Columbia Artists Management, LLC - Tim Fox and Alison Ahart Williams, Kraft-Engel Management - Richard Kraft and Laura Engel. Entertainment Centre. 14 Mar 2015
There is a huge and expectant crowd at the Entertainment Centre for this Festival once-off and Australian premiere, exclusive to Adelaide. It is a night to remember.
Unless you have been living in Woop Woop for the last quarter century, you must have seen at least one Tim Burton film. I had visited the Tim Burton retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and you may have sojourned to Melbourne a few years ago to see the same at Federation Square. Burton is a product of a mundane suburban LA upbringing filled with movie dreaming. The exhibition was chock full of his sketches, ink drawings and water colourings of exotic and macabre characters that became manifest in his movies like The Nightmare Before Christmas, Corpse Bride, Mars Attacks! and Beetlejuice. His gothic and ghoulish designs muscled up the superhero genre in two Batman movies, and re-defined Alice in Wonderland. He has made millions and millions of sketches (bet you thought I was going to say millions and millions of $$).
Film-wise, composer Danny Elfman has been right there with him since Pee-wee's Big Adventure for a total of sixteen blockbuster Hollywood movies over twenty-five years - one of the most productive, creative and successful partnerships in show business history. Elfman's haunting, loud, strange and unrelenting compositions are combustible standalone and explosive with Burton's visualisations.
On the night, a gigantic Adelaide Symphony Orchestra conducted by John Mauceri is backed up by the Adelaide Festival Chorus. Overhead is an enormous screen. The format in the first half sees a film announced on the screen, then a few minutes of Burton's illustrations, followed by a few more minutes of film outtakes. Then a screen saver comes on that looks like it was designed by an Aboriginal artist from Utopia though probably was also by Burton. At this point, the music obtains a fresh vibrancy as one's attention is no longer diverted by the visuals. All the same, one longs for some actual synced footage instead of the moving montage.
The second half of the show is more interesting, thanks in part to favourite movies like Batman and Edward Scissorhands, but principally because of guest soloists Bertie Blackman, Sandy Cameron and Charlie Wells. Cameron, dressed provocatively in a leather strapped outfit, burns her violin strings with some awesome stroking, and the nine year old Charlie Wells presumably got the gig because no castrato had the balls to do it.
Oh, gosh, I nearly forgot. Danny Elfman his very self is there in red hair and a purple suit. With theatrical gusto, he reprises some songs he voiced in the Christmas-Hallowe'en mix-up Nightmare Before Christmas. His energy and effervescence is breathtaking. It's sort of like meeting an animated Beethoven, and you wonder - How did you create all this music?
After two standing ovations for our magnificent orchestra and this smorgasbord of compositions, Elfman apologises for not getting to Australia sooner. Maybe there is the making of a new movie there - The Ghost of Don Dunstan! Bravo!
David Grybowski
When: 14 Mar
Where: Entertainment Centre
Bookings: Closed
Poe Burlesque Theatre. La Boheme. 13 March 2015.
Intimate lighting, cosy seating and Victorian inspired decoration set the scene. Departing the bright lights of Sydney's cabaret scene for the intimacy of Adelaide's La Boheme, Poe Burlesque Theatre presents their homage to Gothic wordsmith Edgar Allan Poe in Edgar's Girls.
Whilst inspired by the works of the poet, fans should feel disappointment at his merely occasional presence. The show title conjurers thoughts of high-brow burlesque artistry regaling the story of Poe's loves and lovers, some of whom provided the creative seed for his greatest works. Alas, it is not to be.
The piece features lovely vocal sets from Morgan Powell, Sarah de Possesse and Clementine Mills. Each possesses a gorgeous voice deserving of more stage time. Unfortunately, that's where the highlights end.
Despite the title of the work, at its close one feels no closer to understanding the "girls of Edgar". The story line is minimal and loose, barely providing a context for the characters, with a comedy routine late in the piece that is confounding as to its purpose and place.
Powell's narration is enjoyable and she presents as the strongest actor of the group. However, reading directly from a notebook throughout, she rarely meets the gaze of her audience and, as a result, fails to connect. In such an intimate venue, it is a lost opportunity.
The burlesque itself is pleasant, but not extraordinary, with the exception of Ginger Foxx. Foxx's sultry and cheeky routine with feather fans is far and away the highest quality and demonstrates both skill and finesse.
Some basic Googling suggests this production has been staged on a much larger scale and with superior production values in its home base. However, this cut down version for the Adelaide Fringe needs less flesh and more substance.
Nicole Russo
When: 11 to 13 Mar
Where: La Boheme
Bookings: Closed
Northern Light Theatre Company. Shedley Theatre. 14 March 2015
Happy Days, the musical, spawned from the fourth season of the American sitcom TV series in 1976. Happy Days ran from 1974 to 1984 and was one of the most popular shows of the '70s. How popular? The leather jacket worn by Henry Winkler as The Fonz is in the Smithsonian Institute. Both the musical and the series are Californian creations that satisfied the market for nostalgia by post-war babies who thought wistfully of high school and grew up on James Dean movies and Elvis Presley music - in fact, they make an inspirational appearance in the show. Just out of interest, Grease the musical opened in 1971, with the film Grease following Happy Days the musical in 1978, so these stories in various media leapfrogged each other. Henry Winkler turned down the similarly leather-clad Italian-American role of Danny Zucco for fear of being typecast, but of course, he already was.
The Northern Light Theatre Company’s reprise is directed by a father and son team (George and Gary Humphries respectively) and a musical direction/choreography team of three sisters (Danielle, Tammy and Kylie Pedler respectively). It doesn't go very well.
The horns in the overture made the orchestra suspect from the start. Nearly all the cueing in the dialogue and some of the scene changes were slower than a math class. At times, some individual microphones didn't work. The choreography was unchallenging, and even then, sometimes arms were going up when they should be going down. Arnold's looked like a shed (set design: John Sheehan).
The situation of the situation comedy, and the narrative, is way past its use-by date. The school kids are all white, reflecting pre-desegregation times. The milieu is nauseatingly American dream and apple pie, with Mrs C straining to escape the gravity pull of the stove. Male Mexican-Americans are portrayed as villains and female ones as sex objects. And the all-star wrestling competition at a picnic? Even one of the characters thought that was weird.
Gus Smith was miscast as The Fonz. Limping around on stage and unwilling to dance, his obvious older age to the Class of '59 made him look like a spent force; it was difficult to see why he was revered in this corner of Milwaukee, or why anyone thought his Fonz was cool, except his Fonz-self. Fonz is supposed to be a drop-out of the current crop of kids, not a hanger-on from the Class of '49, unless he flunked Grade 12 ten times. Nathan Quadrio looked very comfortable on stage and presented the requisite affable and handsome Richie. Bianca Levai was in fine voice as Pinky and gave the impression of subduing her soul capacities to the plain white bread music. Cheryl Ford as the aforementioned mother was the real McCoy evoking sympathy. Delanie Whibley was a standout and could have a career in musical theatre after her upcoming stint to study dance in LA.
Happy Days is a great opportunity to get lots of young people up on stage singing and dancing, but after four weeks of the Fringe, this was a hard landing back into the Adelaide scene.
David Grybowski
When: 13 to 28 Mar
Where: Shedley Theatre
Bookings: seatadvisor.com
Stan's Cafe. Flinders Street Baptist Church. 11 Mar 2015
Three cardinals in their crimson uniforms and a Moslem stage manager take their Punch and Judy-style puppet show on the road. It's a dumb show - the sole vocals being scene introductions in Latin, and missing the raucous audience participation that contributed to Punch and Judy surviving to the present day from its roots in 16th Century commedia dell'arte. Something like Michael Frayn's Noises Off, we also see the frantic offstage business of the cast and crew. Not only are they shifting scenery in and out of the puppet-size proscenium at an impossible and comic rate, but the cardinals themselves are the puppets, rapidly changing head gear and tunics before looking rather foolish in front of the stage lights when gesticulating like marionettes or forming tableaus.
Naturally, the subject matter is the Bible. It was great fun to watch them assemble a scene, guess the familiar Bible story, and marvel at how they accomplish the action, like delivering the fatal stony blow to Goliath, or re-creating the siege of a city. The cardinals were very busy sliding in mountains or hanging a star or donning the keffiyeh. Periodically things go wrong, like a noisily dropped prop or missed music cues.
Beginning with a selected tour of the Old Testament, Jesus was then born, crucified, buried and everything in-between. After the ascension, the cardinal sin of going on too long with the same shtick was apparent. They took us through the Crusades and World War, all as admirably done and creative and colourful as the Bible stories, but essentially more of the same. Right up to the present day; the devil was to blame for the Israeli-Palestine conflict as well.
I felt that director James Yarker missed copious opportunities for additional tension, conflict and humour inherently present in the show's modus operandi. The fact the puppets were missing didn't cause much consternation, perhaps they are always missing. A great opportunity for strife was between the cardinals and the Moslem stage manager, but the single event of disagreement was patched up with holy patience. The relationships between the cardinals themselves was too subtle to get much interested in. The offstage business could have been a lot richer - because when it was, it got a few laughs.
A great concept with huge comic potential - seemingly designed to raise a twitter and not go too far - but it wore me out.
David Grybowski
When: 11 to 14 Mar
Where: Flinders Street Baptist Church
Bookings: bass.net.au
ONEOFUS/Improbable. Dunstan Playhouse. 
0 Mar 2015
Aside from the set which is a cartoon of the faded elegance of mansion rooms, Beauty and The Beast didn't promise much in the first ten minutes. Mat Fraser and Julie Atlas Muz made some introductory remarks about themselves, take seats, and recite the opening of the fairy tale with the aid of another couple who manipulate overheads on one of those old projectors; you know, the kind used in the offices of the world before PowerPoint. But it gets better and better as Mat and Julie alternate revelations of their lives as carnies and their improbable courtship beginning in the sideshows of Julie's beloved Coney Island with the tale of Beauty and The Beast which stands as a metaphoric narrative arc for their love story.
With the aid of puppeteers Jess Mabel Jones and Johnny Dixon, this humorous, heart-warming and magical tale is told with every trick known between pantomime and pornography (in fact the show is rated 18+). Goblets fly through the air, arms and body dismember and re-attach, clothes go on and off, and then stay off. In a frantic and racy banquet of fruit, lascivious tongue lashings of bananas and melon foreshadow the finale.
Beast even takes a sponge bath and washes his ass with his heel. Try that as your next party trick! But it's no parlour game for Fraser; that's how he does it even when no-one's looking. You see, Fraser's physique is a fall-out of his mother's prescribed use of Thalidomide.
Beauty is won over by the lonely but enigmatic Beast and their marriage is consummated in ecstatic variation. Not for the shy or faint-hearted. I have to admit, I experienced a hint of envy as I watched this couple - so in love, and creative, and free - have this opportunity to reaffirm their vows with such gusto. Bravo!
While former Miss Coney Island, Julie Atlas Muz, is very comfortable in her career performance genre of burlesque, and at being her lovely self, one does have to know something about acting to perform even melodrama. On the other hand, Fraser would be absolutely convincing in anything from Shakespeare's Henry V to Hemingway's Henry in 'Farewell To Arms.' He has a glorious vocal presence and steady command of the stage. Disabled my arse.
A must see for the Festival.
David Grybowski
When: 10 to 15 Mar
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: bass.net.au