STARC Productions. Bakehouse Theatre. 24 Jan 2019
50 years ago, man landed on the moon and the musical Hair was encouraging people to drop out and get high and the philosophy of free love inspired open relationships.
Neil Simon’s 1969 three act take on this cultural moment, Last of The Red Hot Lovers, holds up extremely well today and not just because couples have been having affairs since forever. Simon’s writing seeks to understand how social forces shape this dynamic, bending and twisting primal humanity against social constructions of ‘faithful’ relationships.
What’s driving 23 years happily married Barney (Marc Clement), and the three women he initiates first meetings with in hope of starting an affair, to make such a move? Needing something new? Fear of missing out? Illicit thrills and spills?
Director Tony Knight deftly manages Simon’s magnificent three acts, each a rich, power packed playlet in its own right, while successfully developing the grand challenge of the piece - Barney’s slow, almost indistinguishable growing awareness of why he’s always seeking ‘something’ in another.
That imperceptible growth gradient comes into play thanks not just to three brilliantly written female characters on the page Barney encounters, but their fully realised social, emotional and sexual humanity in performance by Stefanie Rossi.
Elaine, Bobbi and Jeanette span the social spectrum of Barney’s lived world and desire/fantasy. They challenge it too. Because by meeting with Barney, they’re admitting to a need they feel compelled to action by. For different reasons. Reasons Barney has serious difficulties consciously acknowledging. None of these women have a problem with their choice to meet a married man in his Mothers’ apartment. Issues, yes. Honestly expressed. For Barney. In the too hard basket.
This conundrum is expressed in dialogue and performance with great gusto, humour and deep compassion.
Simon’s goal of uncovering and exploring the truly human, pained, impassioned and newly aware scope of relationship possibility/impossibility is profoundly rigorous, yet emotionally open. Marc Clement and Stefanie Rossi’s richly honest performance ensures this gets through to an audience.
Electric night at the theatre, almost three plays for one ticket experience.
David O’Brien
When: 23 Jan to 2 Feb
Where: The Bakehouse Theatre
Bookings: bakehousetheatre.com
Pelican Productions. Murray Performing Arts Centre. 19 Jan 2019
How do they do it?
Pelican Productions with their annual Theatre Camp manages to groom up hundreds of stage-struck Adelaide children and turn them into creditable, and often top-notch, performers.
Jen Frith and Kylie Green’s Pelican and Spotlight enterprise has been going for fifteen years and each year, ta-da, there’s a sensational professional concert turned out with not one but a series of casts ranging over two weekends of performances.
Lighting, costumes, sound, music, props, cues: it’s not exactly MGM's budget but it is pretty darned slick with masses of children of all ages finely honed into choral and choreographed routines. And, oh, the high energy.
The Greatest Show is a huge operation, a very long concert featuring scenes from Pippin, The Greatest Showman, Gypsy, Catch Me If You Can, Fame, Madagascar, Mean Girls, Cats, and Mama Mia!
Each show is expertly frocked up to suit and given the right backdrop and lighting. So it really is a cavalcade of best-ofs which gives myriad young hopefuls the training and a chance to shine in front of large audiences.
Behind the scenes is a massive team of tutors in voice and movement; some of the city’s best choreographers and costumiers.
On stage are the names of tomorrow.
On Saturday’s matinee, shimmering stars were Finn Green, Zoe Foskett, Emily Downing, Angelique Diko, Jasmine Huynh, Eve Green, Hayley Thomas, Maddie McNichol, Ella Spiniello, Lluka Wadey, Cooper Jones, Mitchell Zilm, and Katerina Angione. They are going places. They showed musical and stage maturity beyond their years. And they were not alone. There are so many vivid young singers and dancers in the mix that only the program could contain their names.
Three of them actually brought the house down - Lluka Wadey, Zoe Foskett, and Finn Green.
But, just looking at the dance ensembles and their precision and timing, their beautiful spirit and diversity, and just listening to some of the grand choral harmonies, one has to acknowledge Pelican as a really important foundation and forward-moving force for the arts in South Australia.
We must only hope our Festival State sustains an arts department, an arts budget, and an arts industry to nurture and employ them.
Please, Mr Marshall.
Samela Harris
When: Closed
Where: Murray Performing Arts Centre, Westminster School, Marion
Bookings: Closed
Neil Croker and The Prestige. On national tour. Entertainment Centre. 17 Jan 2019
A bio-musical based on the life of the beloved South African anti-apartheid hero Nelson Mandela would seem to be a tremendous idea, but musicals are a tough genre. Despite all the good energy in the world from a vigorous song and dance cast, this touring production struggles to find its mark in a sea of earnest good intention.
The great man’s life is sketched out in episodic scenes and expressed through torrents of terrible rhyming couplets. Good voices sing out the night, sight, right, fight lyrics blighted by a very average score valiantly well played by Michael Tyack’s fine band. The talent is all there on stage, working so hard. But the result reminds one of school musicals. It’s all so ingenuously derivative; Jesus Christ Superstar meets Stomp, minus memorable tunes.
Fortunately, as the second act evolves, there is an emerging gestalt and a sense of the triumph of the people and the calm endurance of Mandela, aka Madiba, is communicated.
Through much of the action, he is depicted while enduring his incarceration, elevated behind a screen and illuminated like an icon. This is quite effective and Mandela’s impersonation by Perci Mooketsi rises above much of the bad script to give him the presence and sense of human grandeur that Mandela deserves. Mooketsi’s delivery of the song, Invictus, is a moving high spot of the show.
Mandela’s life story and the fight for freedom in South Africa are threaded together in rap by the very lithe and sinewy David Denis as Narrator. He adds a Michael Jackson physicality to the show, along with some tumbling and likeable good spirit. Choral harmonies are strong also, and some marvellous voices emerge particularly from Ruva Ngwenya, Blake Erickson, Tarisai Vushe, Barry Conrad, Madeline Perrone and Tim Omaji.
There’s a lot of fierce or triumphant fist-waving amid the foot-stamping choreography which, despite the African leggings and caps, has something of an Irish feel to it. There are ambitious anthems and lots of action but Madiba the Musical can’t shake the amateurish formulaic structure and clichéd script. It is the loving zeal and sheer vitality of the hard-working and talented cast which bring Madiba to life, and the benign presence of Mooketsi symbolising one of the great men of our time.
Samela Harris
When: 17 to 20 Jan
Where: Entertainment Centre
Bookings: madibamusical.com.au
Butterfly Theatre. Wheatsheaf Hotel. 16 February
There’s savagery and there’s savage reality in the business of art and money making in London, circa 1980s; Thatcher’s bloody Britain and all that. Novelist/spy Graham Greene (Brant Eustice) is grappling with debt, a baby, avoiding spy life and too much booze all in a desperate attempt to survive. So deep in he goes, he conjures the likes of Christopher Marlow and William Shakespeare (both by Leah Lowe) for help.
Greene’s profoundly difficult, ugly conundrum of a spy/artist life is at the very heart of Allen’s script. How does surviving a dangerous past and future pan out with the devil, in so many forms, after your neck?
Director Brant Eustice’s production is savagery dressed in rich, deprecating humour and engaging liveliness which never lets up. The balance of literary in-jokes for the Shakespeare scholar and the mix of danger in the 1980s and 1600s worlds is simply but effectively executed. The cast is totally in command of their roles and has an absolute ball on stage playing with the material. Leah Lowe’s dark and deadly Marlow is as tantalising as is her delightfully wimpy Shakespeare stuck on his Italian play in service to Greene. Jay Somers’ Cutting Ball is a stand out performance in the style of a mischievous Shakespearean Puck-like character in which all the deadliness of Allen’s script is tautly contained and released ever so carefully.
In a trio of roles, Cheryl Douglas offers wonderful supporting balance to the production, and an especially wicked, knife ready companion to Marlow as Mary Firth.
Here’s first class pub theatre you can depend on for the good stuff.
David O’Brien
When: 15 to 24 January
Where: Wheatsheaf Hotel
Bookings: trybooking.com
Glynn Nicholas and Gretel Killeen - His and her versions of our lives. Holden Street Theatres
Glynn Nicholas and Gretel Killeen have not worked together for decades. Now in Adelaide with a double act, one can’t quite say they are working “together” so much as sharing the bill. It’s a two-act show divided into two performances following a delightfully quirky joint introduction.
The overarching gag is ageing. Both performers describe the pain and pleasure of increasingly epic life experience: Killeen with a self-denigrating tongue in cheek and Nicholas with raw confessional honesty.
Killeen has the stand-up comedy thing down pat. She must be among the best female stand-ups on stage in Australia right now. Her routine in this show is throw-back-your-head, laugh-out-loud funny. Her delivery style is oh, so casual. Almost incidental. It’s so nicely woven that one is barely aware of its careful construction. And she is gifted with that rare attribute, the witty off-the-cuff response. Hence she can afford to be fearless in audience interaction. She will always have a good come-back. She uses the audience constantly as a reference point, asking if people have had this or that experience, often rhetorically but always lowering the fourth wall and engaging directly. On the opening night at Holden Street, this was a tall order, literally. The house was packed to the rafters. And the massive audience loved her, rightly.
There is something delicately simpatico about her shtick while at the same time edgy and frank. She tells tales of looking for love, of the perils of parenthood, of the ageing body, embarrassing moments, living with celebrity and, of course, her amazing psychic powers.
Nicholas is Act II. He’s an engaging performer, beloved of Adelaide audiences. He has the best impish eye in the business. For this show he does a by-request revival of his old Channel 9 satiric creation, Pate Biscuit, now re-named Pat. Out of more than a quarter century of retirement, the hand puppet, Bongo, is as hilarious as ever and together they deliver an outrageous Story Time. Thereafter Nicholas picks up his guitar and sings I am a Mess; a strange song which parodies misery and preludes Nicholas’s accounts of mistakes and failed marriages. It is bare-heart stuff peppered with wonderful throw-away lines.
Now living back in Adelaide caring for aged parents, Nicholas says he has found new zest for life in the highly nuanced world of the Argentine Tango, and suddenly the audience is listening to a fascinating dissertation on the tango which is to be followed by a demonstration with, as luck would have it, a very beautiful and seasoned tango dancer from the audience. Pity Nicholas never asked her name. She had style. He rewarded her with a lollipop, an old trademark gesture from his famous Rundle Mall busking days.
It’s not what one expected but then again, what did one expect? Something different. And it is.
The performers close the show with I Got You, Babe - and a very acceptable Sonny and Cher harmony is revealed along with some anarchical improvised lyrics. Killeen has a marvellous voice. Oh, why do we discover this almost as an afterthought? Ah, but it’s promising content for another show.
#NiceNight #LotsOfLaughs #GrabaTicket
Samela Harris
When: 12 to 20 Jan
Where: Holden Street Theatres
Bookings: holdenstreettheatres.com