Adelaide Repertory Theatre. Arts Theatre. 22 Jun 2017
Director Erik Strauts has taken a gamble in mounting an unknown new American play as part of The Rep’s 2017 season. The Psychic is written by long-time TV comedy writer Sam Bobrick and in 2011 it won the prestigious Edgar award for the Mystery Writers of America Best Play. The hook that lured Strauts to direct it was the sense that he could not, on first read, see where the play was taking him.
That is why the play is fun and it is why no self-respecting critic ever would give away a plot spoiler.
The play is set in present-day New York wherein outrageous gangsters and molls still roam the back streets where struggling playwright Adam Webster lives. He has a sprawling basement apartment with high arched windows which show the lower parts of people passing in the street outside. This set, designed by Patrick Beagan and superbly lit by Richard Parkhill and Jason Groves, is simply star of the show. Complete with electricity switch box, pipes and metal beams it sings with a sense of authenticity.
On hard times, the playwright not only hands out business cards handwritten in pencil but has popped a crude home-made sign in the window advertising himself as a $25 psychic. And thus does the passing parade come to his door.
Adam is played in an exaggerated vocabulary of shoulder shrugs, wide eyes and raised eyebrows by Josh van’t Padje. He’s a phoney psychic and quickly caught out. But then again, does he have a streak of the old prescience after all?
He meets gorgeous Laura Benson, the surprisingly elegant wife of nasty underworld figure, Roy Benson. He meets the ravishingly brassy moll, Rita Malone, and the crafty crook Johnny Bubbles, who wears an ostentatious diamond tie pin. And finally, as news of murdered characters gets around, he meets Detective Norris Coslow, a stereotypical whodunnit dick, absurdly clad in a bright yellow hat and coat. They are all players linked in a convoluted tale.
As the characters reveal themselves and the plot weaves its way forth, it is clear that all is unclear and nothing may be what it could or should be. Herein, it all becomes pleasantly funny.
Strauts brings out the best in his classy cast: Anita Pipprell, James Whitrow, Jessica McGaffin, James Black, and Malcolm Walton. They look classically cornball in their Beverly George costumes and they all work with ease in strong ‘Noo Yawker’ accents.
It’s a beaut production and a welcome source of laughs on a winter's night.
Samela Harris
When: 22 Jun to 1 Jul
Where: Arts Theatre
Bookings: trybooking.com
Cameron Goodall. Smartartists. Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Dunstan Playhouse. 22 Jun 2017
Almost forty years ago, Robyn Archer penned and performed her tribute to female vocalists who died too young, A Star Is Torn. But now it's the guys’ turn, requiring a hell of a guy to perform it. And it is fellow somewhat Adelaidean Cameron Goodall who got the nod. Goodall is a favourite of the square city, thanks to his collaboration with his brother, Tristan, in The Audreys (three ARIAs) and his many performances with State Theatre in the Adam Cook days, including his production of Hamlet. More recently was his Zazu in The Lion King, but everybody has to earn a crust.
Archer created a chronicle of the tragic, beginning with Hank Williams and cataloguing toward Kurt Cobain's vintage, with Elvis and Sid Vicious having recurrent roles. Ghoulish details of stabbings, gunshot, plane crashes, drownings, drug overdoses, and dubious diagnoses abound. Suicides and murders and accidents. A forty-year-old is a stayer in this crowd. Archer calls on a performer to change in a blink - to not simply play a plethora of musical styles but switch personalities while explaining a few home truths of life on the road and stage rapture.
Cameron Goodall delivered an astounding tour de force performance. These are not polished impersonations but multiple - a dozen or so - character sketches, where masterful observation and replication of key behaviours and vocal patterns conjure an astonishing verisimilitude. The width and breadth of musical style from country and western to rock and opera and folk were all on show. In a lightning change, it's no longer Mario Lanza, it's Bobby Darin! And it's everything - body stance, facial gestures, guitar style and vocal patterns. I had to gasp. The sleazy smoulder of Jim Morrison, the irreverent logic and abuse of Sid V, the laid-back rhythm of Otis Redding, it's all there and much, much more. Sam Cooke, Phil Ochs, Ricky Nelson, Jeff and Tim Buckley, Nick Drake. His Highway To Hell was demonic and precise.
Goodall was musically, vocally and mischievously supported by accordionist George Butrumlis and keyboard player Enio Pozzebon. Goodall, musos and vicariously Archer got the standing O. Double Bravo!
David Grybowski
When: 21 to 22 June
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: Closed
The Swinging Songbook of Cy Coleman. Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Space Theatre. 21 Jun 2017
Can you believe Cy Coleman garnered 19 Tony award nominations and won five between 1963 and 1997? Really incredible. His most successful partnership was with Carolyn Leigh which produced The Best Is Yet To Come.
The sirens (CYrens - get it?) open with a playful rendition of Hey Big Spender which he wrote with Dorothy Fields for the musical Sweet Charity in 1966, and a year later sung to obscene popularity in a recording by Shirley Bassey. It is belted out with formidable gusto which is a hallmark of this lively and fetching hour long show. The girls' banter seems a bit strained at the start but their notation and clarity never falters and microphones may not have been needed; and, boy, can they sing.
The ladies have come together for this show from various previous engagements, drawn by their mutual love of New York jazz and Broadway musicals. Amanda Harrison took a cab straight from the set of Wicked. Chelsea Renton-Gibb performed in Chicago and Cabaret while Melissa Langton is one of The Fabulous Singlettes, but that's only a few samples of engagements. Cy Coleman seems to have written plenty of songs for women and a great variety from bolshie women to missing-my-man songs. Everybody Today Is Turnin' On is a highlight, introduced as arising from Cy's palling around with Hugh Hefner and all that goes with it, and a wry number from a worn-out twenty-seven-year-old hooker doing the math on how many times she's been doing it. Renton-Gibb's bare legs did an act all on their own for most the show but they were great props for this little number.
Never a dull moment, fantastic singing and a great song catalog. Vat else do you vant?
David Grybowski
When: 21 to 22 Jun
Where: Space Theatre
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Meow Meow. Her Majesty’s Theatre. 18 Jun 2017
I have seen Meow Meow many times now and I'll go again for sure. While she's hurrying some man to fetch her reading glasses, or having another carry her prop sack, don't you just want to run up on stage and scratch her back, just to have her throw her head back and purr? Some of the schtick is still stuck on, like legging it over the audience with banter, making do with a personal fog machine or EXIT sign for lighting, and the tear-away copiously layered show biz gowns, but what's new - what is extraordinarily fabulous - is that she created this show just for little old Adelaide and the ghosts of Her Majesty's. True, she has tributed other theatres in other cities, so I am overwhelmed with gratitude that Adelaide also gets the Meow Meow treatment, and to have been in the presence of this rarity.
Meow Meow is a pretty attractive persona, but so is Melissa Madden Gray, a consummate entertainer and the creator of this fascinating feline. Gray did her research, citing a couple of city theatre war horses and the Performing Arts Collections as sources. She rounded out an historical narrative, starting with a painted backdrop (original design - Andrea Lauer) of the Tivoli Theatre of 1913, a prior name for Her Maj. A few recorded choruses of the traditional shanty, Bound For South Australia eventually saw the Tivoli disappear into the flyspace to reveal an orchestra lead by musical director Jherek Bischoff. A prow of a working boat of the colonial days decorated centre stage. All these colonial props were heartening, whereas the songs, also created by Meow Gray in collaboration with composers Bischoff and August von Trapp (could he really be the great grandson of the Captain and Agatha?), were fresh and lively and showed off Meow Meow's lush and variable voice. More of Lauer's design comprised slung parachute silk lit up with fairy lights to give the impression of ice for a tale and a song about the Terra and Erebus Antarctic expeditions, with hints to South Australian Antarctic explorers Wilkins and Mawson. Meow Gray, like myself, identified Adelaide as one of those end-of-the-earth places, and conjured a sense of adventure in constructing a theatre - making normal in an extraordinary remoteness.
A line-up of mainly pre-pubescent kids dressed firstly like Harlequins and later like the von Trapps formed up a show-stealing chorus. Each had their own style of star-waving and one young'un especially had other things on his mind. While he garnered peals of laughter in the final songs of the show, Meow Meow generously went along with the flow. Not enough time to learn all her lines - and where else could she do this show? Well, that was no problem either.
A superbly and richly researched script by Gray given over to Meow Meow for a full blown cabaret performance. Thanks for this gift. Bravo!
David Grybowski
When: 17 to 18 Jun
Where: Her Majesty's Theatre
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Groove Sessions. Dunstan Playhouse. 17 Jun 2017
A cappella groups are presented with the unique challenge of harnessing the power of voice, singing alone in harmony, without the support of instrumentation. There are many groups who achieve this, but The Idea of North is somewhat different in two significant respects. Firstly, a degree of serious, studied musicianship in their work surpassing other groups of repute. Secondly, a capacity to let humour play a role in their vocalised instrumentation; letting the artistry lead any comic novelty factor.
Bringing Japan’s Kaichiro Kitamura, greatly admired by the company, on as guest artist allowed The Idea of North to give full expression to both musicianship and technical artistry in pursuit of an emotionally driven narrative, discovering new levels of textural shade and depth in every single song.
This unity is made superbly clear as Kitamura takes the stage solo, fully demonstrating the sublime, profound complexity of his craft. Kitamura does not merely imitate the sound of a musical instrument. He expresses complex tonality as well. His slice of life in Japan begins with a bus in transit to an airport and a plane taking off, offering a three dimensional and emotive sensibility not encountered in performance before.
Add this approach to song, and you have something a little more significant than just being pitch-perfect. You hear four voices assuredly offering up groove with beautiful strains of jazz, dashes of funk and medleys of bygone eras.
More extraordinarily, is this group’s creation of, at times, lingering dualities of tone in between harmonic structures defying belief because you just know those notes, that expression, is beyond the expected.
Reaching warm and deeply into your ears and your contemplative heart.
David O’Brien
When: 17 Jun
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: Closed