State Theatre Company SA. Dunstan Playhouse. 23 May 2025
They were tough days for “Wog” children, growing up in the shadow of cocky Aussie intolerance in the last century. Little did they know the cultural swing ahead of them as they inherited the land from their diligent migrant parents.
Melina Marchetta lived it and, through Vidya Rajan’s adaptation for the stage, an era of Italian Australians coming of age is now being played out in the Dunstan Playhouse, complete with the family passata ritual.
To that end, the stage is loaded with countless crates of ripe tomatoes. Mountains of them. The tomato is totemic to the Italian influence on Australian cuisine and culture. So much so that the set includes the giant steaming steel drum of tomatoes, the fragrance of which pervaded the proximate first night audience members, not so sweetly.
Hence, it seems to be a somewhat odd night at the theatre with a State Theatre production largely originating from Melbourne under the directorship of the new Brink artistic director Stephen Nicolazzo.
It already has had a Melbourne season, one understands, and cast members such as principal Chanella Macri are not new to their characterisations. This shows in their confidence and nuance. Macri, who is Italian-Samoan, and a fine actress, has a beautifully modulated voice and scores some deliciously impish fractures of the fourth wall. She is also eye-catching simply in physical presence albeit the frequent stripping down to rather eccentric undies is puzzling. Nonetheless, she carries it with no-nonsense aplomb and delivers Josie Alibrandi as a smart teenager trying to find her place amid family and school. Not that she appears to be seventeen. Blind casting these days gives audiences some blanks to fill in and, in the costuming of this work, further puzzles about hair, wigs, and gender. That the nonna had really messy hair was a cultural distraction to this nanna who cannot recollect such an untidy Italian widow when she was growing up in an Italian neighbourhood, let alone one who did not wear black. Such discrepancies can be distracting. Also, the body mikes seemed de trop on the Dunstan stage.
Indeed, there are many ponderables here, but not in the acting. The cast, mostly Melbourne-based actors, is superb, albeit the wonderful Lucia Mastrantone, eloquent as Christina Alabrandi, fell into a bit of the “Effie” wog delivery for comic relief as student Sera. Jennifer Vuletic is really touching as Nonna and even more so in song. One wished the director had given her less time pondering photo albums for, indeed, it is a very long and overwritten play, as noted by two coming-of-age teens in the audience.
Adelaide’s Chris Asimos is refined and simpatico in his portrayal of Michael Andretti. He wouldn’t know how to give a bad performance. As for Riley Warner, hot out of WAPPA: he is a keeper. One looks forward to seeing more of his work. Ashton Malcom completes the cast extremely capably as both racist schoolgirl, Ivy and as John, the boy from the posh school. Pity about the wig.
This big night out in retro Italian family life is accompanied by a very unusual soundscape from Melbourne composer Daniel Nixon. It’s undercurrent of amorphous semi-industrial thrum was another puzzle and, when music soared for the thrill of a kiss, it was like the movies.
So, here we have the first work from our new Brink chief. The bulk of opening-night audience got the laughs and responded to the now classic Australian coming of age story. And no one will ever forget all those tomatoes.
Samela Harris
When: 23 to 31 May
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: statetheatrecompany.com.au
Independent Theatre. Star Theatres. 16 May 2025
Callum Logan gazes intently from the front of Independent Theatre’s program for Ordinary People, his sweet face set against dark and stormy waters.
At the end of the play’s performance in Star Theatres, that image has become indelibly impressed into the folds of audience grey matter. And one has been drawn into the post traumatic angst of the young man as if by some sort of emotional magnet.
Of course, it is Rob Croser’s directorial insight which has thus captured the heart, with the choice of a deeply affecting piece of American drama and an exceptional lead actor.
Ordinary People, adapted from a Judith Guest 1976 novel and directed by Robert Redford, was a multi-award-winning film featuring Mary Tyler Moore and Donald Sutherland with Timothy Hutton in 1980.
It was and is all about an affluent suburban-Chicago family after the favoured older son has drowned in a boating accident. A year later, the surviving son, Conrad Jarrett struggles to find his place in both his family and his peer-group world and at last seeks the help of a psychiatrist.
Thus does this play traverse the lumpy layers of guilt and blame which envelop loss and grief. It’s a universal theme, of course, thus highly relatable for all, and very well studied in a work, adapted for the stage by Nancy Gilsenan.
It embraces Conrad’s relationship with his swim team buddies, the girl who befriended him in hospital care, the new local girl with her own problems, not to mention an over-protective father and a love-stunted mother. The audience becomes fly-on-the-wall to the interactions with the psychiatrist and, indeed, gains some added respect for the very difficult role psychiatrists play in this world.
One’s heart goes out in all directions as the play develops.
Croser and fellow designer David Roach have contained the action in a bland box set with a steeply raked stage.
First impression is that it is all too austere and a little logistically awkward with the actors carrying props in and out. But, that very aesthetic simplicity embellished only by lighting hues and shadows, seems to magnify the characters and, at the same time, suggest the suppression of emotional expression. The more one ponders it, the more that barren set has to offer.
This play is a splendid vehicle for Callum Logan, a fresh young actor who is turning heads all over the place. After distinguishing himself in a recent Fleurieu Festival Shakespearean variety show, he now displays his depth and versatility with a tour de force depiction of the complexity of grief and loss and family dysfunction a la American 20th-century theatre. Logan delivers youthful charm and fun, hair-trigger fury, and romantic tenderness - well-wrought aspects of this complex character, all with a good American accent.
There are lively junior actors onstage, also: college swim mates nicely played by Ryan Kennealy and Oscar McLean, wet-haired and in budgie smugglers. Olivia McAdam and Cleo Barker give credibility to the two girls in his orbit. Fahad Farooque plucks most movingly on the heartstrings as Conrad’s lost soul of a caring father while Lyn Wilson, not quite as aptly cast, turns on believably brittle awfulness as the mother who has trouble in showing love to this lesser of her sons.
Steven Turner is Dr Barker, the psychiatrist. He’s comfortable, deceptively casual with his big mugs of coffee in hand, his role providing the play's intellectual balance on the whys and wherefores of grief. It is a potently simpatico performance.
Veteran actor David Roach can play anything, and he does, nicely - both the swim coach and the Texas uncle.
The quality of Croser's direction and the intensity of the performances create a tight and terrific production, entirely absorbing and thought-provoking.
And, of course, the chance to see this modest but brilliant young actor, Callum Logan.
Samela Harris
When: 16 to 24 May
Where: Star Theatres
Bookings: Independenttheatre.org.au
Disney Theatre Group. Festival Theatre. 10 May 2025
Joy.
There it is! A one-word review.
Perhaps one could add bliss, fulfilment, laughter and awe.
And, finally, the name Disney.
Especially in this era of austerity and insecurity, we are blessed to have a brilliant Australian arm of Disney touring a blockbuster musical of such mighty calibre.
This veteran critic is unashamed to deliver a hands down rave review of its 2025 production of Beauty and the Beast.
It features no big familiar national stars, just a really discerning Australian casting. The name of Shubshri Kandia has yet to be a drawcard from the marquee.
And here she is, strong and charming in the role of Belle, the village beauty who falls into the dark fairytale world of the angry prince cursed into the shape of a beast to live in a grim castle in the midst of the wolf-scary woods.
The original tale is ancient and French, written in 1740 by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve and Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont and rewritten by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont in 1756 . It was the Disney team who brought Belle into the contemporary light, and with a stage book from screenwriter Linda Woolverton and music from the great Alan Menken, re-envisaged Belle’s manifestation of beauty as also including an inner quality of learning and strength. Hence, today’s Belle is a voracious bookworm, and her ideal world is not jewels and wedding rings but a library and a compassionate relationship.
We now see this Disney delivery of the fantasy fairy tale as jolly good surrealism with the colourful classic Dali-esque dream concepts, as the clock dances with the candelabra and the dear old teapot wheels her teacup son, Chip, around on a tea trolly.
Fertile imagination thrives forever as do the universal battles of good versus evil.
Disney brings them to life yet again with good old Tim Rice’s lyrics and a cream of talented Disney creatives enabling top production values. Every incarnation of this work is just that bit smarter and more bedazzling than the last with the ongoing developments in stage technology: clever illusions; astounding lighting; not so much stage sets as stage worlds; and oh, the flowers.
Hence, the effusion of adjectives which come to mind as one beholds this show.
Entertainment at its best. Quality and style in every step. Oh, the costumes. Oh, the choreography. Oh, the brilliant Busby Berkley dance scene. The stuff of visual swoons.
Of course, Alan Menken’s music swirls from the skilful orchestra, loud but never overwhelming. Always balanced so the voices ring clear.
Trained voices, great hoofers - Rohan Browne is a delicious Lumiere, Gareth Jacobs is comic delight as Cogsworth, the clock. There’s Jayde Westaby, Alana Tranter, Rodney Dobson, gorgeous Hayley Martin, lithe Adam de Martino, young Jared Bicketron as Chip and, of course, tenor Brendan Xavier beneath the hair and horns of The Beast.
Not to be forgotten, he who brings the house down to whoops of delirious acclaim as the hilariously horrible Gaston, is one Jackson Head.
Tickets are not cheap but selling out fast as the word spreads that this show is super special.
Samela Harris
When: 10 May to 6 Jul
Where: Festival Theatre
Bookings: ticketek.com.au
State Opera South Australia. Festival Theatre. 8 May 2025
Flight is playing for only three performances and finishes Saturday 10 May 2025. If you are an opera die-hard or simply opera-curious, you’ll want to see this. It is strikingly staged, is acted with style, and is sung beautifully. It is genuinely funny, with the audience frequently laughing out loud, it has moments of heart-rending poignancy, and it is provocative at times. It’s the full deal!
Flight, with music by Jonathan Dove and libretto by April de Angelis, is a comic opera set in an airport, where a group of stranded travellers – including a diplomat and his heavily pregnant wife, a couple reigniting their romance, a mature lady about to meet her fiancé for the first time, and a refugee stranded without papers – face flight delays because of storms, resulting in them having to sleep overnight at the departure gate. As they reveal personal secrets and confront emotional baggage, the opera blends humour and pathos. De Angelis’ libretto is beautifully constructed with frequent and clever rhyming, and concision. Director Stephen Barlow uses his cast beautifully as he gets them to extract every ounce of meaning from every sentence: words are prompts for how the cast use and move around the stage. Henry Choo as Bill and Samuel Dale Johnson as The Steward are especially effective in their stagecraft, and they excel in everything they sing: clarity and musicality abound.
The mysterious refugee, inspired by the true story of Mehran Karimi Nasseri, an Iranian refugee who lived in the departure lounge of Terminal 1 in Charles de Gaulle Airport from 26 August 1988 until July 2006 when he was hospitalized, becomes a symbol of human displacement which continues to be tragically topical in today’s world. Flight explores themes of compassion, transformation, and the shared humanity beneath superficial differences.
Dove’s music is catchy and fun, modern and unpredictable, which often lulls the listener into experiencing the passage of time more slowly and amplifies the gravity of the thematic material. It is full of surprising orchestrations, and the use of percussion is a highlight.
Counter-tenor James Laing plays The Refugee with vulnerability and grace. His aria Dawn, still darkness… deep in Act 3 highlights the pain of statelessness. It’s a high point of the performance. Dove’s decision to score the role as a countertenor rather than a tenor or baritone is inspired: the poignancy of The Refugee’s plight is heightened.
Anna Voshege sings The Controller and her gorgeous coloratura soprano voice rides high above the stage, literally! Voshege gives the character control, authority and compassion, but evokes isolation. Her obvious concern for The Refugee, especially towards the end of the opera, is quite affecting.
Nina Korbe plays Tina, Bill’s partner. Korbe gives her both coquettishness and sass, and we are in no doubt who really wears the pants in the relationship. Cherie Boogaart plays The Older Woman and excels in giving her an air of mystery as well as naivety. Boogaart knows when she has humorous lyrics, and extracts every laugh possible.
Ashlyn Tymms plays The Stewardess, and frequently steals the show with the antics she gets up to with her fellow Steward (Samuel Dale Johnson). Their practised smiles are a hit, and the ‘elevator scene’ is sufficiently raunchy for the show to almost merit a rating!
Jeremy Tatchell has a smaller role as the Diplomat, but he sings and acts it fabulously. His tessitura is a perfect fit for Dove’s music. Fiona McArdle plays his pregnant wife, and she is superb. This is possibly the best thing that McArdle has done. Like Tatchell, the music fits her voice like a stylish glove, and her acting is first rate.
And then there is Teddy Tahu Rhodes, who plays The Immigration Officer. His impressive bass baritone voice fills the auditorium and immediately conveys authority. His diction is perfect, and his character demands respect. As Voshege does for The Controller, Rhodes also gives The Immigration Officer a wide streak of overt humanity, and we all wish that in today’s troubled world border force officers were also able to exercise compassion and discretion as does The Immigration Officer.
Director Barlow also uses some local actors as additional travellers, and he gives each of them distinct (and humorous) traits. It’s a nice touch.
Andrew Riley’s design is imposing but straightforward. It’s perfectly clear that we are located in an airport departure lounge replete with sliding doors leading to departure gates, a TV screen showing flight statuses, bench seats that are clearly uncomfortable, as they are in real airports, and the rear wall is used as giant projection screen upon which simple but effective images are projected to depict planes arriving, storms and the like.
The Adelaide Symphony Orchestra sounded fabulous under the baton of conductor Charlotte Corderoy. There a few minor issues with principal singers being almost overshadowed by the orchestra early in act 1, but this was soon resolved.
This production of Flight originates from Scottish Opera, and is a reimagined version of the one performed at Opera Holland park in 2015. This international collaboration with State Opera South Australia strongly underlines SOSA artistic director Dane Lam’s vison of SOSA being part of a creative ecosystem of “opera without borders”.
Remember, this fabulous production closes this weekend! Don’t delay in getting your tickets. It really is fun!
Kym Clayton
When: 8 to 10 May
Where: Festival Theatre
Bookings: ticketek.com.au
Garry Marshall & Lowell Ganz. Galleon Theatre Group Inc. Domain Theatre. 2 May 2025
Thank goodness for Community Theatre of the standard of Wrong Turn at Lungfish!
When Arts Minister Andrea Michaels seemed affronted during a recent ABC 891 Radio interview by the suggestion $80 million over a decade might not be a sufficient budget to support the Arts- all the Arts- she may have been oblivious to the dire state of professional theatre in South Australia. Dire because a city the size of Adelaide supports so few professional productions. Our dear Arts Minister needs to get out to see so called amateur work like this to appreciate the scope that exists to develop the professional space in this State!
Wrong Turn at Lungfish, showcases what lives in that space!
There’s nothing like the prospect of mortality to provoke introspection and prompt great belly laughs! Sublime writing by Gary Marshall and Lowell Ganz, somewhat reminiscent of Niel Simon in its often brusque, sharp wit, is a gift this Galleon Theatre Group ensemble does not squander
Tony Busch, Dora Stamos and Tianna Cooper are simply outstanding, while Wade Cook shows promise. But I am ahead of myself!
A bold choice for a small community theatre group, Wrong Turn at Lungfish explores the many complexities of being human and connecting with others, sometimes completely unexpectedly, when we stumble upon our shared humanity through vulnerability.
Peter Ravenswaal (Peter Busch), an embittered former Dean of a college, is highly literate, blind and struggling to come to terms with the illness that will eventually see to his demise. Young New York Italian, Anita Meredino (Dora Stamos), probably from “Hell’s Kitchen” given Stamos’ superb accent, is barely literate but gifted with intuitive intelligence by birth and street smarts by necessity. Volunteering for a reading-for-the-blind organization brings Anita into Ravenswaal’s embittered orbit weekly, while an unfortunate student Nurse (Tianna Cooper) must suffer Ravenswaal’s grief driven tantrums and tirades because no one else will. Having lost his wife but a year earlier, Ravenswaal is immersed in grief for her and his own impending mortality. Hearsay brings us to know Dora’s boyfriend Dominic (Wade Cook), something of a ne’er do well, and to suspect all is not as it seems.
Marshall and Ganz’s beautifully drawn cocktail of character dynamics is an ensemble actor’s dream, one this trio of capable actors make the most of. Ravenswaal variously cajoles, taunts, rejects and educates Anita as he demands she read Schappenhaur, Keats, and Elliot, among others, while his love for Beethoven both punctuates and underscores his intellectual and emotional acuity. Ravenswaal’s observation that humanity made a “wrong turn at Lungfish” foreshadows what is to come. Anita counters with increasingly clever wit and disarming honesty as the barriers between these unlikely, yet entirely believable, friends collapses.
Act One crackles with the energy of this battle of wits and vulnerabilities as Ravenswaal and Anita find mutual respect and fondness. Cooper is masterful in her rendition of the harried Nurse, her insights into the character reflected in the rollercoaster of her interactions with Ravenswaal.
Act Two sees the appearance of Dominic, a thug of a man for all the usual cliched reasons; somehow Marshall and Ganz’s script keeps him on the better side of stereotype. Wade Cook, a musical theatre performer tackling his first stage show, gives the character a good crack but doesn’t quite find the depth of Dominic implicit in the text. To be fair, Cook is contending with an entrance halfway through a play with a well-established rhythm and the stella performances of his cast mates. It’s a tough gig matching such energy late in the piece. However, Cook does well to convey the brutishness Dominic brings to what is more an arrangement with Dora than a relationship; unfortunately, Dora sees it as the latter. An element of the elegance of the writing is how Dora’s doubts, which Ravenswaal intuits, are laced through the fabric of the text.
T.S.Elliott’s The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock provides a poignantly beautiful and moving bookend to this superb production.
Set design by director Rosie Aust, Galleon Theatre President Kym Clayton, and Michael Ralph is best summarized as eminently award worthy. Trish Winfield’s Lighting Design, Warren McKenzie’s (Galleon’s VP) Sound Design and Mary Cummins great costume design each and collectively support this great production well.
A superb example of community theatre at its best, Wrong Turn at Lungfish, is yet another production I’ve reviewed featuring tertiary trained actors, something I would ask our Minister for the Arts to reflect on when spruiking Arts budgets. Where are the professional opportunities for such actors in South Australia?
Thankfully companies like Galleon, The Rep and Northern Light are providing some.
Wrong Turn at Lungfish, Go! See it!
When: 2 to 10 May
Where: Domain Theatre
Bookings: galleon.org.au
Editors Note: Kym Clayton, on set design in this production, is both Galleon Theatre Company’s President, a member of the Adelaide Critics Circle Incorporated, and a writer and critic for The Barefoot Review.