Cabaret Festival. Her Majesty’s Theatre. 5 Jun 2025
Virginia Gay, Artistic Director of the 25th Adelaide Cabaret Festival, told us in no uncertain terms her theme for this anniversary festival: an acknowledgement of the past, a celebration of the present, and an exciting look at the future. In this, she has succeeded in spades.
The Gala gave us a peek, albeit a limited one, of what to expect this season. From the spikey Louisiana horns and lusty keyboard work of Davina & The Vagabonds; to Vika and Linda Bull, who have never been seen to give less than a stellar performance; from smut violinist Victoria Falconer to the supple and prancing Tomas Kantor in his hot pink pant suit, they gave it their all. Virginia Gay gave at least that much and more in sheer exuberance and costumery, including the opening number Let’s Get This Party Started, but in the end the Adelaide Cabaret Festival’s 25th Gala performance was a story of two names.
What came before the interval was then a warmup, concluding as it did with Rizo’s Song Of Freedom, a pocket rocket of a singer who spoke of ingesting psilocybin mushrooms and appeared to have chosen her costume as a direct outcome of this act. She was – boisterous.
Act Two then began with the aforementioned Vika & Linda. These powerhouses of the Australian music scene never fail to deliver and their rousing rendition of Nina Simone’s New Day was just a taster of their upcoming show.
I promised you two names to remember and here is the first. Carlotta. Carlotta is 82 years of age and proudly celebrates that fact. She is powerful, forthright and ribald, and had the audience eating out of her hand. In four minutes, she showed us exactly what heights cabaret had reached (past tense) and how it might be restored to that position. She dominated the stage by presence alone.
The second name then is Noah Byrne. Noah is 18 years of age, has just finished his intensive music course at Marryatville High School, and is going to be a worldwide star. Nothing is more certain. From the moment the spotlight caught him in repose at the lap of the stage he showed he was in a class of his own. His voice work, his timing, his sense of what works marks him as pure talent. From virtually nothing (a story of how he, a boy with learning difficulties had ended up on this stage) he crafted a theatrical performance which should be talked about for years to come.
Mark his name; remember when you heard of him first: Noah Byrne. With an unruly mop of hair, a conservatively cut waistcoat suit and two-tone shoes, he took less than five minutes to propel the audience into the future with him. He spoke in rapid-fire syllables, bounded across the stage, established himself at the piano and cemented his reputation.
I mean no disrespect in not mentioning other performers; we have witnessed the beginning of a legend in the beginning of a career, and we will be reading the name Noah Byrne for years to come.
As a side note: all reviewers and critics wait for a time such as this, to proclaim “I saw it!”. I am no different in that this is only the second time I have known with such certainty what I have witnessed. The last time was when a friend and I (he an internationally known musician) first heard a band named Innocent Criminals win Triple J’s demo contest with their song Pure Massacre. That band was Silverchair. And believe me - Noah Byrne is in a class of his own making.
With all this in mind you might think the Adelaide Cabaret Festival is in good hands as it embarks upon the next 25 years, and you would be right. The program is strong, there is a solid mix of local and international performers, and it promises much more than late night assignations and innuendo, though there is that. In fact, Carlotta made sure we knew her show was on a Sunday afternoon, a wry comment on the age of her fans. In 2025 it is fair to say the Adelaide Cabaret Festival has something for everyone.
Alex Wheaton
When: 5 Jun
Where: Her Majesty’s Theatre
Bookings: Closed
Pulteney Grammar School. Futures Theatre, Paradise. 30 May 2025
Pulteney Grammar’s production of Greg Kotis’ Urinetown- The Musical is an outstanding example of what can be achieved with a secondary school musical when the happy combination of talent, time and significant resources are brought together by a school community.
It is clear the efforts of the substantial production team to provide a strong foundation for the talented cast paid off!
A ten times Tony Award nominated, triple winner, the musical opened on Broadway in 2000. Despite that, it’s comically satirized comment on a socially two-tiered world, beset by water shortages controlled by a corrupt system under the regime of the despotic Caldwell B. Cladwell (Billy Rowan) could not be more pertinent! In this dog-eat-dog world, citizens must use public, pay-per-use, amenities controlled by the despot’s company. The underclass hero of the piece, Bobby Strong, (Patrick Longden) leads a revolution against Cladwell’s socially irresponsible, avaricious corporation, and the legal system as well as unwittingly falling in love with Hope Cladwell (Polly Schubert).
Kotis’s Urinetown is a sophisticated exploration of corporate greed, environmental catastrophe, and the resilience of a community pushing back despotism, cleverly tempered by crackling satire, and intentionally self-conscious “meta” commentary.
Under Jo Casson’s capable direction, this youthful cast manages the themes and pace of the show with great insight and impeccable timing.
Credit must be given to the ensemble, the seething, writhing, gloriously grotty mob of citizens, crooks, and sanitation martyrs. Variously huddled in protest or jazz-handing for justice, every single performer gives Broadway-level commitment such that one wanted to give them each their own curtain call.
Wardrobe is, quite simply, spectacular and testimony to the resourcefulness of Costume Coordinator, Madi Schubert, assistants, Jordan Bender and Jess Bohmer and an expansive Costume Preparation Team.
Choreographers Casson and Rosy Dobre prove to be a dynamic duo, their iterations of Look at The Sky, Snuff That Girl, Run Freedom, Run and I See A River are ensemble showstoppers one won’t forget in a hurry! And the Commedia style lazzi throughout is hilarious!
Pulteney’s Head of Performing Arts and Musical Director, Jonathan Rice, conducted Mark Hollmann’s score with professional precision, its harmonies tight, cues on point, and musical shifts, from comic to tragic and back again, seamless.
Clearly well supported by the work of Vocal Director Katia Labozzetta and repetiteur Meredith Wilson, the Principal Cast is simply superb! Henry Green as Officer Lockstock, accompanied by his faithful sidekick Officer Barrel (Sebastian Gollan – a thirteen-year-old with a great future!) is immediately likeable- despite being something of a rascal- and engaging in his finely balanced roles of narrator and corrupt cop. Similarly, Little Sally (Emily Puah) connects with personable charm and great comic timing. Pocket rocket Maggie Bridges as the rough around the edges, streetwise, crafty, Penelope Pennywise simply shines in every aspect of her performance and Billy Rowan is superbly despicable as Cladwell; I would have liked to have seen stronger attempts by the makeup team to age these two. Polly Schubert as Hope and Patrick Longden as Bobby, crackle with romantic tension and both possess great presence. Did I mention the singing is simply superb? Unbelievably so! I hope these great young performers, along with many of the ensemble are given (and take) the opportunity to pursue arts training and a career when they finish school. To this end, perhaps the SA Government could provide similar funding to the Arts as they do to bailing out basketball teams abandoned by their owners!
Along with Pelican Productions, Pulteney Grammar’s Musical Theatre course seems on a trajectory to produce the next of generation musical theatre stars!
Pulteney Grammar turned toilet humour into theatrical high art. It was witty, bold, deeply relevant, and just the right amount of absurd.
Theatre is supposed to provoke and entertain, and this production of Urinetown - The Musical does it with style.
Go! See it!!!
John Doherty
When: 29 to 31 May
Where: Futures Theatre, Paradise
Bookings: humanitix.com
Zest Theatre Group. Victor Harbor Town Hall. 23 May 2025
It’s not like the old days when community theatre was a bit of a joke. These days, it’s quite serious business with seasoned performers underscoring the zeal and potential of the up-and-comers in, as it happens at Victor Harbor right now, truly ambitious major productions.
Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is not a work for the faint-hearted.
It is a big show. Not only does it need a cast of the proverbial thousands but also it needs a zillion costumes and set changes, special effects and bold professional sound.
Zest’s brave production ticks most of these boxes within the limitations of the old Town Hall. It is a crime that Victor still does not have a proper theatre. It certainly has lots of thespians with talent and devotion.
This work has been produced by the indefatigable Terry Mountstephen and directed by mother and daughter team, Aria and Natalie Stevenson with choreography from Leila Britton. It has all the big backing sound of the Marc Shaiman score and the beloved Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley movie songs.
Singers are body-miked and, at times, Zest’s multifunction tech, Greg Rossiter’s volume zeal enables a bit of distortion. Young Robert Walker still has trainer wheels on in the acting department but the kid can sure belt out a song as Charlie Bucket.
Joshua Coldwell is an award-winning old hand, so to speak, and a versatile actor, last seen by this critic as a brutally corporate Rupert Murdoch in the Theatre Guild’s Ink. The role of Willie Wonka could not be in more challenging contrast, but Coldwell captures the character, sings in tune and carries the show, albeit in oddly unfitting trousers.
The costumes for a show of this scale are daunting and Zest has a huge, clever crew behind them. Generally, they are excellent and the OompaLoompa outfits bring the house down.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a good vehicle for talent spotting and Zest has a wealth of diverse talent from which ballet dancer Eliza Altamura shines forth as the obnoxious Veruca Salt. She’s star material. Vivacious Tia Stevenson is up there, too, in the role of precocious Violet Beauregarde and the production does a very good job of having her blow up as an overjuiced blueberry. Alice Riggs, on the other hand, fat-suited as Augustus Gloop, charms with her stage presence alone, unlike Yasha Button playing Mrs Teavee who simply stuns when she lets loose her big Broadway hot mama voice. Riley Hubbard hones in nicely on the media-sodden character of Mike Teavee. The audience loves him.
Then again, the audience has a lot to love in a diligent cast each carving out a classic Dahl character: John Hogg, Leila Hollingworth, Lucas Irvin, Daniel Cooper, Rachel Coghlan, and Kaitlyn Tanner.
The bedridden grandparents are delicious caricatures and the big dance numbers are exuberant good fun with an ensemble which embraces trained dancers and as well as assorted extras of young and even younger. And did I mention that they yodel?
It’s quite a long night and the seats are hard, but this Fleurieu mob knows its stuff and clearly is a company which enjoys working really hard and giving its community a vitality of value for money.
Samela Harris
When: 23 May to 1 Jun
Where: Victor Harbor Town Hall
Bookings: trybooking.com
State Theatre Company SA. Dunstan Playhouse. 23 May 2025
They were tough days for “Wog” children, growing up in the shadow of cocky Aussie intolerance in the last century. Little did they know the cultural swing ahead of them as they inherited the land from their diligent migrant parents.
Melina Marchetta lived it and, through Vidya Rajan’s adaptation for the stage, an era of Italian Australians coming of age is now being played out in the Dunstan Playhouse, complete with the family passata ritual.
To that end, the stage is loaded with countless crates of ripe tomatoes. Mountains of them. The tomato is totemic to the Italian influence on Australian cuisine and culture. So much so that the set includes the giant steaming steel drum of tomatoes, the fragrance of which pervaded the proximate first night audience members, not so sweetly.
Hence, it seems to be a somewhat odd night at the theatre with a State Theatre production largely originating from Melbourne under the directorship of the new Brink artistic director Stephen Nicolazzo.
It already has had a Melbourne season, one understands, and cast members such as principal Chanella Macri are not new to their characterisations. This shows in their confidence and nuance. Macri, who is Italian-Samoan, and a fine actress, has a beautifully modulated voice and scores some deliciously impish fractures of the fourth wall. She is also eye-catching simply in physical presence albeit the frequent stripping down to rather eccentric undies is puzzling. Nonetheless, she carries it with no-nonsense aplomb and delivers Josie Alibrandi as a smart teenager trying to find her place amid family and school. Not that she appears to be seventeen. Blind casting these days gives audiences some blanks to fill in and, in the costuming of this work, further puzzles about hair, wigs, and gender. That the nonna had really messy hair was a cultural distraction to this nanna who cannot recollect such an untidy Italian widow when she was growing up in an Italian neighbourhood, let alone one who did not wear black. Such discrepancies can be distracting. Also, the body mikes seemed de trop on the Dunstan stage.
Indeed, there are many ponderables here, but not in the acting. The cast, mostly Melbourne-based actors, is superb, albeit the wonderful Lucia Mastrantone, eloquent as Christina Alabrandi, fell into a bit of the “Effie” wog delivery for comic relief as student Sera. Jennifer Vuletic is really touching as Nonna and even more so in song. One wished the director had given her less time pondering photo albums for, indeed, it is a very long and overwritten play, as noted by two coming-of-age teens in the audience.
Adelaide’s Chris Asimos is refined and simpatico in his portrayal of Michael Andretti. He wouldn’t know how to give a bad performance. As for Riley Warner, hot out of WAPPA: he is a keeper. One looks forward to seeing more of his work. Ashton Malcom completes the cast extremely capably as both racist schoolgirl, Ivy and as John, the boy from the posh school. Pity about the wig.
This big night out in retro Italian family life is accompanied by a very unusual soundscape from Melbourne composer Daniel Nixon. It’s undercurrent of amorphous semi-industrial thrum was another puzzle and, when music soared for the thrill of a kiss, it was like the movies.
So, here we have the first work from our new Brink chief. The bulk of opening-night audience got the laughs and responded to the now classic Australian coming of age story. And no one will ever forget all those tomatoes.
Samela Harris
When: 23 to 31 May
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: statetheatrecompany.com.au
Independent Theatre. Star Theatres. 16 May 2025
Callum Logan gazes intently from the front of Independent Theatre’s program for Ordinary People, his sweet face set against dark and stormy waters.
At the end of the play’s performance in Star Theatres, that image has become indelibly impressed into the folds of audience grey matter. And one has been drawn into the post traumatic angst of the young man as if by some sort of emotional magnet.
Of course, it is Rob Croser’s directorial insight which has thus captured the heart, with the choice of a deeply affecting piece of American drama and an exceptional lead actor.
Ordinary People, adapted from a Judith Guest 1976 novel and directed by Robert Redford, was a multi-award-winning film featuring Mary Tyler Moore and Donald Sutherland with Timothy Hutton in 1980.
It was and is all about an affluent suburban-Chicago family after the favoured older son has drowned in a boating accident. A year later, the surviving son, Conrad Jarrett struggles to find his place in both his family and his peer-group world and at last seeks the help of a psychiatrist.
Thus does this play traverse the lumpy layers of guilt and blame which envelop loss and grief. It’s a universal theme, of course, thus highly relatable for all, and very well studied in a work, adapted for the stage by Nancy Gilsenan.
It embraces Conrad’s relationship with his swim team buddies, the girl who befriended him in hospital care, the new local girl with her own problems, not to mention an over-protective father and a love-stunted mother. The audience becomes fly-on-the-wall to the interactions with the psychiatrist and, indeed, gains some added respect for the very difficult role psychiatrists play in this world.
One’s heart goes out in all directions as the play develops.
Croser and fellow designer David Roach have contained the action in a bland box set with a steeply raked stage.
First impression is that it is all too austere and a little logistically awkward with the actors carrying props in and out. But, that very aesthetic simplicity embellished only by lighting hues and shadows, seems to magnify the characters and, at the same time, suggest the suppression of emotional expression. The more one ponders it, the more that barren set has to offer.
This play is a splendid vehicle for Callum Logan, a fresh young actor who is turning heads all over the place. After distinguishing himself in a recent Fleurieu Festival Shakespearean variety show, he now displays his depth and versatility with a tour de force depiction of the complexity of grief and loss and family dysfunction a la American 20th-century theatre. Logan delivers youthful charm and fun, hair-trigger fury, and romantic tenderness - well-wrought aspects of this complex character, all with a good American accent.
There are lively junior actors onstage, also: college swim mates nicely played by Ryan Kennealy and Oscar McLean, wet-haired and in budgie smugglers. Olivia McAdam and Cleo Barker give credibility to the two girls in his orbit. Fahad Farooque plucks most movingly on the heartstrings as Conrad’s lost soul of a caring father while Lyn Wilson, not quite as aptly cast, turns on believably brittle awfulness as the mother who has trouble in showing love to this lesser of her sons.
Steven Turner is Dr Barker, the psychiatrist. He’s comfortable, deceptively casual with his big mugs of coffee in hand, his role providing the play's intellectual balance on the whys and wherefores of grief. It is a potently simpatico performance.
Veteran actor David Roach can play anything, and he does, nicely - both the swim coach and the Texas uncle.
The quality of Croser's direction and the intensity of the performances create a tight and terrific production, entirely absorbing and thought-provoking.
And, of course, the chance to see this modest but brilliant young actor, Callum Logan.
Samela Harris
When: 16 to 24 May
Where: Star Theatres
Bookings: Independenttheatre.org.au