Stephen Sheehan. Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Festival Centre Rehearsal Room. 18 Jun 2015
Guided in tranches through subterranean corridors in the Festival Centre, life has already become surreal by the time one is seated in the two-tiered auditorium which was once a rehearsal room. Is that the underside of a revolve overhead? There is a cave-like stage in a corner with a sink and mirror, a massage table, a TV monitor, sofa, and a keyboard. It is a dressing room. Opera plays on the Tannoy.
A man sits with his back to the gathering audience. A woman sleeps deep in the sofa's coffin-like embrace.
The house lights go down. The man turns. It is Stephen Sheehan who introduces his character and the composer Wagner whose name he pronounces as "Wag-na" and presents, for our convenience, his translation of the opera being sung. He flips large pages on a pad and a wild nonsense of misheard lyrics unfolds, except that, ridiculous as they are, one can hear them clearly. Then Arapahoe, the miniature horse enters. Solid little pony, he seems unfazed by the audience's laughter and the trilling of the soprano. He snuffles intently on some interesting scent on the stage. The hilarity of the lyrics rises as Sheehan flips the pages, moving around to make way for the little visitor. The little horse is as adorable as it is incongruous. His presence is not explained. The audience is in stitches.
And the show is not like anything one could ever have imagined. But, presto, it is the vivid imaginings of Stephen Sheehan. Move over Luis Bunuel. Here is a surrealist soul much sweeter. Here comes a voyage which is sweet-natured and clever, lateral-thinking, original, and off-the-wall.
The pony exits. The actor dons a beautiful white horse head and plays soulfully on the keyboard.
When he reveals his face, it is with a dreadful curly wig and the revelation that he is now Tristan, ever besotted with Isolde. He's also a “background comedian” by which he defines himself; a strange sort of wallpaper entertainer. He tells jokes which he attributes to composers such as Chopin, Liszt, and Bach. He tells them while playing their music on his keyboard. He tells them softly, almost incidentally. They start out as cornball and then swerve into the lateral mindspace called Sheehan. He is not like anyone else.
The body on the couch rises to become the glorious Isolde, a Wagnerian soprano. She is a wonderful singer but, very strange. She sings while lying prone on the massage couch. She plays it straight from another world, oblivious to Tristan. In so doing, she enhances the strange humour of the piece beautifully. She is delivered by renowned opera singer Norma Knight - a performance of brave good spirit.
Sheehan weaves a narrative about Tristan's unrequited love. He plays many pieces. He tells more shaggy composer stories. His pace is beautiful. He is unhurried, unruffled, pensive. He has immense grace and a sweetness of demeanour. He is sometimes just a little coy. Sometimes he is just a little melancholy. Always he is strikingly original and his mastery of stagecraft is effortless.
The Cabaret Festival season of his show is brief. Too brief.
I would tell the world to drop everything and see this jewel of absurdity. But it has vanished into the ether of the moment. What a glorious moment it was.
Samela Harris
When: Closed
Where: Festival Centre Rehearsal Room
Bookings: Closed
Dunstan Playhouse. 14 June 2015.
With the opening medley of classical musics most loved symphonies still ringing in our ears, Ali McGregor, Dimity Shepherd & Antoinette Halloran enter to showcase a different side of opera.
Opera Burlesque is the brainchild of soprano Ali McGregor, whose artistic genius was sparked by the story of the girls of the Royal Opera House. After performing for the Convent Garden elite, they would discard their costumes and travel to the darker side of town to sing their arias to the public in the Miton's Music Hall. McGregor first staged the show with Shepherd & Halloran in 2005, and toured it successfully in both Australia and overseas until 2007.
Returning as part of this year's Adelaide Cabaret Festival, the three lovely ladies may be 10 years older, but they are as sexy as ever. Clad tastefully in corsets and lace, they soar through a mix of opera and rock, melding the genres with ease and charming all with sassy banter.
The audience delights in Halloran's euphonious performance of Un bel di vedremo, from her recent role as Cio-Cio-San in Madame Butterfly. It is an unexpected treat for those who did not get the pleasure. In hilarious contrast, she also gets the pulse racing with an orgasmic, operatic recital from 50 Shades of Grey.
Shepherd's seductive mezzo-soprano vocal is perfectly matched to cabaret. She brings the sass, with a dark version of Grace Jones's I've Seen That Face Before. McGregor is the "nice" to Shepherd's "naughty", and her innocent rendition of Kiss's I Was Made for Lovin' You is one of the highlights.
The three lovely divas are well supported by their mini orchestra, who provide wonderful musical accompaniment throughout. The ladies bring plenty of saucy humour and gorgeous vocals, but in terms of burlesque, Sapphire Snow's set is the real deal. She glides and shimmies across the Dunstan Playhouse stage, peeking from behind feathered fans with all the cheeky glamour of a 1920s pin up doll. Lila Luna, stepping in for Imogen Kelly, also provides a lovely acrobatic performance on the aerial hoop.
One feels that the pop "arias" are slightly swamped by their symphonic counterparts, however the quality performances soften the blow from any misplaced expectation.
Closing with a rousing and ear splitting version of ACDC's T.N.T, these three more than succeed in bringing the fun, frocks and frisk of burlesque to the opera.
Nicole Russo
When: Closed
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Melbourne Theatre Company. Her Majesty's Theatre. 13 June 2015
There's only one house on Pennsylvania Avenue that matters and that's the big white one with the flag on top. In this one person play with fabulous songs, we sit with assistant to the assistant to the assistant Harper while she packs her removal box in the Blue Room of the White House after an extraordinary long service as a sort of events co-coordinator for the First Family from Kennedy to Clinton - with the unexplained absence of George Bush the First.
This is Australian playwright Joanna Murray-Smith's second bespoke play for songstress Bernadette Robinson. Both directed by the irrepressible Simon Phillips, Songs For Nobodies was a hit in 2010 and the trio reprise their success with this offering, which opened in November 2014 at the Melbourne Theatre Company.
The situation is a bit like West Wing where you're with the underlings in the office except when the President just happens to surprise you at an embarrassing moment and lends you some avuncular advice. And Harper is a bit like Forest Gump - not only is she present at the late 20th Century's most historical events, she influences them. The cutest examples are when she whips off Marilyn Monroe's panties to smooth out that skin-clinging Happy Birthday, Mr President dress; and when she comes up with Tear Down This Wall! for Reagan's Cold War-ending Brandenburg Gate speech.
The set, comprised of a set of formal White House furniture, recalling Imperial Rome, and the presidential portraits that digitally dissolve to reveal images of the times, instilled an embarrassing, forelock-tugging cringe.
As Harper, Robinson is warm, charming and innocent, but the patter is just a petite too pat, and the Tennessee accent a bit over-egged. The Harper thing is a conceit to thematically link some songs to showcase Robinson's astonishing vocal skills and mimicking abilities. Sarah Vaughan, Diana Ross, Aretha Franklin, Eartha Kitt, Barbara Streisand and even Bob Dylan are vividly present and accounted for. The songs are introduced with some cute intercourse between the diva and Harper - usually womanly support. Robinson has an uncanny ability to get into the divas's skins, and to astonish with vocal veracity, especially the black ones, yet her mimicry skates very close to parody and the drag show. Or maybe it just seems that way as these women are easy prey for the drag artistes. Along the way, she does a very passable Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan, and who can remember what Gerald Ford sounded like?
I am personally a reader of this era of American history and I loved this show and Bernadette Robinson's work in it.
PS I cannot find any evidence that such a Harper person actually existed, though intriguingly, a slide show at the end of the performance showed a Robinson-looking person in a snappy with various presidents and at work in the White House. Maybe the CIA doctored the pics?
David Grybowski
When: 11 to 14 June
Where: Her Majesty's Theatre
Bookings: bass.net.au
Bakehouse Theatre Company. Bakehouse Theatre. 13 Jun 2015
Misogyny, insecurity, spite, venom, and jealousy; they're hoary old dramatic themes but not usually intensively concentrated unless it be in a Neil Labute drama. This little ripper of an emotional pressure cooker is not a kitchen sink drama. It is a factory lunch room number. And, it is not exactly a working class saga but a class clash epic.
As we meet Greg and Steph, they are in violent, virulent conflict. She is on the attack. He has spoken poorly of her to his best mate whose thick and stupid girlfriend has seen fit to pass on the hurtful words. Steph won't take them lying down. She has an extended hissy-fit in which she generally explains how bad it is to make thoughtless comments on the physical appearance of others. Greg has referred to her looks as "regular".
The tirade goes back and forth and forth and back. Torrents of words are screamed. Greg was obviously wrong, but Steph is a foul-mouthed neurotic harridan who really wants an argument. Greg wants it all to go away. Fool that he is, he loves this strident hairdresser. But Greg, we finally realise, is adrift way outside his intellectual and cultural world. He has fallen into a hades of the dim and dangerous people. His best friend, Kent, is a grotesque caricature of a vulgar, ignorant sexist pig. One can't imagine how Greg has ever tolerated him. But Kent has a respectable girlfriend called Carly, a security guard, who seems not to notice how gutter-repugnant he is.
So there we have it; four catastrophic characters screaming at each other about who has betrayed whom and how. Somehow in the middle of all this, Greg wanders from scene to scene with a veritable library of classic literature in his hand.
His dolt friends regularly ask him what he is reading and he tells them. Their idea of a book is TV Week. What are these people doing together?
In the end of the day, Greg has his moment, a pyrrhic victory. We believe there are better things ahead for him.
The others are losers and we never want to see them again. What a pity there are so many such people crowding out this world, we feel as we totter, exhausted, from the theatre.
We have not liked what we saw. But we were not bored. Reason for this is not just Joh Hartog's fiercely snappy direction of the ferocious cut and thrust of it all, but the performances of the four actors. They are intense, committed and utterly focused, drawing the audience tightly into the awful thrall of the work. If Krystal Brock is convincing as Carly, Clare Mansfield is searing as awful Steph. David Hirst is so absolutely obnoxious as Kent that one may find oneself crossing the street to get away from the poor man if one ever sees him in real life.
Nic Krieg holds the key to the play as hapless Greg, the only character for whom the audience can feel an ounce of sympathy. He is a battered soul, out of his depth among the philistines. Krieg's embodiment of all of this simply breaks one's heart. Never did an actor colour a character with more shades of hurt. It's a tour de force. This brutish Labute play merits seeing for the Krieg of it.
Samela Harris
When: 13 to 27 Jun
Where: Bakehouse Theatre
Bookings: bakehousetheatre.com
Photography by Michael Errey
Bringing Him Home With His West End Story. Cabaret Festival. Festival Theatre. 13 Jun 2015
Daniel Koek is a Gawler lad who made it big on the West End. In homage to an inspirational performance of The Phantom of the Opera his Mum took him to when he was a young'un, he opened his show with a medley of tunes from this beloved musical. Koek is very proud of how far he has come - manifested by his Hugh Grant accent - and he repeatedly used words like ‘grit’, ‘determination’, and ‘hard work’ to signal it's not all beer and skittles. A salient lesson for any wannabes out there in the crowd.
The audience's troubles melted away after a few bars from Phantom. Koek is an extraordinarily powerful vocalist, and he showcased his amazing range by reprising songs from his lead roles in smash musicals in biographical order (he seemed to have nothing but lead roles): West Side Story, Chess, South Pacific and the icing on the cake, his Jean Valjean in a recent West End production of Les Misérables.
Now a word from his sponsor. Koek is Cultural Ambassador for Qantas and he played one of those naff videos of himself effortlessly checking in at an empty Heathrow and on to the first glass of champers in business class. Has it come to this? What a wank. He further plugged a UK cancer fund and his two albums. I was hoping for a plug for whoever made his suit, because it was terrific.
The second part of the show featured a few numbers from the new album, HiGH, and a couple of songs with Adelaide's Michaela Burger. There were some happy snaps in the background of the good old school days. A nice tie-in, as they were fellow students in London and she is also in a Cabaret Festival show - sold out, but. His long-time musical director, Greg Arrowsmith, did the seamless arrangements and brought together fine musicians.
Daniel Koek has made it big and he came back to tell us. He certainly emphasised it doesn't happen overnight, it's work, and at times, an out-of-control journey. He subliminally indicated that if you want to be really busy in show business, it helps to dance and play an instrument as well as you can sing. But boy, can he sing!
David Grybowski
When: 13 to 14 June
Where: Festival Theatre Stage
Bookings: Closed