Reasons To Be Pretty

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

Daniel Koek

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

The Songs That Made Memphis

Sun Rising. Space Theatre. 11 Jun 2015

Don't you think the theatre on the cover of the Cabaret Festival program - at a glance, when you are walking past it in a display stand - looks like a full whiskey bottle? Subliminally? No? Just me?

I could just imagine B. Humphries scouting out Sun Rising in some smoke machine-generated smoky honky tonk in Melbourne, marveling at this band's awesome respect for the colour conversion of blues from black to white, and the birth of rock & roll, in Sam Phillips's Memphis recording studio, where he pressed the black plastic with the Sun Records label for some of the biz's biggest names in their nascent condition in the mid-1950s. I felt the same love, especially from band leader David Cosma's renditions, without imitation, of some of Elvis's first recordings. He looked so proud. But a little miffed when slightly upstaged by Adrian Whyte's fulsome Folsom Prison as a youthful Johnny Cash poltergeist.

David Cosma is keen you get the story right, presenting Phillips and his stable of stars story chronologically, and introducing the songs with a wealth of appreciated information. Helping David with his dream is the fabulous Damon Smith. Smith rips the ivory off the 88s with terrifying slides, yet tickles his way through solos - he is both slap and tickle. His gravelly voice was absolutely spot on for Jerry Lee Lewis and Roy Orbison.

The band is further motivated by Adam Coad and Trent McKenzie on drums, and bass and double bass respectively. I loved the way McKenzie pounded and slapped the double bass strings like someone's soft bottom. When the aforementioned Whyte's not Cash, he's encouraging the electric lead guitar to weep and cry.

The crowd comprised mainly age types who were teens in the 50s or just after, and they loved the music made before the day the music died (slight homage to Don McLean's American Pie). They were enthralled with Sun Rising's catalogue of Presley, Orbison, Howlin' Wolf, BB King, Perkins, Cash, Lewis and also to learn how it all began. The only thing missing was the dance floor.

David Grybowski

When: 11 to 13 Jun

Where: Space Theatre

Bookings: Closed

The Front

Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Dunstan Playhouse. 8 Jun 2015

And thus is born a new Australian musical, a labor of love from the pen of talented medico cum composer and vocalist Lane Hinchcliffe.

At the conclusion of today’s world première performance, the near capacity Dunstan Playhouse audience rose to its feet and offered a heartfelt, appreciative and noisy standing ovation. To a person the (parochial?) audience sensed they had witnessed the beginning of something special.

The Front is a new addition to the canon of musicals about war and its lasting effects. It centers on the recent discovery of the remains of Australian soldiers (and other nationalities) at the site of the Battle of Fromelles in 1916 and their re-interment into official war graves. The story follows the pilgrimage of an old man, Arthur, played with consummate style and dignity by Paul Blackwell, as he journeys to the site of the battlefield to find the grave of Frank, a lost relative whom he never knew. It culminates with Arthur reading aloud at the gravesite from a letter written by an enemy soldier who was rescued by Frank as his last act of humanity. Along the way there are flashbacks to 1916 where we meet Frank and his fellow troopers, but because much of the play is set in the war, it is more appropriate to say there are flash-forwards to ‘now’ rather than flashbacks to ‘then’. In this lies a fundamental flaw in the show's structure. The final scene - Arthur reading at the grave site supported by his own sons - is so beautifully poignant and so succinct as an anti-war statement that it somehow needs to feature more prominently throughout the entire play and be carefully built up towards the tear jerking conclusion.

The show is performed as a concert and does away with elaborate settings: just a bare stage shared with an excellent musical ensemble and the cast sitting around on bentwood chairs in their excellent period costumes. All cast members carry scripts and occasionally refer to them, but the performance is not a moved reading. The show is largely sung-through (22 songs) with significantly less dialogue. Hinchcliffe gives us tantalising glimpses into the personalities of his characters but we want to know them better. Too often what they say is declamatory and fleeting, and this too is a flaw in the show, with many of the characters needing deeper development. A clear and spectacular exception is that of young Willy, the baby of the troop, beautifully played by Nicholas Winter. Hinchcliffe’s rendering of this character is superb, and Winter’s portrayal of Willy’s brutal and lonely death is chillingly remarkable.

Martin Crewes lead role performance of Frank is very satisfying. He carefully draws out Frank’s humanity, sense of duty, compassion and inevitable fear. His vocal performance of the closing number to Act 1, The Front – probably the finest musical number in the show – is a high point.

Michael Whalley is excellent as Keith (from Keith!) – the knock-around, fun loving, irreverent larrikin who is eventually totally destroyed when the war leaves him blinded. Josh Rowe’s fine baritone voice and imposing presence give him authority as Bluey, the sergeant. Matt Crook skillfully moves between the dual roles of an idealistic junior serving on the front, and the anti-war son of Arthur. Cameron MacDonald imbues the role of Bert, a digger of Germanic descent, with great humility. Catherine Campbell and Emily Morris give strong performances as Miriam and Gertie, two nurses who befriended and tender to Frank and his troopers. Rosanne Hosking plays Nellie, the grief stricken but dignified wife to Frank. Her performance of I’ve Seen It All Before is also a highlight.

Hinchcliffe’s music is very satisfying and neo-romantic. There are sweeping melodic lines that evoke adventure, grief, danger and compassion. Hinchcliffe, who also plays Ken, one of Arthur’s sons, is also a singer of considerable talent, and his rendition of Fromelles attests to that. He clearly knows how to write for voice: no clumsy intervals, phrases of comfortable duration to allow for physicality, and emotions set in appropriate registers. Matthew Carey’s musical direction is tight, although the woodwind at times compete a little too insistently with the singers. Director Andy Packer has produced a creditable concert version of a show that has the potential to really become something.

The Front deserves further development, and a future. It deserves your support. Google it.

P.S. Unusual fare for a Cabaret Festival, but who cares!

Kym Clayton

When: 8 Jun

Where: Dunstan Playhouse

Bookings: bass.net.au