With the alarming flight of time, suddenly a big birthday has come around for the Independent Theatre Company.
Thirty-five!
Rob Croser and David Roach have been bringing the most elite level of theatre arts to this state for this seemingly epic time. Not bad, for something these theatre powers have been doing on the side while holding down serious full-time careers.
Croser is an award-w
inning children’s rights lawyer and Roach a one-time priest and former valued counsellor at Daw House.
But their love of good theatre, their affinity with the beauty of the written and spoken word, and their perception of the need for a brave new outsider company on the theatrical scene of Adelaide brought them together with Allen Munn and Pattie Atherton to establish their own Independent company.
Across the years, through various venues, it has survived and thrived, bringing daring new works to Adelaide audiences. It has been swathed with awards.
Now, suddenly, it is 35 years old and, dammit, it is going to throw a party to celebrate its massive history of classic plays, new plays, and plays by overseas writers.
On Sunday 24th March at its new home base, Goodwood Theatre, its assorted casts and supporters will perform scenes from favourite plays. They will tell stories of the company, play music, and exhibit pictures of past productions, a mind-boggling 200 of them.
And it will reflect on some of the company’s laurels. It was the first non-professional company to have been invited to perform in The Space Theatre and thereafter, for a decade, be a regular company in the Festival Centre’s theatres.
It struck another first in incorporating members of the Indian and African communities into productions. It was the first company in the land to cast an African actor as Othello. That actor, Shedrick Yarkpai from Liberia, went on to play assorted blind casting parts in a lot of classic and contemporary western theatre with the company and even became subject of a play about his journey to South Australia as a refugee.
Independent Theatre has had the strongest link to American theatre and culture of any company in SA and the American playwright John Logan has regularly given the company rights to first productions of his works, outside New York or London.
Then there are the Rob Croser adaptations. This skilled master of the theatre has adapted some of the hardest classics of literature, from Steinbeck’s East of Eden to Huckleberry Finn and The Magnificent Ambersons.
Among the company’s wealth of Australian premiere productions and introductions to Australia of overseas writers and new works have been:
- Frank Galati’s Steppenwolf adaptation and production of The Grapes of Wrath in 1992 and 1995;
- John Logan’s Never the Sinner (1992, 1994, 2004), Hauptmann (1993), The View from Golgotha (1996), Red (2011) and Peter and Alice (2014);
- Helen Edmundson’s Shared Experience production of War and Peace (2000);
- Jon Marans’ Old Wicked Songs (2001, 2002, 2018) and Jumping for Joy (2003);
- Charles Smith’s Free Man of Color (2009), and Les Trois Dumas (2010);
- Harper Lee’s and Christopher Sergel’s To Kill a Mockingbird (2007, 2012);
- Roy Sargent’s adaptation of Cry the Beloved Country (2006 and 2008);
- Adelaide, but London based, playwright, Samuel Adamson’s adaptation of All about My Mother (2011);
- Alexi Kaye Campbell’s Bracken Moor (2014);
- Lolita Chakrabati’s Red Velvet (2015);
- Ketti Frings’ adaptation of Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel (2018).
And Independent Theatre is not finished here. It is simply pausing to have a birthday party celebrating its mass of achievements.
Tickets at $25 are still available to the party on Sunday March 24 at 3pm in the Goodwood Institute.
Samela Harris
When: 24 Mar
Where: Goodwood Institute
Bookings: independenttheatre.org.au
The Adelaide Cabaret Festival have announced a taste of their June 2019 programme with the release of details on six upcoming shows and some alluring new spaces.
Amongst the early releases is an exclusive Australian premiere from global cabaret legend Ute Lemper who will perform Rendezvous with Marlene for one night only at the Thebarton Theatre, one of the new Cabaret Festival venues. The German chanteuse and festival headliner will create magic on stage, re-living a three-hour telephone exchange she had with Marlene Dietrich in 1988.
In another Australian first Flabbergast Theatre will bring their award-winning immersive show The Swell Mob from the UK to transport audiences into an historical epoch filled with thieves, fogle-hunters, dandies and deception. Hailed “a perfectly bizarre, uncomfortable, unmissable show”, it will run throughout the festival's 16 days and nights.
Musical theatre performer and TV star Fiona Choi (The Family Law, The Let Down, Rent) will bring to life the story of Hollywood’s first Chinese movie star and international style icon, Anna May Wong, in her show Dragon Lady: The many lives and deaths of Anna May Wong. This intimate performance is set to provoke questions about cultural identity and ambition through sparkling musical numbers.
Australian cabaret icon Paul Capsis will light up rock music’s dark side in Paul Capsis with Jethro Woodward and the Fitzroy Youth Orchestra at The Famous Spiegeltent; another new cabaret venue! A most gifted interpreter of song, Capsis will belt out hits by artists including Patti Smith, Tom Waits, Lana Del Ray, The Doors and Led Zeppelin.
In a world premiere, Adelaide’s own award-winning choreographer Larissa McGowan will perform Cher – exploring the persona and characters of the ultimate pop chameleon through contemporary dance. Also on the line up comedian Dan Ilic (ABC’s Hungry Beast) and Triple J’s Lewis Hobba will savage the news in a fast paced, satirical panel show called A Rational Fear described as ‘Q&A on crack’!
Megan Mullally and her band Nancy And Beth will find two friends - Megan Mullally and Stephanie Hunt - picking dope punk and vaudeville songs and singing them while dancing in matching costumes.
Adelaide Cabaret Festival Artistic Director Julia Zemiro says she is “Delighted to announce our early release shows, it’s an exhilarating mix of things to come. Classic German cabaret, TV folk as you’ve not seen them before, a dash of politics, old Hollywood glory, a cabaret favourite re-invented, a dance mash up plus an immersive show that will be on every night of the festival! Mes amis… this is just the beginning.”
Adelaide Festival Centre CEO & Artistic Director Douglas Gautier noted that “This year’s Adelaide Cabaret Festival line-up may be our most diverse and exciting yet, with many Australian exclusives and premieres. Securing German cabaret star Ute Lemper’s only Australian performance is a great coup for Adelaide Cabaret Festival and it’s just the beginning of what’s to come this year. Julia Zemiro’s captivating vision brings new life to the festival in its nineteenth year.”
The Adelaide Cabaret Festival will run from 7 to 22 June 2019 with a full program launch expected in April. Tickets go on sale 3 February.
Adapted from a media release.
When: 7 to 22 Jun
Where: Adelaide Festival Centre
Bookings: adelaidecabaretfestival.com.au
Holden Street Theatres. Holden Street Theatres – The Arch.
While all weapons present moral challenges there are two kinds that stand out because the assailant is absent from the battlefield – nuclear missiles and drones. And I mean 12,000 kilometers away absent; there is no risk to the operator in this asymmetrical warfare. What if that operator is a mother and a pilot at the controls of a bomb-laden drone shortly after dropping the kids off at school? Have a nice day at the office, dear? Who are they killing anyway, and why? Do innocents die? And what does that do to you?
Adelaide theatre impresario, Martha Lott scours the Edinburgh Festival every year to bring to her Holden Street Theatres the very best for the Adelaide Fringe. Lott even offers a scholarship to a deserving company to make the journey; and the awards for her efforts are many. Last year, two different Holden Street shows won the Adelaide Critics’ Circle Award and the Fringe’s BankSA Best Theatre Award for the whole Fringe, and Holden Street shows garnered one or two weekly awards every week as well.
Besides producer and theatre manager, Lott is also a British-trained actor. She has kept this Grounded gem for herself and will be flying solo in this 70 minute monologue. Lott discovered American, George Brant’s Grounded at its world premiere at the Edinburgh Festival in 2013. Years later, she decided to team up with British director Poppy Rowley for an acting vehicle and Rowley proffered Grounded. I asked Martha what attracted her to this work and she gave me a list: “The challenge to the actor; the way we are fighting war; the control and the God complex that America has throughout this war; the fact that as women, we give life, but as fighters, we take it away. That lives are dispensable, contrasting the psychology of the character and the war, and it’s frightening how much we are being watched.” “You can do the personality strikes if you are Top Shit.” Martha points out that the predictions made in this 2013 show have sadly come true, for added poignancy.
Winner of the National New Play Network’s 2012 Smith Prize for plays focused on American politics, Grounded was described as “Top Notch – a chilling portrait of future war…” by New York Magazine. (Sadly, it was already happening in 2012.) The play was named a Top 10 London Play of 2013 by the London Evening Standard. The Guardian described Grounded as “A searing piece of writing” while The New York Times labeled the play “Gripping.”
Personally, I find this a compelling combination – Martha Lott the producer returning to her love of acting, her European director and an American play on a hot topic that has been widely performed in twelve languages. A must-see of the 2019 Adelaide Fringe.
David Grybowski
When: 5 to 16 Mar
Where: Holden Street Theatres
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Chalk and cheese doesn’t begin to describe them.
Steve Davis is a thorough man. He believes in research and preparation.
For a performance partner, he has thrown his lot in with one of the all-time spontaneity kings in town: Ralf Hadzic, a man known to many as Adelaide’s chauffeur to the stars.
The only thing these two men have in common is the number 17. Seventeen is the number of years Ralf spent as an invisible TV star dancing around in the Fat Cat suit and 17 is the number of years that Steve spent in the unseen world behind the mike of radio on stations from Murray Bridge and Adelaide to Budapest.
They summon fate as an explanation for getting together to put on a show; a sense they had that one day their paths would have to cross.
Those paths finally crossed on the radio when Ralf joined the radio station at which Steve was morning show host and news editor. That was the early 90s.
They found they had both studied radio presentation and media with the great Vaughan Harvey.
The only difference was what they did with the training. Steve went into spoken word and Ralf fell silent within the Fat Cat suit.
Now here comes their Fringe show, 2 Cats on a Hot Fringe Roof.
There is just nothing ordinary about it - or them.
They offer up a taste of their characters and the way in which the spark of their collaboration was struck in one of Steve’s renowned Adelaide Show podcasts: check it out here.
Their show, 2 Cats On A Hot Fringe Roof, is described as a 60-minute comedy cabaret.
Steve will do stand-up about kid’s television and how we communicate in the “childish” era of social media, while Ralf will be sharing the jewels of his collection of exclusive blooper reels of old Fat Cat footage featuring Jane Reilly, Patsy Biscoe, et al. Archival outtakes and gotcha moments plus Hadzig gags and anecdotes, come on down.
It’s certainly promising to be wild and different and risky and, to add to the suspense, they have a barrage of celebrity friends they’re inviting along to see the show for which they have finessed Glynn Nicholas as director.
Not only but also, they are doing the outrageously unexpected; spoiler alert here! They are not going to sit around waiting for critics to review their show. They are going to review their audiences. New reviews every night to be posted on The Adelaide Show podcast reviews page here.
“I’ve been performing for years and one thing that you never get used to is that anxiety about whether or not the reviewer understood and liked your show,” says Hadzic of his life in the Fat Cat suit.
“Steve has been writing theatre reviews for 20 years so we thought, why not put those skills to work for our show,” he adds.
Davis says writing audience reviews is not just a Fringe novelty angle.
“Live theatre is a communal experience,” he says. “If you just turn up and sit in your seat passively, you have stacked the odds against you enjoying the show, while you also rob fellow audience members and performers of the energy you could have added through engagement.
“We’re not expecting audience members to get up on stage or carry our show, but by writing an honest review of each night’s audience, we are honouring the importance of their role in adding the magical spark that makes live comedy worth going out to see,” says Steve.
Samela Harris
When: 18 to 27 Feb
Where: The Historian Hotel
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Here comes the Fringe you have before you have a Fringe - or at least a piece of theatrical fun and games with a couple of well-known names.
Gretel Killeen and Glynn Nicholas are powering into town to do an offbeat two-hander they have very fashionably called #UsTwo.
Perhaps playing on the sexual theme of #MeToo, the Aussie television veterans have devised a show to tell the world the essential differences between the male and female of the species - from their perspectives. One might define it as a quirky double bio show.
Gretel Killeen has lived a fairly public life on television in The Project and Go Back to Where You Came From, not to mention Big Brother and opinion columns in The Guardian. She has also hosted the Logies and turned out a stream of books among them one entitled The Night My Bum Dropped.
Glynn Nicholas has a high recognition factor in Adelaide. He sprang to attention as a busker in Rundle Mall in the early 80s. His immense popularity was unprecedented. Trained in mime by the legendary Zora Semberova and with circus skills from the USA, he became a beloved identity as host of the children’s show Here’s Humphrey and as a television clown and comedian. Among other things, he was memorably the character Pate Biscuit, a delicious character parody of distinguished folk singer Patsy Biscoe. He went on to have his own shows, hosted The Big Gig, wrote and performed Man Overboard, co-wrote Eurobeat and generally has had a thriving and motivated career writing, producing and performing in comedy.
He and Killeen have had very different career trajectories although, like Killeen, Nicholas can brag a hot-selling book.
Their very odd claim, however, is to have spent the last 30 years avoiding working with each other.
Now they are old and wise, experienced in life and love and showbiz and they have stories to tell and even some “outright lies".
And there begins the promise of some very interesting funny business.
Their promo material sings with teasers.
“In the show, Gretel will reveal why you should never marry a man who has a nickname for his willy, why people who wear sensible shoes live longer, and how to train your children to save for your retirement,” says Glynn Nicholas.
“Glynn will reflect on why failure to practice guitar hasn’t helped anyone working on this project and why, when his daughter lovingly calls him ‘a player’, he pretends to be indignant,” adds Gretel.
#UsTwo opens at Holden Street Theatres on January 12.
When: 12 to 20 Jan
Where: Holden Street Theatres
Bookings: holdenstreettheatres.com