Adelaide Festival. Compagnie Carabosse. Adelaide Botanic Garden. 12 Mar 2020
French artistic collective Compagnie Carabosse has brought their fire-scape installations to Womadelaide several times in the past few years. It’s always a hypnotic delight for design and deliberation, but Fire Gardens is the Womad act on a gigantic scale. The audience enters in four half-hour increments from 8 pm to 9:30, to meter the numbers, but the trouble was, it’s so good, it seemed like nobody wanted to leave. By 9:30, it was uncomfortably crowded and a little annoying. Simple pots of fire line a garden path and invite one to follow the Congo line queue to the far end of the fire exhibit and the exotically lit Palm House (but actually, you can walk wherever you want within the lit area).
Unfortunately, the candles in the white singlets hanging inside were spilling so much wax that entry was prohibited. By this time, the soft yet thick and slightly fragrant smoke was nearly overpowering as you are in the midst of zillions of fire pots. Shadows eerily flicker off the foliage. Once the decision was made to sit out the crowds, the experience enhanced considerably. The latter part of the circuit has the best stuff – multi-pot sculptures of pots of fire mounted on kinetic structures. Coals burn in wire boats suspended above and reflected on the pond. A double bassist dressed like a hobo plays jazz without looking up from within his tiny tent while apparitions of people transit in the distant dark haze. There are many lovely aural and visual surprises that compel exploration, or simple relaxation and contemplation whilst lying on the grass or sitting on a swinging seat. When the crowd subsided, the experience was finally magical and enchanting.
David Grybowski
When: 12 to 15 Mar
Where: Adelaide Botanic Garden
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
★★★★
Night Owl Shows. Masonic – Phoenix Room at Gluttony. 3 Mar 2020
Night Owl Shows is a music show production company specialising in nostalgia. They have/had (some seasons have ended) nine shows at the Adelaide Fringe with singers replicating the songs and vocal oomph of Aretha Franklin, Dolly Parton, Amy Winehouse, Tina Turner, Paul Simon, The Carpenters, Nashville, a show called California Legends, and this one. Dan Clews, who leads the company, describes the shows as “show-umentary” which is an awkward conjunction meaning that the presenters reveal interesting biographical information and anecdotes when introducing the songs.
It is none other than Dan Clews who sings James Taylor in The Carole King & James Taylor Story. He does this extremely well, giving up Taylor’s nasal quality and overall sweetness, and fretting the chords like he was born with a guitar in his hand. Taylor was known in the US as “the tear ducts of America” - his melancholy chords give even hopeful songs a sense of reflection touched with regret. Must have been all the drugs Taylor used (he kicked heroin good-bye in 1983). Clews has the emotional quotient to convey all this. Phoebe Katis’ delivery is a bit breathy and formal in contrast to Carole King’s vocal power and casual breeziness, and thus not as effective a channeler of King as Clews is of Taylor. Maybe it was because she had only arrived from Paris the day before and thought she’d be ready for a show.
Taylor and King are two of the greater songwriters of their age. King’s second studio album, Tapestry, sold 25 million copies and was the highest selling album by a female artist for 25 years. Night Owl Shows I’m sure is a commercial success as many of their shows are sold out to the generation that grew up to the soundtracks of their subject matter. Following a biographic chronology, we learn King and Taylor both started their careers in New York. Carol King wrote songs with first husband Gerry Goffin (how about Natural Woman in an afternoon) at the famous Brill Building, and James Taylor’s first album was produced by The Beatles’ Abbey Road label. They relocated independently to LA and were brought together by a producer there. They were never married. But it was Taylor who encouraged King to sing her own songs which got the already famous songwriter’s performance career under way.
Taylor’s and Katis’s renditions of the famous songs – Fire and Rain, Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow, It’s Too Late, You’ve Got A Friend - unpack nostalgia for their target audience, and it’s likely if you had your first job in the 70s, you’ll be emotionally involved. And hopefully the same if the songs are new to you, or you’ve never heard them live, because they are beautifully and sensitively crafted, and in this show, performed; they don’t require emotional baggage to be enjoyed.
PS Taylor’s first Number 1 Hit, You’ve Got A Friend, was written by Carole King, in the same year Tapestry was released - 1971.
David Grybowski
When: 4 to 15 Mar
Where: Masonic – Phoenix Room at Gluttony
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
★★★
Adelaide Fringe. The Spiegeltent. 7 Mar 2020
The War of Words between Andrew Barton ‘Banjo’ Patterson and Henry Archibald Hertzberg Lawson is infamous in Australian literary history. In 1892, through the pages of The Bulletin, they engaged in an extremely lively City versus Country poetic debate, and in this show the protagonists look back at the men they were then, and acknowledge a grudging respect for each other’s work.
The two men are catching up a century or so later, at the Leviticus Bar & Grill at Heaven’s Gate. Lawson is late (as per usual, apparently), and immediately the differences between the grammar school educated law clerk and journalist, Paterson and the republican socialist, Lawson were apparent.
Warren Fahey and Max Cullen have been touring Dead Men Talking since 2014 and have these characters down pat, while the characterisations are a little exaggerated, they work in this context. The relatively unscripted nature of the show sometimes leaves a gap, but they move smoothly on, familiar with all the works they need to mention.
Both give potted histories of their lives, and while Paterson refers early to Waltzing Matilda, he doesn’t recite the iconic poem until the end, and even then it’s an unfamiliar mixture of what sounded like English and pidgin, although it’s described as Aboriginal (much like Frying Pan’s Theology).
Lawson makes no bones about his alcoholism and mental health issues, and even if he wanted to downplay this aspect of his life, Paterson makes clear that this needs to be faced as part of his legacy.
The repartee is not as entertaining as one might have expected; two such remarkable wordsmiths should have had a more interesting and stimulating wordplay rather than the ‘dad’ jokes and puns that featured, but perhaps they preferred to let the poems and songs themselves do the talking. Fahey has a fair singing voice and sang/recited some crowd favourites (The Man from Ironbark, A Bushman’s Song), while Cullen’s recital of Faces in the Street was a highlight. Paterson’s response to Lawson In Defence of the Bush seems to have the effect of making Lawson’s original works stronger.
For those who have never read the works of these two remarkable writers, or who just know the very familiar poems, this production will introduce, in a very gentle way, some of the works of two of Australia’s most revered writers.
Arna Eyers-White
When: 7 Mark
Where: The Spiegeltent
Bookings: Closed
★★★1/2
Adelaide Fringe. Madness of Two. Rumpus. 8 Mar 2020
It’s the Fringe and anything goes. Including artful lunacy.
So we have five talented actors, a mass of greasepaint, and a ukulele or two. What to do, they ask the audience as they cling to each other in a display of faux daunted ham. They throw up absurd ideas, and a banana.
And off they go trying out themes based on death and murder and, well, it is quite a busy blur. It is not the clown school of Commedia or Le Coq exactly, albeit costumes do give a nod to Harlequin and Pierrot. And there’s some classic shtick with songs, tumbling, and bumbling, some of it very funny indeed. There are some good lines and, most especially, with thanks to the clown called Wah, AKA James Hornsby, some really wonderful songs. He is quite a talent and, in this show by the new company he co-runs with Ellen Graham, he creates a beautiful, gentle clown character, large and slow, quiet and shy. Graham is his antithesis, hyperactive and athletic. She is a lithe physical-theatre exponent and very funny when needs be. Also noisy. But not as strident as the other two female clowns, Britney AKA Jasmin McWatters and Linda, AKA Zola Allen. Their high-octave girlie screaming and squealing is just too, too much and too often for this critic’s aural endurance. Like Holden Street when presenting the rock opera Ragnarokkr, Rumpus should issue ear plugs at the door. Director, Hew Param, please take note. Screaming is not inherent to clowning or, indeed, to any good theatre. This zany show has potential on too many levels to sink it with squeals.
There is yet Arran Beattie as clown Roger to mention. He can be shrill with the worst of them, but he also can ham it up fearlessly. His voice and comic presence are terrific. Indeed, there is so much that is good-spirited and original and zany in this clownish concoction that it makes a madcap contrast to a lot of the earnestly arty theatre around the Fringe. Then again, this little confection is not beer and skittles. Its slapstick silliness is underscored by some wickedly effective satire. The Under the Rug song is a standout commentary on political evasiveness and Don’t Worry is another song with revue-style substance. Behind the ga-ga-girlie shrills of this production lies a seam of seriously good creative artistry. Let us look out for what else the Madness of Two may do.
Samela Harris
When: 8 to 15 Mar
Where: Rumpus
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Adelaide Festival. Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. Festival Theatre. 7 Mar 2020.
This year marks the 250th birthday of Ludwig van Beethoven, and around the world there are more events commemorating this than you can shake a stick at! At this year’s Adelaide Festival we have enjoyed the Lyon Opera Ballet’s Trois Grandes Fugues, which celebrated Beethoven’s Grosse Fugue Op. 133, and several of his string quartets, and throughout this year the Adelaide Symphony orchestra will perform all his symphonies and his violin concerto.
It is manifestly obvious that Beethoven is, and will likely continue to be one of humankind’s most loved composers, and almost everyone surely knows that the great man was tormented with chronic deafness. What is perhaps not as well known is that his affliction nearly pushed him to the precipice of wanting to end his own life. Beethoven wrote to his brothers about his turmoil in a heart wrenching letter that is now referred to as the Heiligenstadt Testament.
So, in this special commemorative year it is fitting this especially painful time in Beethoven’s life is explored so that we can appreciate the man’s musical genius all the more. The Sound of History does just that, and presents music composed by Beethoven before and after Heiligenstadt, and also presents a modern composition that is a musical interpretation of Beethoven’s pain.
Performed by Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, the program comprises extracts from Beethoven’s Septet in E flat, Op.20, the Piano Concerto No.1 in C, Op.15, Symphony No.1 in C, Op.21, and Symphony No.2 in D, Op.36. These excerpts are accompanied by short contextual explanations delivered by Professor Christopher Clark from the University of Cambridge. This part of the program is intensely interesting, and exposes a number of myths surrounding Beethoven’s deafness. Clark is erudite, and his material is factual, interesting and to the point. However, the event feels too much like a lecture – replete with giant slide projections on a screen hanging behind the orchestra – and the musical extracts become more of a ‘tease’. Such feelings are pushed aside when the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra performs Brett Dean’s Testament: Music for Orchestra, which is a musical response to the turmoil Beethoven must have been in as his hearing increasingly became worse.
Throughout the evening the projection screen also captures live images of sections of the orchestra as they play. This adds an extra dimension to the whole concert experience.
Dean’s Testament is a remarkable composition. It attempts to create in sound what Beethoven must have heard as his hearing failed. It plumbs the depths of emotion to express the despair felt by the man. Dean himself was to have conducted the concert but he is a recent COVID19 victim and is currently under medical isolation in hospital. A nice touch was to project a video message from him thanking Richard Mills AM who stepped in at the eleventh hour to ‘rescue’ the entire concert.
Mills demonstrates his undoubted class with his leading of the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra in a ‘safe’ reading of Beethoven’s Symphony No.3 in E flat, Op.55 ‘Eroica’. Mills and the orchestra take the mighty Eroica at a measured pace with the dynamics carefully planned from beginning to end: the strength of the opening chord; the potency of the funeral march; the energy of the scherzo; and the sheer might of the finale; all are in balance. One is never surprised – it is as we expect – and the result sends the audience home confirmed in their belief that Beethoven was, is, and will always be one of the greatest.
Kym Clayton
When: 7 Mar
Where: Festival Theatre
Bookings: Closed