Story: The Breakfast Club hits Adelaide

Described as one of the all time greatest 'High School Films' The Breakfast Club both defined a generation and decoded the traits all teens share hidden behind a veneer of sterotypes and predjudice.

Thirty years ago, a ragtag gang of rule-breaking youths entered a library and embarked on the most epic detention sentence the big screen has ever seen.

The actual Detention Date was March 24 1984 when the loveable misfits of The Breakfast Club entered a Saturday morning detention at Shermer High School in suburban Chicago.

Now the full production comes to the Adelaide stage when Matt Byrne Media presents the classic John Hughes film live, at the Holden Street Theatres from October 22 to November 6.

Producer/Director Matt Byrne has announced the casting for his stage adaptation of The Breakfast Club.

"We had a fantastic turn out for auditions that really showed how much talent is coming through in Adelaide," Byrne said.

"I want to congratulate all the amazing young actors who came and auditioned, it was a privilege to see all your work.

"For the audience I hope you will come along and get the full Breakfast."

The cast will feature James King as "The Criminal" John Bender, Kacy Ratta as "The Princess" Claire Standish, Jamie Hornsby as "The Brain" Brian Johnson, Lachlan Hywood as "The Athlete" Andrew Clark, Kristen Tommasini as "The Basket Case" Allison Reynolds, Brendan Cooney as Carl The Janitor and Matt Byrne as Principal Richard Vernon.

"This year we celebrate the 30th Anniversary of the film which changed so many lives.

"Not just for the Brat Pack cast of Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald, Emilio Estevev, Allie Sheedy and Anthony Michael Hall, but for all the parents and students who have watched, lived and loved the story over the years."

The Breakfast Club will run October 22-25, 29 to Nov 1 and November 5 to 8 at 8 p.m. with matinees on November 1 and 8 at 2 p.m.

Bookings are available on 8262 4906.

Story: They Say She’s Different

They Say She's Different - The Music of Betty Davis. Adelaide Cabaret Festival

Betty Davis is not to be confused with Bette Davis.
One is edgy, gritty and dirty and the other is a golden oldies star.
It is Betty with a "Y" that Cecilia Low is bringing to the Adelaide Cabaret Festival. She's Betty Davis out-there rockfunk chick who was once Mrs Miles Davis.

"Betty used to hang out with Jimmy Hendrix and Sly and the Family Stone," Low explains.

"She was only married to Miles Davis for a year but in 1969  he changed his sound.
 His Bitches Brew happened because of Betty."
Davis later was to acknowledge this. He was also to divorce Betty because  of her relationship with the psychedelic era rock guitarist Hendrix. He was sure she was having an affair with him. Betty always said not.
Low describes her as "a person who connected people", a charismatic star in her own right, a "celebrity's celebrity".
"Everyone wanted to be around her," she says.

Betty Davis had started out as a model but she was drawn into the wild music world of the 60s, recording with the likes of Santana and the Pointer Sisters and dating Eric Clapton. She was to produce her own raw and earthy funk sound which was to excite many.
"She has a very hard wedge and was a handful to listen to," says Low.
But Low was among those to be fascinated by her -  albeit a lifetime later.

"When I was at the Elder Con, before I left Adelaide, someone must have re-released her music," she recalls.

"My sister Jaci said 'it made me think of you' and bought it for me. Why, I don't know. She'd never done anything like that before. But it became my go-to music.

 
"I'd never heard a woman sing like it before. It's not acrobatics, like Maria Carey or Aretha Franklin. Betty Davis tells stories and they are compelling.

"I knew I'd do something with her. It just grew and grew".

Cecilia Low's talents were honed in Adelaide and she has never lost touch with her home town. Her credits include Sondheim's ‘Assassins’ with Flying Penguin Productions and the Yaschin Company's adaptation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's ‘I Only Came to Use the Phone’.

Stretching her wings, she was to perform in blockbusters such as ‘Miss Saigon’, ‘Rent’ and ‘The Lion King’, which took her all around the world.

Now settled in Melbourne, she has been working in production for film theatre and photography, being lead singer in two bands, ‘A Little Something’ and ‘Slide Night’ and establishing herself in a day job.

"I did something I really wanted. I went back to school and became a remedial masseuse," she declares.

"Now I have my own little business, Ci Cure."

Having suffered her own assorted injuries in the tough discipline of musical theatre especially, she says, in the latter year of the Lion King in London, she understands the injuries and the therapies of theatre people. She knows too well how they exacerbate injuries with their "the show must go on" philosophy.

 
Now she loves the fact that many of them are coming to her for treatments - musicians, dancers, Circus Oz performers, Warhorse performers...

"I know about the crazy injuries a lot of puppeteers suffer. I relate to performers." Her work in movie house production was, she says, to give herself "a different take on the arts" - and, now partnered with cinematographer and lighting designer Cameron Zayec, she has brought a fresh element of the cinematic to her Betty Davis show.

"I want to blur the line between a live and cinematic gig," she explains. "There are pre-records and live projections. All the senses are covered. I even have a dance floor with a mirror ball and I encourage people to get up and boogie."

She brings the show with inputs from bass player Tony Kopa, as musical director, Kenneth Moraleda as director, Amanda Riley as "style and fro tamer" along with Phil Ceberano on guitar and Greg Patten on drums. "I started working on the script when I was in London but shelved it. A year or so ago, I restarted it and the timing was right," says Low.

"It had been slowly forming inside me.

"But I was wondering who could be in it. I had not thought of it being me."

It took but a suggestion from a friend for the penny to drop and the singer/dancer to step into the character of fusion queen, Betty Davis. She is not delivering Davis as a linear story rather than delivering an overall impression of Davis's time in musical history.

"She was right in the middle of it," Low exclaims. "We are focusing on the time from 1968 to 1972.

"By 1975, she had left the scene and become a recluse.

"She just stepped away."

Low believes that Betty Davis was ill treated by the industry in her day, probably because she was so outrageous and provocative.

"She screeched and screamed and talked about sexuality," she says.

But she was a catalyst in the history of music - and she was different.

Samela Harris – talking to Cecilia Low

When: 19 & 20 June
Where: Space Theatre
Bookings: bass.net.au

Story: Writers' Week 2014

Adelaide Festival Writers' Week wrap-up

The Women's Memorial Garden of Writers' Week has become a sylvan venue.

The tents are gone. Not only does it look so much nicer as a broad jigsaw of pleasant blue shade cloths, but it accommodates so many more people and it never feels too crowded.

Breezes flow freely and the greenery of the garden tree scape prevails.

The glory of stick designs backing the stages and welcoming arrivals from King William Road are reiterated. They were much admired last year and they add an art element which is interesting to the eye.

There are still a few tents, of course. Those twig artworks adorn the central roof spaces like chandeliers in the book tent which, long and airy, has its trestles so laid out that browsing space is entirely amenable.

There is another tent for caterers and the service area, some compounds working as loo blocks and the Green Room and some very special areas devoted to children.
Children swarming around the place are the new weekend face of Writers' Week.

 
As one sat in the morning sessions, listening to writers and pondering the fruits of thought, the eye was caught by periodic parades of vivid little ones - happy children flapping huge multi-coloured silken wings or dragging silken dragon tails. They have their own imagination corner, their own storyland, and their own book sections. Tomorrow's literary market is learning to love the word and rubbing little shoulders with some of the influential authors of our time.

It is just so beautiful and so right.

Meanwhile, those influential authors were pleasing their public no end.

People arrive really early at Writers' Week to ensure the best seats in the mornings. The first session is at 9.30am, the last at 5.30pm. Tables and chairs for dining, sipping coffee and wine away from the two stages make it quite possible to hang out for the whole day and many, luxuriously, did so.

Laura Kroetsch and the Writers' Week advisory mob spread the net wide for 2014 so throughout the week, there were delectable offerings for every literary appetite and an ample flow of unhurried people. However big the drawcard, there were always places to sit and hear, even if it meant filching a chair or two from the other stage.

Margaret Drabble was the superstar opener event. Seasoned, prolific and immensely admired, she packed 'em out.

Her rival later in the day was American Elizabeth Gilbert of ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ fame. She has written a very different work, this time fiction with an historical background called The Signature of all Things Gilbert. The readers were keen to know of both incarnations of her writing and she turned out to be a vivacious and engaging performer.

Early in the piece, it was Gabrielle Carey, one-time partner with Kathy Lette in ‘Puberty Blues’ and the ‘Salami Sisters’, who drew the morning crowds to the Western Stage. Her latest book is a memoir called ‘Moving Among Strangers’ and it extrapolates upon her family's associations with the great Australian novelist and poet Randolph Stow. So, her session had not only star quality but an intriguing altruism, for Carey is a powerful advocate for the country to re-discover Stow and to recognise that he is up there with Patrick White, if not aloft. UQP has reissued some Stow works and they, along with Carey's gentle and thoughtful works, sold fast in the book tent.

Not everything was about higher thought, however.

There was one shit writer. Vet and scientist David Walter-Toews held forth on Poop - Past Present and Future as he talked to Chair Paul Willis about his book, ‘The Origin of Feces - What Excrement Tells Us About Evolution, Ecology and a Sustainable Society’.  The subject attracted much interest among gardeners and cooks as well as scientists and all those interested in sustainability. Some later described the session as "hot shit". Unusual terminology at Writers' Week, but forgiven in the context.

War remained a strong theme and, here came yet another demographic. Even the Governor, Rear Admiral Kevin Scarce, was seen to have popped in from next door to listen to sessions on war history - notably that of Paul Ham, one of the world's leading authors of popular war history books. His session became just a bit edgy when he targeted the arrogance of academic war historians in their attitude to his genre. His chair, Clare Wright, just happened to be an academic engaged in war history.

Many people had not heard of American novelist Rachel Kushner. Unprepared for a hot Adelaide day, she turned up in black boots and long frock for her session beneath the dappled sun shades. All she had to do was to read an extract from her latest book, ‘The Flame Throwers’ and people started planning a dash to the book tent. She was the "discovery" of Writers' Week for many.

The word went out on Twitter.  Before each session, the chairs reminded audiences that the Twitter hashtag was #adlWW. Phones were turned to silent, but they were busy and a fine record of the week's event was broadcast.

Mandy Sayer provoked a few lively Tweets when she expounded on her life, subjugated and increasingly psychologically disturbed, as ‘The Poet's Wife’. Her memoir pulls few punches and the audience was fascinated by its potential legal minefield. Sayer assured all it had been well legalled. She also pointed out that "The Poet" was an American and her first husband. Her current husband, Australian author and playwright Louis Nowra, is entirely dissimilar.

Among the poets this year, it was Geoff Page who won hearts and minds. He is a Canberra-based poet with a bent for jazz music. Many had not heard of him but, on hearing his poetry read aloud, rushed off to buy the books.

Politics and love, crime and religion all took their place in the line-up. One could not cover it all. But the choices were there.

There were no notable scandals or misadventures, no last-minute cancellations, no great dramas to hit the gossip grapevine - unless it be that Gabrielle Carey forgot to bring her own book to the event and rushed into the book tent and paid full price for a new copy.

It was a joyful event. A great success. Very Adelaide.

Samela Harris

Photography by Martin Christmas

SA's Cellar Door Wine Festival

Adelaide offers an abundance of festivals which used to centre predominantly around the Fringe, Festival and Womadelaide, but over the past few years this great southern state has been expanding its repertoire. One festival that was added to the calendar in 2011 was the Cellar Door Wine Festival. It celebrates everything that South Australia has to offer throughout its amazing wine regions, its fantastic produce and its growing craft beer and cider market.

Having been to the Cellar Door Wine Festival in past years, I was beside myself to receive an invite to join the Social Media team as an Ambassador in 2014. Knowing that this would be an opportunity not to pass up, I jumped at the chance to join key South Australian social media magnates in helping raise awareness of what has now become a multiple award winning and nationally recognised event.
Given the responsibility to promote, post, tweet and photograph various elements of the festival otherwise known as #CDWF, I relished the task of engaging people through various functions, networks and social media platforms to help entice people to what is now South Australia’s biggest and best wine event.

Boasting a list of 160+ wineries from 15 wine regions scattered throughout the state, visitors will have the chance to sample over 800 different wines across the 3 days of the festival. Add to that a list of craft beer and cider breweries along with some iconic and relatively new boutique food producers in the PIRSA Tastes of SA area, and you have the perfect recipe for a gourmet journey of the senses.

Starting on Friday 14th February (Valentine’s Day) and continuing over the weekend, up to nine thousand people will muster through the doors of the centrally and stunningly located Convention Centre situated between North Terrace and the River Torrens. For those looking to spoil their loved ones on Valentine’s Day, or any other day for that matter, there are 8 different Master classes to choose from. Starting on the Friday, Masterchef Marion Grasby offers a food and wine extravaganza, while cheese expert and importer Valerie Henbest will have you salivating with a range of indulgent cheese and matching wines.

Being a self-confessed food geek and lover of quality, premium wine and craft beer, my journey through the four Social Media Ambassador functions has only strengthened my appreciation and anticipation for the 2014 event. With a single day, general admission ticket setting you back a mere $30, it not only provides and amazing social setting but is also an opportunity to savour some of our state’s best wines. This is an ideal event to tantalise your tastebuds and set about planning an epic encounter to a wine region that may otherwise have been perceived as a trip too far to travel.

You’re only a few clicks away from attending what’s is SA’s premier wine event. For further information, masterclass session times and ticket pricing and sales, check out the website at cellardoorfestival.com.

Darren Richards