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
Queensland Theatre Company. Adelaide Festival. Her Majesty's Theatre. 10 Mar 2015
The theatre is smokey. Flames lick out of a 44-gallon drum on the stage. And old man sits nearby against a backdrop of massive blackboards covered in chalky scrawlings.
The atmosphere is established for the audience shuffling into place in Her Majesty's.
This is a big night for Adelaide theatre. This is the 2015 Festival's big theatre production. It has been a thin theatre program this festival and audiences are hungry and expectant.
Black Diggers is a big show from Queensland Theatre Company, written by Tom Wright and directed by Wesley Enoch. It has already had seasons interstate and it has been localised for Adelaide, with references to local names and places.
It is a national story, after all; a broad-strokes account of Aboriginal Australians who served in World War I.
It is a tale of hope, innocence, friendship, loyalty, and racism.
Young Aboriginal men volunteered for service against a cultural tide which had denied them recognition. Black Diggers condenses the accounts of many of those men into a series of vignettes layered swiftly and neatly one upon another. The all-male cast is huge and it is as beautifully co-ordinated as an elite army unit. There are swift costume changes and tableaux. There are highly-disciplined representations of unruliness - for these men out in the charnel house of WWI, on the death fields of Gallipoli, Amiens, Passchendaele, and Messines, were also rough kids from the bush. There, so far from home and fighting for a political cause few really understood, they discovered the comfort of mateship. They were equals in combat, in sharing the hell of war. Skin colour was not an issue.
There were instances of intolerance, however, and the characters of Black Diggers chose various ways to respond. One chap, in punching out a racist soldier from another troop, explained to his mates that his violent retaliation had been at the accusation of not washing, not at the racial slur.
Hence were things different for Aboriginal soldiers. They were part of a family of Aussies bonded by deed. They gained a sense of national belonging and a new sense of country.
The production has some marvellous moments, none a more poignant portrait of war than the row of soldiers sitting in their trench singing their songs and killing time for day after day, their boredom occasionally disturbed by sudden bursts of utter horror and panic. The boys reflect on the small areas of gained or lost territory these slow strategies were achieving. And years rolled by.
The endless suffering breaks the spirit of some. One lad reveals that he really should not be there. He is only 15.
Places of combat are painted large in white on the great blackboards and, as the play draws to a close, they are whitewashed for the names of dead Aboriginal soldiers to take their place in black upon them.
Throughout, there is a soundscape which colours the audience's imagination with the details of time and place - from the birds of the bush through to the shocking blasts of shellfire. It is a brilliant and exemplary soundscape, impeccably balanced against the action onstage.
The soldiers come home in various states and to various receptions. Racism is not dead, but then again, from some quarters, belonging and equality has been earned and recognised. Some returned men will cope with the future and some will never be the same. Ever was it thus.
But for some Aboriginal men there were some dire injustices, not the least of them the deeply ironic loss of their lands in the solider-settler land giveaways.
Black Diggers covers this huge subject with its large scale - the large stage made to seem cavernous with just platforms and the blackboard background. It is a well devised and designed production. The cast is diverse and likeable. They play myriad characters, from recruiters and officers to an outback mum. When they sing, they do so with the ragged enthusiasm of a batch of untrained boys.
The play is finely written. There are some lovely turns of phrase. However, it is overwritten. There are some soliloquies which drift into didacticism. And the play suffers from afterthoughts, as if it does not know quite when to end.
Ah, but what a brilliant bugler.
Samela Harris
When: 10 to 14 Mar
Where: Her Majesty's Theatre
Bookings: bass.net.au
Adelaide Festival. Ayers House. 9 Mar 2015
Hello Dylan Thomas in the body of Mr Bob Kingdom.
It was very special to sit there in the Ayers House state dining room amid an audience of gentle literary minds and let your wonderful descriptives wheel around in mind's eye.
It is a while since I have read Thomas but he is embedded in my memory and my spirit.
It was my father, Max Harris, now recognised as "the father of Modernism in the Australian arts", who first published Thomas in Australia.
It was the poem "The hunchback in the Park", which appeared in Angry Penguins no. 4, early in 1943 and Max wrote:
"...In this romantic poetry of the forties, Dylan Thomas is the most considerable figure to have arisen from English writers... We reprint this new poem by Dylan Thomas from an advance blurb of "New Directions" sent to us by the editor, James Laughlin, in the belief that it may be quite some time before the poems of Dylan Thomas as recent as this become available in Australia."
So it was to be.
By the time I was born, Dylan Thomas was well and truly available and in my world he was much read and adored.
Thus was my childhood a veritable Milkwood of mellifluous Welsh intonations and ravishing language.
Now comes Bob Kingdom and one could almost believe that Thomas was alive again.
With wiry sandy-coloured hair almost vertical, and wearing a suit with crumpled dress shirt, bow tie and running shoes a la Thomas on his last lecture tour, Kingdom assumes a world-weary expression as he attends the lectern. "A poor man's Charles Laughton," says he. He's rather better looking than Thomas, but when he opens his mouth, we forgive him. It is Dylan Thomas which comes out - laconic, droll and, oh, so lushly lyrical.
The words roll forth in a Welsh sea swell.
The pace of their rhythmic sway allows one to savour their beauty and ponder their originality.
There's a "gossip of neighbours" and the castle, "brown as owls", those partying Swanseaites who "hymned and rumpused", those who “lumbered out in a grizzle", things "smooth as a moth's nose"....
It is stories he tells, of childhood immersion in an adult world, of wild Welsh characters, larger than life. Kingdom voices them.
He, the actor, has a sore throat and he is protecting it. So, there is no booming, just the flows of narrative, the lilts of poetry, the ebb and flow of Welshness, the sublime eloquence of Thomas.
From time to time, Kingdom moves his position, giving relief to those with sightline problems.
He changes mood from colourful descriptives to lamentations of mortality. Every breath comes as from a perfect time capsule of Thomas.
There in the sweet late summer afternoon, fans whirring softly, beads of sweat forming, packed tight in that handsome old room, a little sea of Adelaide poetry-lovers swayed both in emotion and tempo - and nothing much else existed until Mr Kingdom picked up his papers and glass of water and modestly walked out the door, once again actor with a sore throat.
Samela Harris
When: 8 to 14 Mar
Where: Ayers House State Dining Room
Bookings: bass.net.au
George Glass. Channel 9 Kevin Crease Studios. 8 Mar 2015
Perhaps you would, too, but the hit show of last decade, 'Keating!’ sprang to mind. However, 'Keating!' was a musical tribute by people who loved the politician and his parliamentary repartee, written at a time of nostalgia for Labor government. Poking fun at Keating was easy and fun and you knew he would have been flattered. Abbott! The Musical is made by people who dislike him, and he's happening now and there is a sense of profound disappointment.
I voted Labor in the last election because I felt Kate Ellis would represent Adelaide in opposition better than Liberal's child-candidate would do in government. However, no way did I want another unstable Labor government headed up by the unbalanced Rudd, and run by chief puppeteer and knife-thrower, Bill Shorten. Like many an Australian, I have a unique philosophy about voting. But Abbott really is a profound disappointment.
Nic Conway, with his Abbottic nose job and blue tac behind the ears to give them the necessary breadth, won me over quickly. His mannerisms and voice were well studied and immediately familiar. Conway's Abbott can't help but put his foot in it and then make the correction even worse. Through the show, he is increasingly made pathetic and isolated. Alister McMichael's Joe Hockey, when not tucking into a pie or ripping apart a chicken, takes a knife through the budget with fabulous falsetto in Fuck 'Em. The songs and dialogues are packed with policy and we see the omnipresent Credlin guide the PM like a mannequin through speeches, only to see him deviate and make some personal view on religion, abortion, detention, or housework a new plank in the Liberal platform.
The musical is written with biting sarcasm and comic exaggeration. Sometimes I felt they "went overboard, like a child in the Timor Sea," as in the frightening tour of a detention centre with a near demonic Scott Morrison. For balance, there is a reporter or PR fellow tagging along with the PM asking reasonable questions. He is like Alice in Wonderland, questioning the hare and the Mad Hatter and getting the same kind of enigmatic answers. Especially scary when a lot of the answers were verbatim from the PM's own statements, and indicated as such via the word ‘QUOTE’ lit up in red on the backstage wall.
You don't have to make this stuff up. Abbott's speech at the Women’s Auxiliary Club on International Women’s Day was another example. What planet is this guy from? I wish I could tell you more about who did what in the show, but there was no programme. Production-wise, the show has not reached its full potential in its presentation or character possibilities. The music was sometimes odd.
They nailed him to the cross, a cross of the Mad Monk's own making, and a true blue Laborite would probably cheer. In the final scene, the exasperated journalist summed up his frustration - "leadership is not running out in front and yelling the loudest." Abbott puts a hand around his shoulder, and has no answer. I left the show feeling rather sad.
David Grybowski
When: 4 to 14 Mar
Where: Channel 9 Kevin Crease Studios
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au