State Opera of South Australia. Adelaide Town Hall. 9 Aug 2019
If audience reaction is the yard stick, then Girls’ Night Out is Adelaide’s ‘classical music’ concert event of the year, and sadly it was a once-off. If you missed it, you missed an aural feast that highlighted the majesty of the human voice in all its magnificence.
Billed Girl’s Night Out, the program is homage to the music of Richard Strauss and features ten arias for female voices and five orchestral pieces from Strauss’ operas and lieder. The stage of the Adelaide Town Hall was enlarged to cater for an expanded Adelaide Symphony Orchestra (with two harps, enlarged percussion, grand piano, celeste and harmonium), four Australian divas each with enviable international experience and reputations, as well as conductor Simone Young who is a force of nature in her own right. Like an alignment of the planets, these five magnificent women combine musical forces to produce something that is greater than the sum of the parts. Their impact is almost too much: their passion and musicality is all consuming and joyous.
From the very first notes of Fröhlicher Beschluss from the opera Intermezzo, Simone Young AM demonstrates why she is one of the world’s leading conductors. Under her direction the Adelaide Symphony brings forth the piece’s full palette of musical colours with clarity and immediacy, and there is no let up for the rest of the concert. The standard is high, very high indeed. And there is a palpable sense of joy and excitement. It is exhilarating to watch Young stride onto the stage at the beginning of the second half of the program and start conducting before she even mounts the podium, and the orchestra doesn’t miss a beat even while the audience is still applauding Young’s return to the stage!
Adrian Uren’s performance (and later Sarah Barrett) on horn is a stand out, again and again, which is a good thing because Strauss was a horn player himself and unsurprisingly the horn features prominently in his orchestrations. Dean Newcomb on clarinet is superlative in Träumerei am Kamin, also from Intermezzo. Concertmaster Natsuko Yoshimoto on violin is tenderness personified in her accompaniment in the lieder Morgen!
But the evening belongs to the four singers: mezzo soprano Catherine Carby, soprano Miriam Gordon-Smith, soprano Emma Matthews, and soprano Lisa Gasteen AO who is another force of nature.
Gordon-Stewart and Matthews joined forces for the duet Er ist der Richtigfe nicht fur mich! Aber der Richtige from Arabella. One either side of the stage separated by Young between them, there was an early (but brief) synchronisation problem but Young skilfully and quickly brought them together allowing the sheer beauty and power of their voices to rise above the orchestra and completely seduce the audience.
The song Allerseelen is intricately layered and is a superb example of the instruments in the orchestra ‘singing’ in duet with the vocalist. Young allowed the conversations, particularly between Carby and the celeste and horn, to surface quickly, clearly and confidently. Carby’s performance of Sein wir wieder gut from Ariadne auf Naxos is a highlight and she amply demonstrates her well-honed acting skills to give immediacy to the tension and drama of the piece. Similarly, Gordon-Stewart is at her stunning best in Es gibt ein Reich also from Ariadne. She embodies the despair and deep sadness of the piece in a very touching and affecting performance.
Gasteen is one of the best sopranos around. She is an irresistible force to which even the most demanding arias must succumb. A Wagnerian specialist, Gasteen’s performances of the songs Cäcilie and Die Nacht from Opp 27 and 10 respectively were breathtaking. Her expansive voice is as true in the softest moments as it is during extended crescendo. She finds an appealing but unusual joy in the ambiguous melancholy of Die Nacht. In the song Befriet she again demonstrates purity of tone in the quietest of moments and allows her majestic vibrato and superb breath control to carry her imperiously towards the forte conclusions. But perhaps the highlight of the evening is her rendition of the hauntingly beautiful Zueignung in which she reveals a consummate command of both the text and the music. Throughout, Young is clearly Gasteen’s kindred spirit and her muse.
The concert rounds out with Matthews and Carby giving an impassioned rendition of Mir ist die Ehre widerfahren from Der Rosenkavalier, then joined by Gordon Stewart for an emotion charged performance of Hab’ mir’s gelobt also from Der Rosenkavalier.
It certainly is a girl’s night out but the boys thoroughly enjoyed it as well!
This concert is a highlight of the current concert season, and Adelaide audiences are the richer for the diversity of quality operatic offerings being presented by State Opera.
Brava!
Kym Clayton
When: 9 Aug
Where: Adelaide Town Hall
Bookings: Closed
St Jude’s Players. St Jude’s Hall. 8 Aug 2019
If ever a hike down to Brighton was worth its weight in gold, this play shines its value; even in abjectly stormy conditions.
Geoff Britain’s production is of such excellence that it may put much professional theatre in the shadows. So immediate, intense and committed is the work that there are times when one completely forgets one is in a theatre, so closely is one relating to the protagonists on stage.
Popular theory has it that people’s hearts beat in unison when in the theatre - and one would moot that this is an ideal example of an entire audience wedded in thrall.
It happens straightaway, from the stark spot-lit opening scene whence young Rosie steps to a city bench scene on the prompt wing and describes her lonely plight as a solo backpacking girl in Europe.
Heartbroken, she tries to list the things she knows to be true. They are few. She realises she has not grown at all. Rosie’s soliloquy is so superbly delivered by Zanny Edhouse that it is met with spontaneous applause.
Rosie is the baby of the Price family, an Aussie-everyman suburban family impeccably contrived by Andrew Bovell. He has settled them in Hallett Cove where dad, 63, early-retired via redundancy from motor making, grows roses and preens his perfect back yard. That yard with its lawn, rotary clothes line, shed, old gum tree and corrugated iron fences, is the core of his world and, indeed, of archetypal Australian working class family life. Among other things, Bovell’s play is a paeon to this leafy sanctuary of suburbia, and to the post-War values which created it.
While big-budget mainstream companies have sought to go minimalist and symbolic in representing this garden and its fly-wire kitchen door domestic scene, little St Jude’s with its compact proportions and volunteers' budget, has given versatile designer Ole Wiebkin free rein to transform the stage into a really vivid micro version of the real thing, complete with scaled down Hills Hoist. It’s a triumph.
The play tells of a year in the life of the Price family, the year in which Rosie comes home to a world presenting contemporary life challenges to her three siblings and her parents. By the end of the year’s upheavals, the list of things she knows to be true has grown, and so has she. It is not an easy journey and Bovell has thrown the family some fairly confronting and topical curve balls.
As the four children have to find and depart in diverse directions, the parents must contemplate their own relationship in an emptying nest.
The performances range from good to sublime. Joshua Coldwell and Leighton Vogt play the brothers, each on a fairly perilous trajectory, each deeply moving in their way. As big sister Pip, Cheryl Douglas softly treads the painful path as the victim of a fraught mother-daughter relationship. But it is Tim Williams and Nicole Rutty as the devoted parents who really lift the bar to excellence. These are two perceptive and commanding characterisations. Award material.
Bovell delves unerringly into the suburban psyche in this very loving play. There aren’t too many nerves it doesn’t tap and Geoff Brittain’s skilful directorial hand makes certain they are well felt.
At play’s end, there’s not a dry eye in the house.
This is a wonderful production of a wonderful piece of Australiana.
Applause. Applause.
Samela Harris
When: 9 to 17 Aug
Where: St Jude’s Hall, Brighton
Bookings: trybooking.com
University of Adelaide Theatre Guild. Little Theatre. 4 Aug 2019 Matinee
If ever a play came with a hurrah of hype, this is it. “Unarguably one of the best plays of the twenty-first century”, enthused a 2009 London review; one which stirred Theatre Guild director Nick Fagan to cite Jezz Butterworth’s Jerusalem as his “all-time favourite play”.
Hence comes this intense production transforming the Little Theatre into an extremely squalid glade of the woods in Wiltshire. It is a sensational set dominated by a battered caravan surrounded by messy domestica and post-party detritus.
It’s the long-term home of Johnny “Rooster” Byron, a one-time stunt rider and a generally dissolute and damaged character. The local council is hell-bent on evicting him from this piece of England’s green and pleasant land. They call him a “Diddicoy maggot” but he claims to be true Romany and asserts a defiant sense of entitlement. He passes his days peddling drugs, drinking himself to oblivion at any pub which will still have him and concocting ever-more fanciful stories to impress his drug-addled acolytes.
In stained singlet and massive workman’s boots, Brant Eustice gives a gruff obnoxiousness to Byron’s character. He seizes the audience’s admiration in his opening scene, downing in a gulp a raw egg and milk hangover breakfast. For the next three hours, he clomps and limps restlessly around the creaking little stage in an exhausting, explosive tour-de-force performance. Despite humanising moments when Byron interacts with his hapless little son, it is an irredeemably unpleasant character Eustice evokes.
There are moments of levity and craziness in the production but the promise that Jerusalem is a comic play is not fulfilled. It is, in fact, a somewhat turgid study of rural no-hopers.
Director Nick Fagan has rounded up a marvellous cast to embody the odd bods of Byron’s world on this St George’s Day when the Flintock Fair is revving up nearby. Council employee Wesley, played by Peter Davies, rocks up as a reluctant Morris dancer. He tries haplessly to forewarn Byron of the Council’s imminent actions against him.
Adrian Barnes presents a character of complete incongruity, the “professor”, a fading relic of erudition who is away with the Shakespearean pixies, or is he? The elegant resonance of Barnes’ voice is dramatic cultural contrast to the hoarse bellowing of poor Byron, not to mention the strident exuberances of the girls. In itself, the Professor is a puzzling character. A lost soul of sentience in a hellhole of gullible boors? He is not particularly likeable, albeit his hypnotic stoned scene is clever and one of the more humorous snatches.
But this is not a play about likeable people. It is about “dark Satanic mills” on England’s green and pleasant land; an underworld in the woods. There are plenty of them in real life and the expansion of trendy housing estates does shine a light on them just as this play asserts. A drunken down-and-out’s chaotic campsite is not compatible with a developer’s vision.
Among the good performances in Fagan’s production shines Robert Bell who is a newly risen star on the Adelaide stage. Ashley Penny is utterly arresting as the underage hanger-on, along with her rather less shrill but ever more tarty companion played by Harper Robb. Benjamin Quick, Jonathan Pole, Georgia Stockham, and Oliver Reschke adorn the stage with good characterisations along with Allison Scharber, Curtis Shipley and Alan Fitzpatrick.
The play’s symbol of beauty and damaged hope is Phaedra, the missing teenager who manifests like a dream in angel wings. In this role, Eloise Quinn Valentine opens the play singing Jerusalem in unaccompanied perfection.
And, by the way, in this era of ubiquitous Americana upon our stages, there is something deeply refreshing about hearing a cast of Australian actors seeming quite at home in the lilting intonations of the English Wiltshire accent.
It is a long play and the Little Theatre is not very warm. Rug up.
Samela Harris
When: 3 to 17 Aug
Where: Little Theatre
Bookings: trybooking.com
State Opera Of South Australia. State Opera Studio. 2 Aug 2019
Christina’s World is the second of three chamber opera productions by the State Opera of South Australia in its Lost Operas of Oz series. (The first was Boojum! and the third will be Madeline Lee.) The premise of the series is simple: opportunity to hear more opera composed by Australians, even if not on the main stage, and revival of works that for whatever reason have been infrequently performed. For some, the very existence of the series has been somewhat contentious, but for others, Boojum! and now Christina’s World have opened a whole new domain.
Composed in the early 1980s by iconic and much loved Australian Composer Ross Edwards, with libretto by Dorothy Hewett, the opera takes its inspiration from Andrew Wyeth’s famous painting of the same name, but the connection is rather slight. Knowing anything about the enigmatic painting, and this reviewer has admired it at the New York MOMA where it proudly hangs, doesn’t really give one real insight into the opera. The storyline is rather bleak and touches on a number of disturbing themes, including infanticide. In fact there is likely too much happening, and in barely an hour and with four of the five cast doubling roles, there is insufficient time to explore any of the themes in any great detail. There is no expansive narrative in which to luxuriate, there is no detailed character development to contemplate, but there is Ross Edwards’ wonderful music and there is some superb singing, particularly from (mezzo) soprano Charlotte Kelso and tenor Nicholas Jones
The plot focusses on the central character Christina and looks at key aspects of her life (and of her family) as they play out in and around the family home. It is almost a case of “if these walls could talk”, and this is perhaps the most obvious connection with Wyeth’s painting – a house that has seen much but obscures its secrets. Christina has a degenerative disease that impacts her physical mobility but she is beautiful and generous in spirit. Christina (Charlotte Kelso) has a brief relationship with and falls pregnant to Tom (Nicholas Jones). He is long gone by the time the child is born and Christina desperately ‘commits’ the child to the embrace of the ocean. (Her own mother had committed suicide by drowning herself in the sea.) Later Tom’s dead body is found – we don’t know the circumstances of his death, but we can easily imagine that Christina’s mentally ill Uncle Harry (Adam Goodburn) might have been responsible, or her father (Joshua Rowe), or even herself? The narrative darts backwards and forward between the present and when the events took place. We see it all from the perspective of the young Christina and also the middle age Christina played by the impeccable Elizabeth Campbell whose character starts and ends the play.
Edwards’ score is episodic and suits the busy segmented nature of the plot, and conductor Warwick Stengårds’ describes it in his programme notes as “dance-like” and “lyrical”. Indeed, the lyricism of the arias sung by Kelso and Jones are a highlight of the composition.
Christina Logan-Bell’s set design evoked the very essence of Wyeth’s famous painting (especially the grassy plants in the foreground which draw their inspiration from the painting’s filamentous brush strokes), and Ben Lett’s lighting design effectively includes several projections onto the walls of the house and outbuildings to underline the drama.
The twelve piece orchestra was excellent, Mitchell Berick’s work on clarinet was exceptional and Sami Butler’s percussion was precise. At times, the ensemble risked obscuring the vocalists, but this is perhaps inevitable in the tight confines of the Opera Studio.
Nicholas Cannon’s direction with an awkward story line was tight and effective.
This is a production of which State Opera can be justly proud, and the capacity audience was rightly generous in its applause and very much appreciated that Ross Edwards himself was in attendance.
Kym Clayton
When: 2 & 3 Aug
Where: State Opera Studio
Bookings: Closed
Patch Theatre. Space Theatre. 27 Jul 2019
“Take care of the light and the light will take care of you.”
That is the mysterious advice given to audience members as they file into the Space to see Zoom.
They now are in possession of strange round clear plastic objects which glow bright with dots of blue light.
As the lights dim in the theatre, the audience glows in the dark.
Expectation is palpable.
Softly lit onstage are a bed and a hanging lightshade.
Temeka Lawlor appears. This is her bedroom. She has one of those blue lights, just as the audience does.
She caresses her light and waves it in greeting to the audience. Instinctively, the audience of four to eight year-old children and their parents reciprocate with mimicked action, and the auditorium is alive with a joy of little blue lights - and curiosity.
The ensuing entertainment is a voyage of surprise and wonderment.
It is the new Patch director Geoff Cobham making his mark on children’s theatre. Cobham’s claim to fame is lighting design and here is a show about light, the beauty of light in the black box world of the theatre.
Lawlor mimes with her wee light and with lines of light and with walls of illuminated illustrations. Wild, zany linear creatures emerge and animate in a thrill of black light artistry. Lawlor, with her mostly invisible black-clad onstage partner Angus Leighton, wields light sabres and flashlights and lasers. A black and white world produces rainbows. The human being turns into a line drawing.
Ironically, for this work of sophisticated modern technology, Cobham has used the old-school picture book of Harold and the Purple Crayon for inspiration. Harold created his own world in line drawings and so does Lawlor, only speaking aloud towards the end of the show when the audience’s mass of little blue lights are called into interactive action. With Jason Sweeney’s simply wonderful music - soothing, evocative, exciting, exuberant and illustrative in its own way - she brings the 45-minute show to a disco wonderment of a climax. "How did you do it,” she asks the children as their lights all change colour. How, indeed. Impeccable technical expertise, is how.
Zoom is a simple story of a child in the dark, of imagination in a bedroom. It is an eloquence of mime and a bravura performance of computer wizardry.
Credited along with Cobham for its creation are the two performers, along with Dave Brown and Roz Hervey. The technical design is by Alex Hatchard and Chris Petridis with animation by Luku.
Applause all round.
Samela Harris
When: 3 and 10 Aug, 11am and 2 pm
Where: Space Theatre
Bookings: bass.net.au