The Metropolitan Musical Theatre Company of SA Inc. The Arts Theatre. 12 Oct 2017
Blend the solid production standards of The Met with an evergreen lots-of-fun musical and you have a winning night of exuberant delight.
For the new generation, Bye Bye Birdie explains the source of a string of familiar popular songs - A Lot of Livin to Do, Kids, Put on a Happy Face, How Lovely to be a Woman… And it brings to life the rockin’ 50s with its full skirts and Elvis mania.
Birdie is based on the phenomenon of super-star Elvis Presley being drafted into the army in 1959. It’s the rock icon's grand farewell as conceived by his hapless manager, Albert Peterson. The idea is that an ardent teen fan is to be chosen as recipient of the singer’s last kiss. The whole show, from Michael Stewart’s book with lyrics by Lee Adams to Charles Strouse’s music, is a good-natured spoof and a send-up of teen hysteria; what turns it on and what oldies make of it. It is also a comic love story of a would-be English teacher and oppressed mother’s boy finding himself out of his depth as nothing goes to plan. That these ingredients are well wrought is the secret to the enduring popularity of the show - and, perchance, the show’s creators would be well pleased with The Met’s presentation.
It’s not Broadway but director Gordon Combes has delivered a production which is slick and clean and tight. Carmel Vistoli’s choreography is simple and good, the ensemble work is tight, the harmonies terrific, the costumes bright, the stage design sharp, the lighting spot-on, Paul Sinkinson’s orchestra is sweet on the ear and the timing and the spirit of the show is energetic, hammy and effervescent. If one had to insist on finding flaws, one may have found a couple of slow scene cues on opening night - but hardly worth noticing.
The principals all hold their own and hit the right notes. Giulia-Giorgina Condoluci is ardent, avid and athletic as Kim, the number one fan, with Russell Ford very strong as her long suffering father, doing vocal justice to Ed Sullivan and Kids, and sweetly supported by Di Mason as the wife and Harry Ince as the kid brother. Matthew Pugsley slicks his hair and struts his stuff in sly Elvis style as Conrad Birdie and when he opens his mouth and sings his main songs, Honestly Sincere and One Last Kiss, he turns on his true star quality.
Celeste Barone works relentlessly hard in her huge and demanding role as Rosie, Peterson’s devoted assistant and wannabe wife. With a voice stronger than melodic but with masses of chutzpa and lots of pizazz in her dance, it’s a winning performance. Jenny Bowen, rugged up in scruffy furs as Peterson’s overbearing mother, has all the best lines and martyr-mother gags and gets the best laughs of the night.
But the night belongs to her nerve-racked boy, Albert Peterson. His is a huge song and dance role with endless reactive comic shtick. It carries the show. And Paul Rodda, always a delight to watch in dance, hits all the right notes in the score and, from fool to misty-eyed romantic, he delivers the showbiz goods in his best performance to date.
Samela Harris
When: 12 to 21 Oct
Where: The Arts Theatre
Bookings: metmusicals.com.au
WRITERS NOTE: While I work with Paul Rodda as a senior critic on this website, my ethic is “no fear or favour”. Had Rodda’s performance been less than excellent, I would have said so or excluded his name from the review.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Paul Rodda who plays the role of Albert Peterson in this production is the Editor and Creative Director of the Barefoot Review.
Windmill Theatre Company. The Space. Adelaide Festival Centre. 11 Oct 2017
He’s back - and not a moment too soon.
The Big Bad Wolf is one of wonderful Windmill’s most interesting and endearing characters and his show returns in perfect time to surprise a new brood of children.
He might be big but as writer Matthew Whittet has created him, this bad wolf is a twisted fairy tale character who is utterly vulnerable. His big bad canine teeth have given him a speech impediment and no, frightened white bunny darting behind that tree, he does not to eat rabbit. He’s a “vegemetarian”. Not only but also, he’s a poet and terrible a disappointment to his ferocious wolf mother.
So he lives alone. All he wants is a friend.
Heidi Hood wants one, too. She’s a tiny woman, dressed in Red Riding Hood red and she lives in a meltingly cute doll’s house cottage in the woods, little dormer bedroom upstairs and fussy, homely downstairs dominated by her talking armchair. She’s nervous so the house is equipped with wolf alarms.
If Patrick Graham is adorable as the marginalised wolf, twinkle-toed Emma J. Hawkins is utterly sublime as Heidi. Her light-footed athleticism is a beauty to behold. The children are bewitched.
Heidi is as accomplished as she is lonely and if she wins just one more award, a planet will be named after her. A poetry competition is announced but the dancing champion is not so good with rhyme. Until she meets Wolfie.
And thus unfolds a tale of friendships against type, of words and love and loyalty.
Matilda Bailey completes the cast and weaves the story together playing the narrator, Grandmaster Wolf, Wolfie’s first friend, the Flea from Cincinnati, Heidi's talking couch, and a TV reporter. She pops out in assorted costumes from Jonathon Oxlade’s terrific woodland set. Wolfie’s towering talking tree is standout, literally.
This gem of a revival, directed by Rosemary Myers, has a short season at The Space and should not be missed.
Samela Harris
When: 11 to 21 Oct
Where: The Space
Bookings: bass.net.au
The Bakehouse Theatre. 7 Oct 2017
Atlanta is very finely tuned, extremely emotive, delicately balanced writing by Joanna Murray-Smith. An exceptional cast is needed to play the extraordinary range of spirit, sensitivity, love and pain Murray-Smith explores through a group of friends and their interrelationships. Murray-Smith utilises young Atlanta as the focal lens we perceive them through, balanced against how Atlanta sees herself, her world. Reality and fantasy.
Director, Joh Hartog has an exceptional cast. Hartog has fashioned from them a production reaching to the very depths of human frailty – hope, passion, love, and confusion of the purest white hot honesty – without a false note played. It flows with a hypnotising ease, spun out from Atlanta’s linking monologues and thoughtful rumination.
Tammy Boden’s set married with Stephen Dean’s lighting perfectly enhances the spiritual sense of easy flowing time the production is graced with. Boden’s sea colour geometric floor and back wall, with rope criss-crossed wooden frame stage right is wonderfully ethereal, supporting Deans’s effective use of spot lighting.
Karen Burns anchors the production as Atlanta in what is rightly called a career defining performance. Her mix of assurance, vulnerability, and strength tempered with timidity is all embracing of the audience. Atalanta’s tales of her family history, blended with reflections on her friendship circle and relationship with Alex (Adam Carter) are a whole world, both real and imagined, in which she seeks to define herself and protect herself.
Her friends are offered to us in their own right; the ‘item’, Grace (Stephanie Clapp) and Jack (Patrick Clements), Jess (Claire Mansfield), Gabe (Jack Evans) and Alex. Atlanta shares each of them with us. She explores what it is about them, and her relationship with them, that fascinates or confuses her. Bit by bit, her fears and insecurities dig cracks in her vulnerable psyche. She pushes her self closer then away from them.
Atlanta is so very much about the unique beauty and reality of being human. No more powerfully is this realised than in Alex’s powerful monologue offered as a riposte to Atlanta pushing him away. Carter delivers with the equal intensity Burns gives in her performance. How would he live without her? After her. What would be equal? An easier, less complicated being?
This question is asked by all the characters of their lives. Questions about their needs, their sense of self, their notion of real self, imagined self and the world they live in or see reflected in media.
Atlanta is an experience of tears, of soulfulness, of healing, of love. It is a magnificent testament to being human, and the need to share its experience more deeply with each other.
David O’Brien
When: 5 to 21 Oct
Where: The Bakehouse Theatre
Bookings: bakehousetheatre.com
.
Matt Byrne Media. Holden Street Theatres. 4 Oct 2017
Men Behaving Badly. British ‘90s comedy sitcom. You may have heard of it. Two politically incorrect blokes ‘lad’ their way through life, dragging long suffering girlfriends along for the ride. You may have seen a few episodes. Or you’d be a huge fan, own the complete series DVD collected box set and binge watch it alone with beer ‘n’ chips on sad lonely weekends.
Director Matt Byrne took on the quixotic challenge of staging four ‘episodes’ of writer Simon Nye’s series, with a video style intro per episode enhancing the televisual origins of the writing and characters.
The result is strange, but intriguing.
Rohan Watts as Gary and Brendan Cooney as Tony are a sharp, well paired set of characterisations. They, and the whole cast, rip along with exquisite comic timing. Watts’ Gary is a technically perfect all out loud and lubricous lad about town with bizarrely, a steady job. Cooney’s Tony matches up with an equally excellent loose and laid back support performance, exhibiting a generous but restrained dose of 70s easy going spirit with a whiff of the 60s.
Partnering the lads, Georgia Stockham as Gary’s girl Dorothy and Cheryl Douglas as Tony’s girl Deborah match Watts and Cooney for excellence. Stockham’s a fabulous take no prisoners performer, while Douglas offers a more demure, laid back, considered characterisation.
Boys will be boys, girls get their revenge and all’s well with a solid set of laughs to be had. Writer Nye’s 90s England is one confused place for a lad, and he plays that up fully.
Byrne’s production is an incredibly busy one. The action jumps from one room to another. Stage hands are constantly hard at work transforming the space into Gary’s bedroom, lounge to Tony’s bedroom, to Deborah’s bedroom, flat and then there’s the Crown Hotel. This doesn’t detract too much from the performance. Byrnes’s focus on trying to emulate the speed and sensibility of the shot to shot nature of television, ambitious as it is, it just manages to stay on the right side of the audience.
It is a strange production, referencing a host of comic traditions and styles from the Carry On films onwards with a dash of vaudeville thrown in. The material is of its time, past the use by date culturally but nonetheless on its surface a worthy workout for actors wanting to push their technical skills to the limit.
David O’Brien
When: 3 to 21 Oct
Where: Holden Street Theatres, The Studio
Bookings: Holden Street Theatres 8262 4906
OzAsia Festival. W!ld Rice Theatre. Dunstan Playhouse. 28 and 29 Sep 2017
Hotel
The jewel in the crown of the OzAsia Festival shines very brightly indeed.
The Singapore company W!ld Rice Theatre, with playwrights Alfian Sa’at and Marcia Vanderstraaten, have devised a Singaporean history work ingeniously centred on what happens over a century in a single room in a grand old hotel. It is unnamed but fairly clearly it is Raffles.
The play's five hours embrace eleven episodes: small plays representing different situations and characters from 1915 to 2015. Incredibly, eleven languages are spoken through the eleven scenes, English predominates and the others are translated on sur-title screens.
Hotel staff function as the chorus introducing the show with a lovely piece choreographed around rolling suitcases. Thereafter, dressed as the hotel valets and maids, they define the scene changes and complement the history symbols which also are represented in black and white photo images on the set.
The production opens with a colonial plantation owner on honeymoon with his Eurasian bride. The audience cringes at his imperialistic sexism. Ten years later in the roaring 20s, Malaysian Chinese cousins, one a hotel laundry worker and the other a servant of the rich Mrs Wong, are reunited in the room and mock the class system by parading around in Mrs Wong’s frocks. Their merriment is shattered by the visit of an Irish nun on the lookout for girls sold into service and the audience again cringes in sorrow. Between scenes, the hotel staff converge on the room cleaning traces of former guests, as indeed hotel staff are meant to do.
The 30s brings an oddly wacky scene with a shrill Indian spiritualist and very strange and spooky séance. A decade later it is Japanese occupation and a heart-rending scene with a Japanese captain and his Malay lover. So sad. But Wild Rice and its large cast, whipping from costume to costume and character to character, lift the mood to Bollywood frivolity with an Indian star who dares to want to make a “realistic” movie. This is the 1950s and the characters are over the top, the script is comical and the dancing is superb. Come 1965, the sexual revolution is suggested as the hotel room service manager woos the TV repairman. Their doomed relationship is eclipsed, however, by Lee Kuan Yew on the broken TV reading the announcement of Singapore's separation from Malaysia.
Already the company has spread its wings in the array of characters the actors portray. They’re a fine, strong and versatile cast, some of them trained in Australia. They are racially diverse and linguistically athletic. Directed by Ivan Heng and Glen Goei, they are the wondrous ethnic blend which is Singapore.
Hotel II
In the 1970s there was Singapore’s famous Bugis Street, the world headquarters for gorgeous drag queens and trannies. Hotel opens with an American army vet bringing two Bugis St beauties back to his room along with a stash of first class coke and acid. He trashes himself on the drugs and passes out leaving the girls to their own devices. The W!ld Rice Theatre actors capture their fantastic feyness to a tee. Monika takes the man's money and leaves her friend discovering the effects of LSD. And thus is the scene a wild acid trip with giant penises and a sparkling angel mother laying on a guilt trip. The scene becomes colourful high action and fun with a poignant edge.
In 1985, the story of 1945 is recalled. This scene of the Japanese businessman tracing the woman in a photo given to him by his father is profoundly moving and superbly performed. It attempts to tie up the loose ends of life.
Indeed, as the scenes of Hotel II evolve, it becomes clear that the play is intent on deeper themes within the comings and goings of the hotel guests.
Then, again, sensitive issues can get a light touch. Racial tensions, for instance, are delivered with colourful and comic treatment with the hotel room now, in 1995, occupied by a bride and her helpers changing from the wedding dress. She has the most wonderfully strict and intractable mother and a bit of a loopy new Indian mother-in-law and the big issue is which national dress she should wear. It’s a funny scene which also is not funny.
By 2005, Islam has become a more emphatically expressed force in largely Chinese Singapore. A Muslim woman, returning to the room in which she had such a delightful time as a girl in 1955 when Islam was less adamant, finds her now stricter Islamic family is seen as a security risk. Singapore has changed and so have they. And of course, the world at large is changing too and this remarkable play mirrors that.
The show wraps up with a beautifully dignified grand 2015 scene in which the hotel management and its new Middle Eastern owners are at a loss dealing with a long term guest who is on his deathbed. This wonderful man puts life, class, immigration and compassion into place.
Again, there are superb performances from the large ensemble cast as they leap from principal character to chorus and back again. These are experienced actors of strikingly different backgrounds, multilingual and, let it be said, pretty good dancers, and with the quietly changing character of the hotel room and the artful marriage of relevance with sheer ingeniousness, they bring us a five star Hotel experience.
Samela Harris
When: 28 and 29 Sep
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: Closed