Independent Theatre Company. The Goodwood Institute. 25 Mar 2015
Eugene O'Neill is a giant of American playwriting history. He is credited with shifting this medium from bland and mannered entertainment to a poignant search for truth in American life. Long Day's Journey Into Night was one of the last of his fifty plays. The Tyrone family, who inhabit this long and sad day that bleeds into the wee hours of the next, is a stand-in for O'Neill's own father, mother and brother, and himself, complete with their conflicts and addictions. Some biographers say that all his other plays led to this masterwork, even though he had already won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1936, five years before this play. Although his wish was that it not be performed for twenty-five years, it won O'Neill his fourth Pulitzer Prize in 1957, four years after his death from pneumonia. His greatness is manifest in his antecedents. In this play alone, you will see the avatars of Arthur Miller's Hap and Biff, and Tennessee Williams's Blanche du Bois.
The first thing to note in this production is the magnificent re-creation of an early 1900s American east coast cottage interior (set design: Rob Croser and David Roach, and constructed with acute attention to detail by a team led by David Roach). Bravo! The after-breakfast chatter signaling hopefulness for a fresh start at the beginning of a summer day near the ocean soon manifests with the tremors that signal subsequent earthquakes. This family has more baggage than the train to Chattanooga and two things are going to happen today to bring out the worst, and sometimes the best, in everybody.
The vicious cycle of a hazardous remark, received with hurt arising from insecurity, followed by recrimination and blame, and finally ending in a temporary truce - although belying the love these family members have for each other - is numbing. And it's a three hour production. The day's situation is left unresolved and you can't help but feel, like in 'Groundhog Day', the Tyrones will do it all over again the next day, like they did it the day before. It becomes suffocating. O'Neill's followers must have sensed this themselves as they employed significant external characters to provide foil and relief to family dysfunctionality - the gentleman caller in The Glass Menagerie, the neighbour and Uncle Ben in Death of a Salesman and the young academic couple in Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf? are offered as examples.
Bronwyn Ruciak does a great job as the addled mother, floating gracefully between lies and morphine. Angus Henderson has his Jamie Tyrone disguise his loafing and dissipated youth with an exuberant charm that elicited forgiveness. Benji Riggs plays the younger brother as a congenial young man and victim, with snippets of real flare. David Roach (who else?) in the male lead of the father roars and declaims most of his lines and misses opportunities for nuance. Rob Croser once again displays his directorial virtuosity in using the entire stage and getting his actors into fetching and amplifying physicalities.
Long Day's Journey Into Night contains four of the most trapped and unhappiest family characters in literature, and is the important precursor for later American dramatists standing on the shoulders of a giant, and learning from him. A must see for those who honour this transition.
David Grybowski
When: 19 to 28 March
Where: The Goodwood Institute
Bookings: trybooking.com
Therry Dramatic Society. Arts Theatre. 18 Mar2015
It's hard to go wrong with an Alan Ayckbourn comedy. He's the master of cross-purposes.
Hence, with seasoned director Norm Caddick behind the scenes, Therry's production of Relatively Speaking does all the things it is supposed to do.
It sets the scene with the young lover suspicious of his girlfriend's fidelity when he finds slippers under the bed. Setting off to seek her father's approval to marry her, he blunders merrily in to the wrong country house wherein his pitches are misunderstood by the hapless householder as a quest for the hand of his own wife. Of course it's all frightfully English and everyone is fearfully polite, proper and hospitable. Hence, the young man is well entrenched with the strangers when the girlfriend turns up looking to terminate an affair she has been having with her boss.
Of course, nobody is on the same page, as they say in the classics.
Mayhems of misunderstanding ensue and audience members are forced to hold their sides as they crease up with laughter.
Peter Davies is a very solid Adelaide actor and this role as Philip, the English businessman in his lovely country home, may be his very finest to date. He has all the upper middle class crusty mannerisms and inflections down so precisely that one might almost identify his models.
He has the posture, the gait and even the unassailable sense of entitlement, all of which heightens and absurdity of his position. He steals the play - which is no mean feat when Rhonda Grill is on stage beside him. Grill depicts the gracious woman of the house, the stoic and hospitable wife, flawless in her good manners. Grill plays it to a tee, her comic timing impeccable. Lee Cook embodies Greg, the young romantic seeking out his future family. He's a strong player who establishes a convincing character and a nice presence. Rachel Horbelt is not a perfect piece of casting for the role of Ginny but she works diligently to give the guilty girl lots of reactive innuendo.
The Scene 1 set of the little London flat is pretty dire - but that would seem to be the general idea. Moving to the country, the facade of a darling old brick house dominates the stage, trellis with roses, park bench and patio table and chairs with the garden shed and the rest of the garden implicit on prompt. It is there that Philip retreats in his endless and futile quests for his missing hoe. Lovely soil in that part of the country, you know.
Vincent Eustice with Caddick has done well with this latter set. One could almost move in.
It's clear there has been good team work in this Therry production and, despite seeing it on preview night, it was tickety-boo in all departments - especially the funny bone.
The show should run in very nicely and, for those who like a good laugh, it is just the post Fringe ticket.
Samela Harris
When: 19 to 28 Mar
Where: Arts Theatre
Bookings: bass.net.au
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