Matt Byrne Media. Holden Street Theatres. 9 Nov 2019
Writer Dan Goggin sounds like a fun guy but he has only one thing on his mind – nuns! What started out as his greeting card quips by cartoon nuns has turned into a nunsense factory initiated by his first off-Broadway musical in 1985 which had nearly 3700 productions and was translated into 21 languages. He milked the concept with sequels themed on country & western nuns, Yiddish nuns, Christmas nuns, etc. - six new musicals! – and then in 1998 this lucky seventh - Nunsense A-men! - a transvestite version that is so effectively ridiculous, it’s hard to imagine how its antecedents with female cast could possibly be as funny. Writing about nuns must be habit-forming.
The convent-cloistered nuns are putting on a fund-raising show – reasons revealed by a charming prologue video skit of a poisonous lunch – and no form of entertainment is safe from these batty sisters as they hoof, joke, jostle, and reveal their vulnerabilities.
The male cast sometimes play men dressed like nuns, sometimes nuns, sometimes men playing women, sometimes women – did I miss anything? David Gauci is a formidable addition to any sisterhood and director Matthew Byrne gave him the pivotal role of the Mother Superior. Gauci has an awarded career in professional cabaret, and in producing hits with his theatre company Davine Productions. Gauci’s penetrating deep voice is always a pleasure, even when spouting nunsense. A special bonus was his physical comedy in a sketch where Mother Superior accidentally sniffs up some amyl nitrate – his hyenic laughter was literally infectious amongst the audience. Jayke Melling played a novice nun with a fetching naivety and an insouciant smile that, well, made you smile. His ballet was a surprise but wouldn’t get him into the Bolshoi. Ron Abelita’s nun was slightly crazy and a real treat. His Sister Mary Amnesia’s ventriloquist act was also unexpected – a much forgotten art. Chris Stansfield’s Brooklyn accent and undisguised masculinity gave me the impression he escaped from South Pacific to don the habit. A warm performance and another powerful voice. Producer and director Matthew Byrne also plays convent nun second-in-command. He generously mostly inhabits an elderly nun dealing with the others’s tomfoolery. Byrne commanded the closing number and is the true mother hen as character, and likely also as director and producer. Knowing Byrne, he probably inserted a few “enhancements” to Goggin’s book.
Loose chorus work must have had choreographer Rose Vallen wonder why her simple steps were only regarded as mere suggestions by the irreverent and independent cast members.
Musical director Ben Saunders had his hands firmly on his organ and kept the others musically timed.
Nunsense A-men! is a vacuous night out of frivolity and vaudeville and not to be taken at all seriously – a perfect evening cap to a long hard day.
David Grybowski
When: 7 to 30 Nov
Where: Holden Street Theatres
Bookings: holdenstreettheatres.com.au
Hills Musical Company. Stirling Community Theatre. 8 Nov 2019
With music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim - West Side Story, A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum, Gypsy, Sweeney Todd - Assassins (1990, much later than any on the list) isn’t in the same league. It’s based on an idea by Charles Gilbert, Jr. and that’s an interesting story. Sondheim was a panelist at a script lab and liked Gilbert’s offering so much that he asked if he could borrow the idea. “Great,” said Gilbert, “I’d love to write the book.” “No,” said Sondheim, “I have somebody else in mind, so thanks. Leave it to the big boys,” or something like that.
The wings to the stage of the Stirling Community Theatre are wonderfully decorated with a newspaper collage of the bad news of the day – the assassination or assassination attempt of an American president. Large black and white portraits of the relevant presidents are quite nostalgic to see and are rendered over in a blood red spreading spot when their time comes in the narrative (Cameron Hapgood – set design and Matt Ralph – lighting design). There is a professionally fetching programme design as well.
The band, under conductor Andrew Groch, starts off a little shaky and promises a disappointing musical evening, but they improve. In the opening number, the assassins and failed assassins from Lincoln’s to Reagan’s, mill about aimlessly as if at a carnival. One by one they are invited by a carny - who appeals to their aimless nature - to buy a pistol in the motif of a duck-shooting game and make something of their lives. Megan Donald as the game handler murders her uncredited choreography, probably the directors’, Monique Hapgood and Macintyre Howie Reeves.
The granddaddy of American assassinations is Lincoln’s, so worthwhile time is spent on it, and indeed, it’s a highlight of the production. David MacGillivray delivers a fully developed characterisation of John Wilkes Booth and his obsession with his place in history as someone setting a great wrong right is beautifully dramatised in the moments before his capture. Casmira Hambledon and Bronwen James are charismatic and all too plausible as the failed assassins of President Gerald Ford, who, quite independently made their shooting attempts only seventeen days apart. That would keep the Secret Service busy. Their fictitious scenes together as common spirits needs a bit of subtlety but did provide provocations of humour. The other assassins, and wanna-bes, are more inscrutable, simply because they fit the bill of the loner sociopath and they are harder to come to grips with. Robin Schmelzkopf’s Charles Guiteau - the assassin of President Garfield – is avuncular but unfathomable and the other performers also haven’t much to work with. Yet weighing in at two hours and fifteen minutes without interval, it is enough. James Nicholson’s costumes were extremely good in defining the styles of the days of the deeds.
John Weidman’s book has the assassins and failed assassins mingle and merge as phantoms. Some dialogues between them, and monologues, is too long and tedious. The last assassination that stopped the nation was Kennedy’s and here Weidman goes off into la-la land with a scene on the sixth floor of the book depository building with the diachronous group encouraging a reluctant Lee Harvey Oswald to get on with it and join their infamy, as if his dilemma was whether to shoot himself or at Kennedy. This is very fanciful as the evidence shows that Oswald was a committed activist and highly motivated. And anyways, Oswald did not fire the killing shot. Victoria’s ex-detective Colin McLaren - in his 2013 book, The Smoking Gun – re-demonstrated Howard Donahue’s theory of decades ago that a Secret Service agent in the follow-car accidently killed Kennedy, creating that horrific head-exploding wound with the Service’s AR-15. The cynicism and black humour dominating Assassins melts away with some sombre reflections on the tragedy of Kennedy’s violent passing.
Assassinsis a strange brew of verbiage and vaudeville, and only once finds real passion in John Wilkes Booth’s final moments. While Weidman’s book is a difficult target, this production has trouble finding it.
David Grybowski
When: 8 to 23 Nov
Where: Stirling Community Theatre
Bookings: hillsmusical.org.au
Photo Credit: Mark Anolak
Marie Clark Musical Theatre. The Goodwood Institute. 26 Oct 2019
One does not share director Lauren Scarfe’s (director), Katie Packer’s (musical director) or Vanessa Redmond’s (choreographer) enthusiasm for Mary Rodgers’s Once Upon A Mattress. And yes, Mary is the daughter of Richard Rodgers, who partnered with Oscar Hammerstein II to create the wonders known as Oklahoma!, South Pacific, The King and I, and The Sound of Music. Alas, Mary Rodgers’s adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale, The Princess And The Pea, is not up to those standards - it was her first full-length musical composed at the age of 28.
Rodgers, lyricist Marshall Barer and the book team of Jay Thompson, Dean Fuller and the same Barer failed to bridge the original fairy tale to adult entertainment – it remains a pantomime in the musical form with its overly simple plot, few thought-provoking embellishments, and little sophistication. Spamalot it ain’t. Or even Camelot. Director Lauren Scarfe writes “it really holds up in the age of feminism,” due, presumably, to the strong lead comic role of the princess-to-be. Funny business aside, it’s a rather simple, straightforward story of a dysfunctional royal family with an overprotective mother thwarting her son, the prince, from marrying to keep him in her clutches of co-dependence. Her method is to have potential princesses undergo humiliating tests that can’t be passed. It ain’t Annie Get Your Gun either and not one’s idea of feminism.
The creative leadership team tries to make the most of the material but frankly there isn’t much to work with and the production never really takes off. However, 21-year-old Emily-Jo Davidson does shine brightly in the aforementioned lead comic role. Her scene of repeatedly lifting heavy weights between belts of booze was a hoot. Indeed, this role was created by Carol Burnett in her Broadway debut, and Emily-Jo’s performance reminds one of America’s greatest comic actresses, Lucille Ball. Still developing, Davidson needs to broaden her comic schtick. There were many fine voices in the cast (eg Brooke Washusen and Davidson) and Katie Packer’s orchestra was on song. Most performers failed to escape orbiting their stereotypical characters. Often the follow spot and its target were not co-spatial leaving visual focus elsewhere.
If only I had a pea under my seat to keep me from the threshold of Noddy Land.
David Grybowski
When: 26 Oct to 2 Nov
Where: The Goodwood Institute
Bookings: marieclark.asn.au
Tracey Crisp. Bakehouse Theatre. 25 Oct 2019
“The paradox of the universal being entirely personal”, writes director Maggie Wood in the program notes for Tracey Crisp’s The Forgettory; succinctly, those words sum up this charmer of a one-hander.
Tracey Crisp’s sobriquet is "the vegetarian librarian”. She is a performer known for her stories of gentle self-deprecation. She’s whimsical, witty, perceptive, and erudite and she has a glorious way with words.
This little show finds its audience among older women for whom love and grief and loss of memory are heartland issues.
The little Studio Theatre at the Bakehouse is transformed into a snug librarian’s nest for the show. There is an oversized bookcase with oversized books, a cosy carpet, a comfy chair, a cardboard box, and some very sympathetic and well-wrought lighting.
Crisp introduces her contemporary world, a 44th floor apartment in scorching, impersonal Abu Dhabi where she has to have her husband’s sanction to get a permit to have wine, the wine which gives her sanity and time to reflect in this insomniac other life so far from where her most poignant memories have been made.
She takes the audience on a gentle tour of family and memories, most movingly in the last section when she sits and knits in the chair, talking at the bedside of her failing father. And she brings old sharp memory to meet new fragmented memory; an impasse; a ubiquitous generational tragedy.
Director Maggie Wood has generated an astute sense of place and time in this production, simply by having Crisp stand or sit or move one step here and one step there. It’s artful, subtle, and effective.
And the audience sits silently rapt in someone else’s stories which, in so many ways, are also their own. Birth, sleeplessness, grief, dementia. And, as Crisp delivers her beautifully-crafted tales, speaking clearly, calmly and without casual abbreviation, they may be shedding an empathetic tear or two.
Samela Harris
When: 23 to 26 Oct
Where: Bakehouse Theatre
Bookings: bakehousetheatre.com
OzAsia Festival. Festival Theatre. 25 Oct 2019
Breathtaking in its scale, this mighty Taiwanese production is one of the cornerstones of the OzAsia Festival. Once again, one cannot help but marvel at the cultural richness this festival brings to town or to celebrate the sight of theatres bursting at the seams with our Asian community.
Playwright and director Stan Lai is a superstar of Chinese-language theatre and this production from the Performance Workshop shines a light on just why this is so. In The Village, he has taken a broad brush to paint the history of Taiwan, not only the politics of post Kuomintang defeat but the lives in exile of Chiang Kai-Shek’s people in Formosa, which became Taiwan. Stan Lai depicts three culturally diverse exiled families in what was to become the village of Chiayi. They speak different tongues and eat different foods but, as time goes by, customs become shared and a new sense of community is established. As years go by, new generations and different values emerge until, after 50 years, the family members have become part of a diaspora and the little village just a relic of the past.
The village set sprawls across the Festival Theatre stage, the once-temporary nature of the three houses suggested by a skeletal structural framework, domestica existing on raised floors with interior furnishings changing over the generations. From time to time the whole structure swings on the revolve to give a different perspective. And, there are countless peripheral scenes played out here and there with a sequence of narrators’ spotlit to one side keeping the families and their time frames in context. Two large subtitle screens flank the stage.
It is quite a tall order to keep track of both the action onstage and the translated dialogue and occasional timelines.
Technically, it is a thrilling production. Sound and lighting are absolutely top notch. The musical score is interesting, a lot of it western pop as time goes on. The style of acting at first takes a spirit of traditional Chinese opera, voices raised, lots of overacting and comic ham. As time goes on, the cast members adapt the style to the evolving periods until they develop a sleek dramatic universality which depicts the present.
The three-hour epic deals with family and human issues which are common to us all: life, death, loss, humiliation, kindness, snobbery and good food. We come to know and love the family members and to grieve for many of their predicaments. We share laughter at foibles and particularly at the graffiti on their public loo. It is a very big picture full of small details.
The cast is immense by modern theatre standards, many of them segueing from character to character to expand the sense of population and generational dynamics. There are standout performances, Hsiao Ai heartbreakingly among them as Ruyun and Liu Liang-Tso heroically so as General Wu. Also strong and pleasing are Chu Chung-Heng, Teng Chen-Huei, Feng Yi-Kang, Sung Shao-Ching and Ling Li-Ching. And then there is Liang Hao-Lan, so elegant in her stately gait as Granny Lu. Many more stand out in the intergenerational swings and roundabouts of this theatrical thrill.
Bravo OzAsia! And, thanks.
Samela Harris
When: 25 to 26 Oct
Where: Festival Theatre
Bookings: bass.net.au