chaser.com.au and theshovel.com.au. Arts Theatre. 30 Nov 2019
Adelaide doesn’t always get a stop on the tour by this mob, and Saturday night’s one-off was sold out. Warm anticipatory applause at the opening betrayed a seasoned audience who would be familiar with urbane James Schloeffel’s satirical fake news website theshovel.com.au and disheveled Charles Firth’s The Chaser range of products. Or maybe some have already attended the wars waged and won in 2017 and 2018. Egads! When the dynamic duo review the shenanigans of 2019, month by month, you realise there is a lot of shit to shovel.
Firth and Schloeffel are like-minded liberals with a similar aching ear for the absurd behaviour taking place in our right-facing world. Their huge experience in political commentary results is an onslaught of razor-sharp insights and sardonic satire that is returned with laughter and applause.
And what a year it was. Using moving image as a backdrop, they jog our memory on wobbly Bill Shorten out for his morning runs. There was only one election poll that was consistently correct for two years – Bill Shorten was not the preferred prime minister. Meanwhile, our coal-cuddling koala preferred PM was lampooned for his baseball caps and his “she’ll be right, I’m one of you” attitude. Peter Dutton was mercilessly and personally attacked for the shape of his head, which was symbolic of his well-honed hard line as Minister for Immigration 2014-17. Cruel but funny. Looped footage of a media-savvy teenager smashing as egg on Queensland MP Fraser Anning’s head said a lot about them and therefore us. My highlight of the show is the ten questions of advice sought from Israel Folau along the lines of, “I cut off my wife’s right hand in accordance with provisions in the Old Testament and I’m entitled to enslave her, but she only has one hand. What should I do?” Also in the religious vein, Cardinal Pell was particularly pilloried. Firth showed us doing some The Chaser-type mischief in attaching a brass addition to a bronze plague of Pell’s achievements, labelled, “and convicted pedophile (sic).” Sticking to Australia, Morrison’s like-minded leaders, Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, make only cameo appearances, but Justin Trudeau is black-faced with embarrassment.
It is a little daunting to witness such a hefty catalogue of blatant misbehaviour, misinformation, misuse of power and phony missives, so Firth and Schloeffel spliced their monthly catalogue with relief skits from some additional talent. Mark Humphries is a handsome television personality who got his TV start hosting ABC’s The Roast, and he has continued his satirical political commentary on SBS Viceland’s The Feed and on Thursday’s 7:30 current affairs show, as well as contributing to The Chaser’s Australia. He was wonderfully ebullient and off-kilter playing several roles including himself as a quiz master with three contestants shanghaied from the audience - a highlight of the night. Victoria Zerbst and Jenna Owen are comedians and satirists who also contribute to SBS’s The Feed and many other programs on TV and radio. They spiked the show with some serious froth and bubble. All presenters wrote their own material. If you’re accustomed to Fringe stand-up comedy acts, you’ll be tone deaf to the f word; if not, one might say go Folau yourself.
The War on 2019 – Live! is a horribly amusing night out. While not having the class of Jonathan Biggins’s, Drew Forsythe’s and Phillip Scott’s The Wharf Review with its songs, dance, impersonations and 15 years of experience, The War sensibly only charges half as much. You couldn’t get a better deal.
PS - Do not despair missing out on The War… You can always try next year, but also, Firth and Schloeffel will be returning for the Adelaide Fringe 2020 from February 18 to 23 with The Anti-Expert’s Guide To Everything - a butt-kicking diatribe on flip-flop science, vaccine-deniers, regurgitated fad diets and all the other dangerous rubbish we don’t take enough time to de-bunk. Their websites are 24/7.
David Grybowski
When: 30 Nov 2019
Where: Arts Theatre
Bookings: Closed
BB Group Production presented by Opera Australia and CWB Entertainment. Adelaide Festival Theatre. 30 Nov 2019
It’s a well-known tale; unrequited love, fear, hate, tragedy. Whether told through the guise of the Montagues and Capulets, Catherine and Heathcliff or, as in this case, the Sharks and the Jets, it is undoubtedly emotionally charged.
This BB Group production of West Side Story is as traditional as it gets. In fact, one might be forgiven for thinking one had seen this set before (Design, Paul Gallis). The costumes are lavish and winsome (Design, Renate Schmitzer), the songs are reliable and would satisfy the expectations of a die-hard fan (Musical Supervisor, Donald Chan), and the storyline doesn’t deviate from its original Broadway big brother. But the wonderful young Australian cast, of which many are making their professional debut, doesn’t quite have the emotional chops to fully render this heart-breaking tragedy.
Of the performers there is nary a bad dancer. The cast is brimming with lithe movers and shakers, all relishing the hectic choreography (Director/Choreographer, Joey McKneely). It is edge-of-your-seat stuff and the highlight of the show by a long shot. McKneely’s production is more stylistic than naturalistic, and moments of poignancy are often at risk of slipping into melodrama. Despite being visually stunning, at times it is emotionally vapid.
Of the top billed performers it is Sophie Salvesani as Maria and Chloe Zuel as Anita who steal the show. Salvesani has a beautiful operatic tone that just devours the Sondheim and Bernstein music and lyrics. Zuel has an electric presence whenever she graces the stage and one cannot take one's eyes off her. She has an emotional maturity that really grounds her delivery. America, led by Zuel, is a show-stopping highlight. Tod Jacobsson grapples with the difficult role of Tony, and does admirably. Vocally he has an interesting tone and he sings beautifully, though not always blending with Salvesani, and much to his own detriment.
Opening night suffers from a low overall volume. The orchestra is in fine form and sounds sublime, but vocals are often lost and words gabbled amongst the Puerto Rican accents or low microphone levels.
It is a promising young cast brimming with Australia’s most promising professional musical theatre performers. They deserve our support, and one hopes their effort and energy earns them healthy houses every night.
Paul Rodda
When: 29 Nov to 8 Dec
Where: Festival Theatre
Bookings: bass.net.au
Noel Lothian Hall, Botanic Gardens. 23 Nov 2019
‘It takes a village to raise a child’, and this village, amongst the old halls of the ever beautiful Botanic Gardens, gives children an opportunity to contribute meaningfully to that village.
The children (and their carers) are welcomed to the community in the food gardens by Marina Barbaro and her theatre family, and asked to choose the role they will take on the village via pocket sized, colourful river stones. Each stone bears the title of a village duty – power worker, food server, postie.
Then it’s back to the village (Lothian Hall) where the villagers set about building, decorating, and naming their family huts. The postman delivers, the food gatherers bring home a delicious variety of fresh fruits, served to the families by the food servers.
Each child has an active role in the village, and the community is brought together for drinking, eating and, most important of all, ensuring that the ‘heart’ of the village is kept beating.
The show is ingeniously put together, allowing the children to take charge while being gently led; surely more than one parent was trying to figure out how to get them to perform like this at home!
The village huts surrounded the communal area, and while the volume was a little loud at times, the overall light and sound ambience had the children happily settled, even during the thunder and lightning!
Trying to teach an understanding of independence, leadership and community living is no mean feat, but in this community interactive theatre production, Marina and family pull it off; through community feasts, communal games and wild thunderstorms, the village sticks together.
Supported by a City of Adelaide Arts and Cultural Grant, this was a free event that hopefully will be reprised.
And the children’s opinion? For them, the best part was having full responsibility for creating their own living space: they want to go again!
Arna Eyers-White
Age Guide: 5 to 12 years
When: 23 and 24 Nov
Where: Noel Lothian Hall
Bookings: Closed
Independent Theatre. Goodwood Theatre. 15 Nov 2019
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) didn’t die until he was 94 and some of his contemporary critics would have said not a moment too soon. He lived through the latter half of Victoria’s reign, two world wars, and saw air travel evolve from none whatsoever to commercial jets. He wrote his last play the year he died from complications after falling out of a tree he was pruning, but he had already won the Nobel Prize for Literature 25 years earlier. A late starter with the ladies, he certainly made up for it and manifested his great respect for the struggles of the fairer sex, and many other issues of social injustice, wage inequality and morality in a great canon of plays, including Independent Theatre’s current offering, Mrs Warren’s Profession.
The fishnet-clad, booted and shapely leg on the publicity and programme cover designed by Nicholas Ely leaves little doubt what is Mrs Warren’s profession. However, she is not a practitioner but an employer of sexual service in Europe’s major cities when such a thing provided a legitimised need at the time the play was written in 1893. Shaw sets up this delectable dichotomy of an independent, self-made and successful business woman who is also potentially exploiting white slavery, or is she providing high-earning jobs to liberated women?
In Shaw’s play, however, she is what she is, and he takes copious amounts of time having her explain the delicate situation to her daughter. The narrative then really focusses on her daughter’s acceptance or rejection of her mother’s profession. Unfortunately for drama, her daughter is also what she is, and indeed, no character during the course of events seems to undergo any change whatsoever in their lives. Arthur Miller took the situation of a virtuous progeny faced with the dubious morals of a parent in All My Sons and made a ripping proper drama out of it oozing with conflicted souls and culminating in heart-breaking tragedy. By comparison, Mrs Warren’s Profession is a moral walk in the park.
Nonetheless, this radio play has some interesting and thought-provoking moments. Certainly, Shaw’s observations on social injustice and capitalism evoke shame in realising that much of what we feel is wrong with the world today is so intergenerational as to signal a systemic dysfunctionality. Eloise Quinn-Valentine as Mrs Warren’s daughter is convincing as an egghead calculating her feelings by converting them to algebra. John Roben is magnificent representing free-wheeling finance and conveying the air of a tycoon used to buying anything he wants. Independent’s omnipresent actor, set designer and constructor par excellence, David Roach, provides a memorable vignette of a hangover. His Reverend Gardner easily cedes control of his life to son Frank who is solidly played by Patrick Marlin with carefree confidence and playfulness. John Oster has an ancillary role to the proceedings but launches the first scene with unhelpful haste. Pam O’Grady appears on stage with script in hand on opening night as she is gratefully filling in for the late withdrawal of the actor now not fulfilling the eponymous role. Even with the script in the first act, she is every inch a charismatic Mrs Warren in voice and manner, besides looking splendid in her period costume (no costume design credit provided). However, where drama might be conveyed the climactic confrontation with her daughter, director Rob Croser has the actors far apart and with a distracting script in tow, the momentum dissipates as Ms O’Grady cannot unleash. No doubt, as the season progresses and she has caught up and the scene is properly rendered, the conflict could be quite fetching.
A philosophical triumph and an indifferent drama, Mrs Warren’s Profession deserves respect for Shaw’s proactive voicing of social issues in theatre all those years ago, and Independent’s production is a compelling insight into the author and his times.
David Grybowski
When: 15 to 23 November
Where: Goodwood Theatre
Bookings: trybooking.com
St Jude’s Players. St Jude’s Hall. 16 Nov 2019
Where did that time go?
Suddenly everyone is applauding, very well-earned applause indeed. Two and a half hours have just passed in a seeming trice, keeping an audience so absorbed in the play that no one seemed to move a muscle. Such stillness is a sign of magical theatre - and St Jude’s has the goods to turn on the magic.
Whatever one may think of Jeffrey Archer’s reputation, one has to salute his fine writing and this play shines forth with a taut plot revolving around a court case against a leading British legal figure accused of murdering his wife. It’s a play top heavy with elderly white men and toffy legal in-jokes. And yet it is a marvellous thriller which has not lost its legal and humane relevance.
Again, the miracle workers at St Jude's have transformed the church hall into very effective sets, one an expansive court room and the other, the living quarters of a very sedate London house. Snatches of exquisite classical music provide a soundscape between scenes.
Brian Knott stalks the stage with utter authority as the eminent senior prosecutor, his wonderful, resonant voice rolling across all the emphases and punctuated nuances of the English language at its court-room best. Andrew Horwood is the defendant. The senior prosecutor’s long-term courtroom foe, equally distinguished in the land of British pomp and, indeed, in terms of acting. He is Knott’s peer in performance. It is a compelling multi-dimensional characterisation he establishes. What a pleasure to behold these two actors, at the height of their skill in a play which could have been written to showcase them.
The production has been directed by Vicky Horwood, wife of the leading man, and she has rounded up some fine supporting actors to adorn the show with seasoned Adelaide quality. Hence, the lineup of David Lockwood, Eric Offler, Robert McCarthy, David Rapkin, and John Matsen are onstage in sterling support. The ever-reliable Julie Quick steps up as a pivotal witness to the event while Joanne St Claire gives very credible substance to the victim. In the younger roles, Adam Schultz as suave and winning Aslam Storm is a perfection of deportment. Andy Winwood is a strong and effective witness while Jan Rice is a picture of passive patience as the court reporter.
And, once again, St Jude’s delivers the expert goods.
This Brighton-based theatre company should never be underestimated.
It has a track record of serious, extremely satisfying substance which just gets better.
Samela Harris
When: 16 to 23 Nov
Where: St Jude’s Hall
Bookings: trybooking.com