John Frost for Crossroads Live. Adelaide Festival Centre. Festival Theatre. 31 Dec 2022
Psssssssst! Psst! Psst! Daw-ling! You look lurv-ly in this new doo! Just a bit more of this Hairspray to hold it all together. Psst! Psst! Oh! Don’t you look absolutely fabulous!
And indeed they did. Opening night of Hairspray on New Year's Eve at the Festival Theatre was the way to get things started in 2023. And why not? It’s the 20th anniversary of the Broadway production which ran for 2642 performances and won 8 Tony awards including Best Musical. Hairspray first Psst! as a John Waters film in 1988 and Psst! again in a 2007 film based on the musical. It must be fun to do because the films featured fetching talent like Divine, Sonny Bono, Debby Harry, John Travolta and Michelle Pfeiffer.
We forget what the world was like in 1962. Maryland, specifically Baltimore, a long way from the Deep South, but a Union slave state during the Civil War, had its problems. Hairspray manages to tackle the big issues of racism, obesity, body image, and gender bending with vacuity, frolic and fun. Fish-out-of-water misshapen Tracy Turnblad wants to make it on the TV dance show, which she does, and applies her new fame to the cause of de-segregation. This is done by enrolling an eclectic band of supporting characters sporting colourful costumes and whacky hairdos. In rom-com tradition, love is in the air.
Producer John Frost for Crossroads Live has assembled a celebrated clutch of Australian and overseas talent for touring this year. Carmel Rodrigues was made for the role of Tracy. She’s only 23 and still remembers her lines from when she played Tracy in a high school show. Her resume shows nothing but hard work to make her professional debut in this production. Brassy tacky, her Tracy is a dynamo of shimmy and song. No cliché about energy could possibly describe her love of performance. Bravo!
The other main cast members are Australian musical theatre majesty. Straight man Shane Jacobson brings his vast experience to bear in the vast girth of the traditionally cross-gender casted role of Tracy’s mum. The 1000 times he played the role of Peter Allen in The Boy From Oz made Todd McKenney a household name. On the other side of prime, McKenney is sweet-as, and his goofing around with Jacobson in the song Timeless to Me was a smash with the audience. Bobby Fox is all of Franki Valli - which he played over 850 times – and four times World Irish Dance Champion. Here he also channels Teen Angel from Grease in his portrayal of Corny Collins. Bravo! Rhonda Burchmore’s stunning career still has legs in the most literal sense. Black American, now Queenslander, Asabi Goodman brings huge dignity to her role as spiritual leader of the numerous black American characters. Her impressive gravitas may stem from her other job as a chemical engineer and her roles in the actors’s alliance. And boy, can she belt out a note! Definitely an exothermic reaction. Those playing the next generation down with Tracy are terrific. A stand-out were the dance moves and voice vibe of New Yorker Javon King. Bravo!
No expense was spared to physicalise the humour in all departments – colour, costumes, wigs, sets, lights, more lights, more costumes, props, big props, ridiculous gimmickry, satirical asides, all singing all dancing non-stop not much light and shade just full throttle energy and over-the-top sixties pop. What’s not to like? Director Matt Lenz did all this according to the script and with his own inventions. The orchestra under musical director Dave Skelton kept it all in sync. The audience returned the love with an instantaneous standing O. Bravo!
PS The program is big on bio and full of photos but omits the song list.
David Grybowski
When: 31 Dec 2022 to 28 Jan 2023
Where: Festival Theatre
Bookings: ticketek.com.au
Mathew Briggs/Under The Microscope. The Space. 8 Dec 2022
A torch flashes onstage. It reveals the silhouette of a figure clearly crashing this way, then that way, then this way on roller skates.
Lights up! Who is this French accented young women clad in ancient flying goggles, vest, shorts and flying scarf?
Lucky! Better. An Angel! An Angel who has arrived in a world of brown paper clouds high in the sky and brown paper little hills dotted about the stage, with a tale to tell.
Andi Snelling’s solo show Happy-Go-Wrong is the most extraordinary, brilliant midi clown physical theatre act filled with very real, very serious life threatening content.
What does cheeky Lucky mean when she says an accident befalling Andi is a ‘happy’ thing?
The constant flipping to and from upbeat Lucky to Andi - struggling to comprehend and survive a viciously uncaring, politicised medical system, presenting as ‘well’ to the world despite being near death - is frankly as confronting as it is spectacularly funny.
Snelling’s command of her audience from start to finish is absolute. Her cuts from Lucky to herself and back are so arresting, so discombobulating one barely has a chance to settle into the next moment of laughter as a follow up experience of suffering is swiftly upon you.
The journey Lucky and Andi take the audience on towards understanding Andi’s predicament is mediated so powerfully in motion. Every action, every slide, turn, fall, tells us so much and reaches deep within us, to recognise something of ourselves in these tense scenes.
Snelling is wickedly gifted in confronting an audience with the most difficult of subjects in the most endearing, kind, warm and compelling manner. That she has done so through her very real personal experience is testament to the greatness within her and deserving of many a repeat season.
This is the play a very wrong world desperately needs.
David O’Brien
When: 8 to 10 Dec
Where: The Space
Bookings: ticketek.com.au
Rumpus. 23 Nov 2022
Medieval Morality plays. Renaissance humanism-infused drama reflecting new worlds through the lens of the older.
Both ground Coldhands implacably, whatever one may think.
The clear throws to fictional fantasy and science fiction cannot hide this intriguing work’s double entwining threads of didacticism and mystical yearning.
Coldhands declares, nay teaches, a truth to our world about climate change and human connection which it needs to know before it even knows it, let alone how to follow it.
Dora Abraham’s text is set in a world where gold has disappeared. There is a force eradicating it and any opposing its power.
Three characters inhabit Ellanna Murphy’s stripped back set with clear allusions to dry, bony dessert featuring sky-reaching bone white claw-hand sculptures and ochre sands. They are a mother (Bonet Leate), hand gloved daughter ((Danielle Lim) and a boy hunter (Sam Lau.)
Mother and daughter are constantly on the run, spiritually sustained by tales she reads from a book. Stories of hope.
When the malevolent force they run from captures the mother and leaves the child, the child is unexpectedly rescued, reluctantly, by the boy hunter.
It’s the relationship between this reluctant hunter and the girl with a mystery to reveal which forges the heart of Abraham’s script.
The allegory of gold / balanced environment / human interconnection is utterly clear. Boy hunter’s ambivalence to direct involvement in the girl’s plight is a clear defence mechanism.
Abraham’s dialogue is beautiful and given great service by the cast.
It is a dialogue encouraging connection to stories; hopes that can be real.
Zola Allen’s direction is focused on ensuring the allegoric poeticism of Abraham’s dialogue lands where it should, through the medium of Danielle Lim’s fervent, warm performance, which drives Coldhands start to finish. The one who can make gold. One whose hands grow colder every time she does.
David O’Brien
When: 22 Nov to 4 Dec
Where: Rumpus 100 Sixth Street Bowden
Bookings: eventbrite.com.au
University of Adelaide Theatre Guild. Little Theatre. 20 Nov 2022
Assumptions about the name of this play are cast to the winds when one discovers that American playwright Robert Askins has written about a manic hand puppet created in a church hobby group.
It is an unlikely subject for a play, entirely preposterous and absurdist - which, of course, is the point.
It could be awful, but director Nick Fagan has cast the incomparable Matt Houston in the lead role of Jason, the loser kid who creates Tyrone, a hand puppet which has his own agenda.
This role requires Houston to swing in and out of the two characters, forlorn Jason gradually becoming more and more in the thrall of the Sesame Street-style creation on his hand. Houston not only has to assert and interplay the two characters but also to manipulate the puppet’s arms and evolving actions. If ever there was a challenging role, this is it.
Matt Houston has it right in hand, so to speak.
His performance is bravura and then some. Not that he gets to play likeable. He’s twice despicable and, as it happens, so are all the other characters in the play. Nasty self-interested Bible Belt Christians, the lot of them. Their language alone is repulsive. This play may hold a theatre record for use of the word “fuck”. And, while the interaction between the recently-widowed puppet-making teacher and her hulking boy admirer is quite funny, it is also grotesque - as is she, a duplicitous grimacing mockery of an exploitative mother.
If one had hoped for redemption from the quiet girl, Jessica, forget it. And as for the pastor, well he carries a bible and is pitiable. So, Hand to God is a pretty repugnant play one way or another. It is just Nick Fagan’s directing skills which keep the audience captivated and looking for resolution. It does not resolve very effectively but, the action has been a very wild ride indeed and no one is going to forget this production in a hurry.
Of course, the Little Theatre makes it intensely proximate and Tom Clancy’s marvellous church design on the upper level has sardonic splendour while the Church hall classroom below is as cheap and tacky, as one may expect.
Good sound, good lighting. Good Southern accents from the cast. All the ingredients are there.
The wonderful Brendan Cooney recently of stunning Stones in His Pockets, gives Pastor Greg a goodly serve of suave smug servant of God while Emily Branford takes the ghastly, strident mother/teacher right over the top and into hapless comedic hinterland. One laughs despite oneself. Tom Tassone embodies the big boy, easy to do as a big boy, but his characterisation is exquisitely nuanced and he gives a stand-out performance. Laura Antoniazzi sweetly depicts the sleeper character, the innocent little girl - or is she? She brings down the house when it comes to the no-spoilers-here climactic scene with Houston. By this time the audience is simply agog.
But, this is Matt Houston’s time to shine. He’s one of the finest actors in town and his talent devours and delivers this show. Applause. Applause.
Samela Harris
When: 20 Nov to 17 Dec
Where: The Little Theatre
Bookings: trybooking.com
Flying Penguin Productions. The Space Theatre. 18 Nov 2022
Basis of play:
Carol: “I’m gonna fail. My course. I’m gonna fail. My degree is gone. Professor, help?”
Professor John: “I need this new house. I need tenure approval. I need to… who is this student?”
Within this conundrum of pain and need, between student failing her course and Professor hanging on to the future, playwright David Mamet plays savagely yet subtly with politics and humanity of higher education and more.
30 years since Oleanna was first produced, it has been attached to many socio-political controversies, greatest of recent time being the #metoo movement.
Director David Mealor’s production certainly addresses it, but is not confined to it.
With excoriating precision, Mealor has crafted a production spinning and turning in such a way that both characters’ needy, angry questioning of the other to understand and see where they’re at (or believe they are) is constantly frustrated by barriers, both put up and of misunderstandings, in what they say.
The three part structure offered is revelatory. It is electrifyingly and utterly brutal in performance. How deftly, sudden and sharply words progress from lazy expressions of entitlement. Sound bites of trite efforts to ‘explain’ the self, ultimately imprisoning and destroying, leaving neither person involved any better off.
Carol is in genuine turmoil. Her pain is crystal clear. John is initially too remote from this. Both are looking for a way to navigate the turbulence of Carol’s desperate enquiry for comprehension. Instead, it becomes a bitter battle between two - at the core - not terribly nice people.
The bare and savage emotion fuelling this production is perfectly served by Designer Kathryn Sproul’s white, slightly raised, square dais, on which is an office desk chair and guest chair.
This dais turns three times. Reflecting the shifting relations between John and Carol; mirroring their demand of the other to ‘see’ and ‘understand’.
Composer Quentin (Quincy) Grant’s score for strings is brilliantly structured and deployed so subtly. It sits, unexpectedly, just beneath the surface tension of the unravelling drama onstage and makes one almost momentarily jump as it kicks in.
Chris Petridis’s lighting comprises sophisticated, granular gradations of white from a whopping bank of lights high upstage, only noticeable after the moment.
These elements greatly support the performers’ work in expressing the unspoken, a key element to any Mamet work.
Renato Musolino as John and Georgia Laity as Carol are greatness onstage. They play off each other with complete confidence and control. The see-saw like rise and falls in their relationship is articulated with precision and clarity, matching the equal divide of incomprehension and ensuring bitterness.
David O’Brien
When: 17 to 26 Nov
Where: The Space Theatre
Bookings: ticketek.com.au