The volume and nature of the sound also hinders the audibility of the actors’ dialogue and thus breaks the flow of action. Second, the set design bothered me. The two beds that dominate the stage are rarely used, and the actors are left with little else to aid the dynamics of their interaction. While budget constraints are a limitation in this kind of theatre, something as simple and versatile as scaffolding, for instance, could have added multiple levels and galvanised the performances. The actors seem at a loss sometimes in terms of where to move and what to do with their hands. This is a wordy play, and the restrictions of the set mean that the audience spend too much time watching ‘talking heads’. And one last issue that could easily be remedied: the sketchbook Jack leaves behind after his death. This prop is a central plot element and it is simply too thin (not to mention noticeably blank) to be convincingly authentic.

Despite these problematic aspects of the production, I was pleasantly surprised by its quality. Hopefully more young people will see it during its run (there weren’t many on the night I went), as they are clearly the target audience of the play’s message. The best thing about Keep Everything You Love: solid, courageous performances by promising young actors.

Directed by Susan O’Toole

Playing until 24 July. July 8 – July 24. Sundays at 6:30pm. Mondays – Wednesdays at 7:30pm

Running time: 70 minutes


— Casey Hutton

(Performance seen: 15th July 2007)

www.STAGEDIARY.com: Queensland's Online Stage Magazine
The Glass Menagerie  
Queensland Theatre Company (Cremorne Theatre)

By Tennessee Williams

Professional production


“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Tolstoy’s remark could easily have been made with Tennessee Williams’ plays in mind, for even the mildest of his plays makes Anna Karenina look cheerful. And yet the misery in The Glass Menagerie is gentler than in most, and the tone is almost nostalgic, like an old man looking back on life.

Surprising, then, when we realise that this was written 15 full years before Suddenly Last Summer, another largely autobiographical play, which depicted his sister’s lobotomy.

There is very little physical violence or outright horror in The Glass Menagerie, and when it does come, against the background of this genteel Southern household, it is literally as well as metaphorically shattering, when Thomas (the narrator, who looks back on his early life and plays the son and brother Tom) suddenly loses control and inadvertently smashes some of the fragile crystal animals, the glass menagerie of the title, that his equally fragile sister Laura collects.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a production that so perfectly mirrors the meaning of a play. As it’s a play abut memory, and how people remember things differently, all events are seen as through a glass, darkly. Flimsy tulle curtains, constantly blowing in the breeze or being pushed out of the way, separate the dining room from the parlour; lights are always dim or extinguished altogether; shadows flit across the wall as characters move from the exterior to the interior; and unexpected flashes of lightning make the gloom even more sinister.

David Walters and Greg Clarke, in designing the lighting and the set, capture precisely the claustrophobic atmosphere of dreamy menace that turns to nightmare, and they not only echo the ideas of the play, but give them added resonance. Every detail is right, from the subdued blue-greys of the furnishings and Laura’s clothes to the clashing yellow of the jonquils that Mrs Wingfield, the faded Southern belle, brings to the dinner table, and the genteel poverty in which the Wingfield family live is conveyed with minimal touches, like the ancient church candlesticks that were very precious but had been twisted in a fire.

As for the cast, there just aren’t enough words in the thesaurus. How can I convey the subtle perfection of Carol Burns’ portrayal of Mrs Wingfield’s lifelong resentment of her fate and her repressed sexuality? Or the exquisite facial gestures of Helen Cassidy as her blossoming love is suddenly blighted? Both actors are in perfect control as they show their characters trying to hide their pain but unable to disguise it altogether, and as the clouds of disappointment gather we were all on the edges of our seats, hardly daring to watch the tragedy unfold.

Tennessee Williams was one of the first American writers to use the now-commonplace flashback technique on stage, and it makes great demands on the actor who must step from the present into the past. Conrad Coleby, in his first appearance for the Queensland Theatre Company, is astonishingly good in the dual roles of narrator and son. He too is repressed and frustrated, but he has a solidity that the women in his life lack, and Coleby makes Tom’s decision to walk out on them both quite believable, no matter how much responsibility and love he feels towards his sister Laura. He’s a man who doesn’t belong in this women’s world, and he knows that for his own survival he has to leave them behind.

He does his best, by bringing a workmate home to dinner, as a potential suitor for the mildly crippled Laura, but when he sees that he cannot protect her from that disappointment either, like his father before him he throws up his hands and walks away from it all.

And this leaves us with that same potential suitor Jim O’Connor, who walks innocently and light-heartedly into this trap and fails spectacularly in reading the situation, even when he comes to realise that Laura has had a crush on him since high school. He doesn’t understand how crucial this occasion is for her and, like any normal man, just walks away when it all becomes too hard. In a fine performance, actor James Stewart convinces us that he is as much a victim of Mrs Wingfield’s absurd expectations as Laura is, and what could be seen as cruelty when he reveals that he is already engaged to be married becomes understandable, in that he has also been drawn into Mrs Wingfield’s web of intrigue, and has his own integrity to uphold.

Tennessee Williams’ plays can be very disturbing to watch, especially in the later ones where he deals with shocking themes and grotesque characters — think Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Streetcar. But the tensions here are more finely-honed and more subtle, because the psychological fragility of the characters is hidden behind a veil of respectability. Michael Futcher has brought together an exceptional team to present this sublimely brittle play and the result, I would suggest, is one of the best ensemble pieces we have seen from the QTC for a long time.

Definitely a must-see production.

Director Michael Futcher

Designer Greg Clarke

Lighting David Walters

Playing until 11 August 2007: Monday 6.30pm, Wednesday-Saturday 7.30pm, matinees Wednesday 1pm, Saturday 2pm

Duration :2 hours 20 minutes, one 20 minute interval


— Alison Cotes

(Performance seen: 14th July 2007)

www.STAGEDIARY.com: Queensland's Online Stage Magazine
Beyond Glamour: The Absinthe Tour  
Meow Meow (Brisbane Powerhouse/Queensland Music Festival)

Professional production

When I was a little girl, my grandmother took me to a circus, where I was invited into the ring by the glamorous talent, and told to hold a rope while they performed around me. This early tilt at stardom did not endear me to life in the spotlight, and left with me a fear of impromptu audience participation. As a result, my anxiety levels were often high during Meow Meow’s spectacular and highly interactive performance at the Brisbane Powerhouse.

Meow Meow’s show, Beyond Glamour: The Absinth Tour, is just one of many Queensland Music Festival performances that are being hosted by the revamped New Farm venue. Meow Meow herself is a very difficult act to describe. She is reminiscent of Sally Bowles, with fishnet stockings, a sexy style, and eyes that are pure Liza Minnelli. However, she moves like a contortionist on the stage, and belts out an array of tunes in a range of languages, interspersed by a witty commentary.

Right from the start the audience is fully involved in the show, which is a wonderful mix of music hall and burlesque, and is probably the most unusual and one of the most entertaining live shows I have ever seen.

Quaffing red wine and smoking cigarettes, Meow Meow switches effortlessly from French to Italian to Polish and back to English, all the while enticing members of the audience onto the stage to help to change her costumes, and help translate the French lyrics she sings.

My favourite songs were the Bertolt Brecht tunes, which she acknowledged, in a rare moment of seriousness, as still being frighteningly pertinent today, and a very different and whimsical version of Misty.

But most of the time she was simply dazzling, and very, very funny. Her (mostly male) assistants from the audience seemed to thoroughly enjoy helping her robe and disrobe, and enthusiastically acted as footstools and microphone stands.

The performance was held on the Turbine Platform, which meant there was seating in the middle, and standing room around the edge of the level above. We were lucky enough to be seated in the second row, and not unlucky enough to be in the first, and therefore not in the firing line to be part of the show! (I haven’t sat in the front row for any show at the Powerhouse since Johnno, where we were frequently splashed with water by the actors on stage).

The doors opened at 9pm, and it was important to be there then, in order to get the best seats closest to the stage. My only real quibble with the venue was that the noise from the bar was clearly audible at times, after the earlier shows at the venue had finished. It certainly didn’t drown out the performance, but it may have been more annoying for those sitting at the back.

When Meow Meow began the show she said she would give us an hour and no more, after all, she didn’t really want to perform, and was just fulfilling her contractual obligations! However, when the alarm clocks she had set on the piano went off, she merely said it was time for her medication, and proceeded to entertain us for another 30 minutes.

The performance, which started at 9.30 (a little too late for some: I caught a couple in our row snoring while they were waiting for the show to start) finished at around 11.30, after three encores and numerous exhortations from Meow Meow for us all to go home. But I am sure that people would have happily stayed for more. Despite my audience participation anxiety, I know I would have.

Played 13 – 14 July, 2007 at 9.30pm.

Running time: 2 hours (no interval)


— Donna Paichl

(Performance seen: 14th July 2007)

www.STAGEDIARY.com: Queensland's Online Stage Magazine
By the Light of Stars That Are No Longer  
Circa (Judith Wright Centre)

by Yaron Lifschitz and Circa

Professional production

‘What if we acknowledged that we are mortal, temporal and yet we are suffused with a stain of the infinite?’ muses Yaron Lifschitz in his director’s notes on by the light of stars that are no longer…. This show explores the paradox of the human experience through the metaphor of stars that cast light even though many of them are dead before their light reaches us on earth. In a similar way, we can be struck with the absolute beauty of what it is to be alive—of love, of joy, of human potential and achievement—and yet simultaneously know that we are destined, without doubt, to die.

Following the successful tour of their last show, The Space Between, Circa delivers another breathtaking display of circus wizardry melded beautifully with contemporary dance and multimedia. For those who have not yet experienced a Circa show, the company produces work that takes circus techniques into the realm of contemporary arts practice. Their re-imagining of the notion of circus offers a platform for amazing physical feats (and they are amazing) to move beyond simple spectacle; Circa strives for meaning too. And, with by the light of stars that are no longer…, they have created an engrossing show that affects the audience profoundly.

It is difficult not to gush about this work. And I must confess that I’m not the biggest fan of physical theatre — not because I don’t believe in the form, but because I often find its manifestations obscure, inaccessible, even alienating. In this sense, Circa’s concept is clever. Circus body-language is a traditional language that everyone can understand, and what’s more, it is exhilarating and edgy. So, at a basic level, everyone is entertained. But people can also be intellectually satisfied as Circa’s performers simultaneously explore more subtle, philosophical themes. From Leonard Cohen to DJ Shadow and Sigur Ros, an exciting, eclectic mix of soundtrack choices appeals to an all-ages audience, and does not fix the performance to any particular timeframe or cultural context. Murmurs of admiration were drawn from the elderly contingent who sat in front of me right through to the bleached and pierced teen skateboarders behind me. Which is perfect, considering that Circa wants to explore vast, universal themes about human experience.

Circa’s choreography is an effective way to explore the sublime aspects of life on earth; the cast’s immense physical capabilities celebrate the power and grace of the body and create a shrine to human potential. It is impossible not to be awed by the sight of Chelsea McGuffin being hurled metres through the air and caught by her male counterparts, or by James Kingsford-Smith’s complex and superb work on the straps. At other times though, their performances are deliberately halting—their movements unsure, gestures palsied—and infused with failure. Darcy Grant baulks during a section of acrobatics with the two other male dancers, and McGuffin’s solo on ballet points is desperately frail and vulnerable. In this way, Circa explores human weakness alongside its almost miraculous capacity for strength. This is a show about dualities—beauty and death, love and loneliness, light and darkness—and the precarious balancing act we undertake amidst these forces.

There is little to criticise here. Initially, I thought Grant’s and McGuffin’s performances seemed more assured than the others, but was later proved wrong as Carberry’s and Kingsford-Smith’s considerable strength and talent was showcased. The discipline and trust required within the cast for this level of quality is immense and impressive. The lighting design—starry and vast at times, and flickering and geometric at others—helps develop the show’s theme without upstaging its performances. Importantly, I thought, by the light of stars that are no longer… incorporates humour as well. Grant’s solo mime in particular delighted the audience and celebrated the laughter so central to both circus and life. And watch out for a surprisingly understated ending that is nevertheless magnetic and powerful.

A line from David Malouf’s new book of poetry sprung to mind mid-way through the show: ‘Our bodies are breakable. They break all bounds and still arrive at their true nature’. In a highly accessible and entertaining way, Circa celebrates with finesse the triumph and the fallibility of the body, by the light of stars that are no longer.

Directed by Yaron Lifschitz

Playing 3 – 6 July 2007, 7:30pm

Running time: 75 mins


— Casey Hutton

(Performance seen: 5th July 2007)

www.STAGEDIARY.com: Queensland's Online Stage Magazine
Hansel and Gretel  
Opera Queensland (Conservatorium Theatre)

Unknown but for this opera (except for the Anglo-Indian 1960s pop singer who borrowed his name) Engelbert Humperdinck was a protege of Wagner, and even helped him with the first production of Parisfal. Wagnerian elements of structure and orchestration are evident from the extended overture or prelude to Hansel and Gretel, expertly played by the Queensland Orchestra under David Stanhope. All the familiar leitmotiv are there (or as Wagner would have it, "Grundthema") — including the beautiful "Evening Prayer".

The dark and menacing shapes on the curtain evoking the Black Forest give way to a plain 20th Century kitchen where Hansel and Gretel labour briefly at their homework but quickly turn to teasing and pranks to distract them from their hunger pangs. Thus the traditional Grimm Brothers tale is given modern tweaks in a version which very much emphasises the energetic and naughty kid aspects of H & G while including all the traditional elements as they begin their frightening adventure.

Caitlin Hulcup as Hansel and Amy Wilkinson as Gretel play the children with exuberance and with such conviction that it is easy to forget they are not in fact pre-teen kids. Their voices are strong and sure, complementing and harmonising very satisfyingly.

Also in top voice is Rosemarie Arthars as the witch, who becomes a frenzied and entertaining centre of attention from the moment of her abduction of the children, yielding some moments highly charged with drama and excitement.

The familiar story is played out with a host of dazzling production elements where the talents of designer Mark Thompson, lighting designer Nigel Levings and directors Elijah Moshinsky and Julie Edwardson come together with some wonderful and unexpected effects and sequences. Apart from an exploding oven, mystical dream sequences and dazzling magic, there are Lewis Carroll elements in the sets, with enormous floorboards, clock and balustrades (as if the kids had been shrunk in their own home rather than going into the woods), while the finale of the celebrating children evokes Peter Pan.

Adding to the performance are the singing and characterisations of parents Jacqueline Mabardi and Henry Ruhl as well as Dew Fairy Rachael Cunningham, and the wonderful contribution of the Children's Chorus, so well prepared by Narelle French.

A little more dance would have been nice, especially by the principals in their big Act 1 dance number, and it's a shame Gretel remains so needlessly dowdy throughout. Hansel, by contrast, is reminiscent of an heroic Harry Potter.

The Southbank Conservatorium is the venue for this production, to which it lends itself beautifully, with crystal clear sound. It is fitting that this opera is performed in an Australian conservatorium, for Humperdinck almost became director of the Sydney Con. Sadly, the outbreak of war in 1914 put an end to this prospect, and Humperdinck joins Ravel and Schonberg as Aussie Conservatorium might-have-beens.

— John Henningham

(Performance seen: 7th July 2007)

www.STAGEDIARY.com: Queensland's Online Stage Magazine
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