Pelican Productions. The Arts Theatre. 14 Sep 2019
New York Latino-type Lin-Manuel Miranda is definitely on a roll. Not only did he conceive of, and write the music and lyrics for this blockbuster, In The Heights, but he wrote the book, music and lyrics for another tremendous hit, Hamilton, which opened on Broadway in 2015 and will have its Australian premiere in Sydney in 2021. In The Heights played over 1000 performances on Broadway from 2008 to 2011. For his toils, Miranda won a Tony for Best Original Score and the show won Best Musical. He did even better with Hamilton – a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and a record sixteen Tony nominations with wins for Best Musical, Best Original Score and Best Book. And here’s the kicker – he was nominated for a Tony for Best Actor in a Musical for BOTH shows! What a guy.
In The Heights and Pelican Productions are a perfect marriage. Pelican has been training youths aged 8 to 19 in musical theatre since 2004 and run a two-week boot camp every January. Director Emma Williams and choreographer Carla Papa manage to showcase a dozen main performers plus thirty chorus members in several of In The Heights’s larger-than-life numbers. But that’s just the half of it – there are two mostly different casts appearing in alternate performances – and just for the record, I saw the Red Cast.
Washington Heights is in the shadow of the George Washington Bridge in upper Manhattan. Perhaps formerly Irish, it is now an Hispanic neighbourhood of people with their heads full of yearning – for the American dream, to return to Cuba or Dominican Republic or wherever they came from, for amor, or simply to get out of the stifling heat and the same old beat. Miranda creates a kaleidoscope of characters, and the young Pelicans time and time again amaze with the veracity and nuance of their creations – including effective accents and body language. While the plot’s a little thin, In The Heights is really about dance, dance and more dance. With the focus on Latin beats, the energy that Williams, Papa, and Latin choreographer Joshua Angeles generate with their exceptionally talented cast is quite incredible. There is so much going on in the complex, rumbustious chorus scenes that one is sometimes overwhelmed.
All the main cast members convince in their pulchritudinous performances. And the singing is sonorous (musical director vocal – Rosie Hocking). Costumes by Kylie Green, Rosie Hosking and Emma Williams, and set by Jen Frith, Kylie Green and Kim Wilson took us further into the barrio. Music director Martin Cheney and his band remained hidden behind the upstage screen but blew the house away with their drive and precision.
This SA premiere of In The Heights is outstanding and it’s inspirational to see so much young South Australian talent having the time of their lives and performing so professionally.
David Grybowski
When: 14 to 21 Sep
Where: The Arts Theatre
Bookings: trybooking.com
The Adelaide Repertory Theatre. Arts Theatre. 29 Aug 2019
Almost from Adam Tuominen’s first breath as Jimmy, the tension comes alive from the stage and one’s attention is riveted.
John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger is a 1950s British classic. It symbolised the birth of “kitchen sink” drama and, judging from its revival at the hands of Lesley Reed and The Rep, it is alive and kicking with a vengeance.
Its uncompromising naturalism is refreshing.
The play depicts the grim and cloying domestic world of Jimmy and his wife Alison in a grimy walkup somewhere in the Midlands. Their Welsh friend Cliff shares life with them, acting as a buffer between passive Alison, to the constant contemptuous verbal assaults she endures from Jimmy. Osborne has created Jimmy not only as an angry young man railing against his failures in life but also as a well-read and erudite character, thus legitimising the rich and often beautiful language of the script. He wrote the play in semi-autobiographical mode.
In private moments, Jimmy indulges a quaint romantic role play with Alison and shows a lust as strong as his violent verbal onslaughts. It is pretty classic domestic violence, the aggressor and the supplicant victim. It’s also a mixed marriage. Alison comes from a British military bourgeoisie background.
Cliff’s presence adds interesting chemistry as the best friend who is also not-so-secretly in love with the hapless wife.
And then her friend Helena enters the fray.
All the action takes place in the nasty little upstairs bedsit, a wonderfully detailed and atmospheric set by Brittany Daw with cutaway walls showing corridors and filthy doors to other flats. The time is always Sundays, the idle days of meaty newspapers, galling church bells, and the weekly ironing. Sound is good, the bells, the rain and most especially the wonderfully evocative jazz music composed for the production by Kim Orchard.
Adam Tuominen pretty much eats the stage alive as Jimmy. He rants and rages, bullies and cajoles, artfully restraining the shouting to the craft of acting; no mean feat. He’s ever a class act. James Edwards has his Welsh accent down pat and gives a simply marvellous portrayal of Cliff, the role which lifted the great Alan Bates to stardom. Leah Lowe, albeit with an unusual accent, reflects succinctly the emotional exhaustion of the bullied spouse while Jessica Carroll steps it out with great style and cultural finesse as the actress friend, Helena. Jack Robins fares well in the cameo role as the country dad.
Director Lesley Reed has delivered a smooth and high quality production of this very demanding theatre work. Particularly admirable and effective is her use of stillness onstage as aesthetic and dramatic punctuation points which cleverly underscore while also counterpointing the emotional turmoil of the play.
It is a great play well revived - a significant play everyone should have seen at least once. Seize the day.
Samela Harris
When: 29 Aug to 7 Sep
Where: Arts Theatre
Bookings: trybooking.com
State Theatre Company of SA. Dunstan Playhouse. 24 Aug 2019
Ailsa Paterson’s set for State Theatre’s Jasper Jones production is a work of supreme and beautiful art. If theatre design was included in our fabulous SALA festival, it could be heralded as a star turn.
It depicts a magnificence of paperbark trees in a vast and towering forest. It is arboreally imaginative, theatrically mind-blowing, and superbly illuminated through the moods of day and night by the exquisite lighting of Nigel Levings.
What a pair. What an achievement. What a visual joy.
It is clearly the secret to the success of this production of Kate Mulvaney’s adaptation of the beloved Craig Silvey novella.
As director, Natasha Jelk has chosen to give the play a sense of heightened artifice with stilted, unnatural deliveries out there in the woodland wilds. She has assembled an interesting cast with James Smith wide-eyed and strident with geeky urgency as the principal character, Charlie. He works with zeal and emotional commitment slithering in and out of the cleverly-designed louvre windowed sleep-out of his home and carrying with him a thundering overload of fear and guilt. He relates well to Rachel Burke as his bookish true love, Eliza, and she to him. And Burke absolutely shines in her denouement scene, revealing the fate of her sister which along with racism is the pivotal issue of the story. Elijah Valadian-Wilson plays the part-Aboriginal boy, Jasper Jones, who is a frequent and hapless victim of blame in a nasty, judgemental Australian country town. Valadian-Wilson’s performance is hallmarked by the lithe beauty of his deportment. He streams through the trees and up the rock faces like a graceful zephyr. Roy Phung is the opposite in the role of Jeffrey, the Vietnamese schoolboy with a passion for cricket and watermelon. His is a lovely comic characterisation. Emma Beech and Rory Walker fill in the cast in multiple roles, both accomplished, albeit Walker’s dynamism in a revelatory scene as Mad Jack is probably the production’s true dramatic show-stopper.
It is quite a long and languid production leaving audience members at times a little restless. But, oh, its over-arching aesthetic is a rare pleasure to behold.
Samela Harris
When: 24 Aug to 7 Sep
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: bass.net.au
Red Phoenix Theatre. Holden Street Theatres. 23 Aug 2019
Predatory descendants and an elderly matriarch hanging on to control of her estate; it’s an old, ugly story which resonates through affluent cultures.
In this case, it is a Texas family and the year is 1987. Pulitzer-Prize-winning playwright Horton Foote, notably screenwriter of To Kill a Mockingbird, was indeed a Texan and the play is strongly imbued in localised Americana; the old black family retainer, the grand old dynastic coastal cotton plantation and the generational choices between oil and agriculture. In this play, the ugly spectre of oil is proffered as perhaps the only salvation to the family’s declining fortunes. Real estate values are slumping and a tax bill hangs over the property.
The family has gathered for a dinner at the grand old home where easy-going Louise and her estate-managing son, just known as Son, have stayed close to the proud old matriarch, Stella. Like circling vultures, Louise's alcoholic brother Lewis, desperate with gambling debts, and their sister Mary Jo whose husband, Bob, is in financial difficulty, are ravenous for a share of the estate. And thus, does the family interact over a disastrous dinner in which the geriatric family retainer, Doug, also is facing the ambitions of the younger generation.
The script is rich in the atmosphere of America’s Deep South and peppered with brittle barbs about avarice and influence. From time to time it is sharply humorous. Few of the characters are particularly likeable and it is the most loathsome of them all, Mary Jo, who dominates the action with her bitchy assertions of impatient entitlement. In this role, Cate Rogers absolutely steals the show with panoply of spiteful, self-righteous and competitive expressions. She brings awfulness to an entertaining art form.
Lyn Wilson plays the less abrasive sister. She’s a good actress and it is a pleasing characterisation. The redoubtable Jean Walker wears the role of the aging matriarch with grace and authority while, as her trusted grandson, Son, Mark Mulders establishes and sustains the family’s one thread of sanity with a strong and compassion-driven performance. It is quite the contrast to the emotional roller coaster Brendan Cooney delivers as the feckless gambling son, not to mention the interesting shadow of deviousness generated by Lindsay Dunn as the son-in-law.
In all, director Libby Drake has chosen a very interesting cast of capable actors for this Red Phoenix production. The one incongruous thing she has chosen is to eschew American accents in the belief that this makes the play easier for Australian audiences to relate to. While one may be a bit tired of hearing American accents on the Adelaide stage, in this case a great deal of the rhythm, idiom, humour and cultural innuendo of the play suffers. Wayne Anthoney’s heart-rending performance as the old family retainer is compromised by the fact that his accent cannot iterate the music written into his wonderful old character's words.
The audience has to use its imagination and leap-frog into the idea that Australia has generations of loyal house servants. On which subject, both Kate Anolak and Gabi Douglas are eminently appealing in their roles as the cook and the maid. Also delightful in this large cast is Laura Antoniazzi as Son’s sensible girlfriend. Then there're Nicole Walker and Jasmine Leach ever scowling and primping as the heartless spoiled-brat granddaughters and Eliza Brampton as the garrulous teenage waitress who symbolises the inevitable future of divided estates.
Kate Prescott’s living and dining room set is eminently workable and aesthetic and full marks to the props team for the hot meal.
Director Libby Drake has put up a good defence in the program for her choice to play the production in Australian accents but, to this critic, it seems just a bit unfair on a Texan playwright’s piece of highly idiosyncratic Texas Americana.
That said, the audience enjoyed the show and left the theatre singing praises to its fabulous cast.
Samela Harris
When: 23 to 31 Aug
Where: Holden Street Theatres
Bookings: holdenstreettheatres.com
Therry Dramatic Society. Arts Theatre. 14 Aug 2019
One has to love Therry for keeping alive the quirky traditionalism of J.B. Priestly.
An Inspector Calls is still something of a drawcard for the older audience demographic and it is a very good vehicle for a younger brood of actors. It is a famously lateral piece of police-investigation theatre, a 70-year-old breakaway from conventional whodunnits with a strong socialist edge. It is a morality play laced with interrogation and guilt.
Angela Short has directed this production in an appropriately proper, upper-crust British spirit. The Birlings are smugly affluent and upwardly mobile thanks to the ruthless underpayment of workers in their factory. They are celebrating the engagement of their daughter to a very nice chap whose parents might see the Birlings as a bit lower on the social scale. The play opens with the Birling family exquisitely dressed for their party. The champagne is flowing along with the booming braggadocio of the father, Arthur.
Don Oswald’s set design features some very tasteful antique furniture but incorporates an extremely heavy-handed piece of symbolism in the form of gaping black chasms and cracks in the walls of the house.
In all, however, it is a very solid production.
The cast uniformly is accomplished, each at home in their characters. Lani Gerbi, in particular, shines as the strong-willed and open-minded daughter, Sheila. Matthew Chapman complements very nicely as her suitor, Gerald Croft while Dylan O’Donnell gives a persuasive performance as the Birling's dissolute young son Eric. He’s particularly on-the-ball when he has an emotional rant mimicking his father who, forcefully played by Patrick Clements, has an exceptionally gravelly delivery. Meanwhile, Rebecca Kemp is elegantly restrained and self-satisfied as the mother, Sybil. The Inspector is embodied by Mark Drury and oh, how sonorous and portentous he is.
There is some strange stage direction from Short, sometimes just too arch and stylised. There is an odd, brief blackout in the first act. But, in all, it is grand old play well put together and well worth seeing.
Samela Harris
When: 14 to 24 Aug
Where: Arts Theatre
Bookings: trybooking.com