The Life And Music Of Eileen Joyce. Julia Hastings. The Lab, Queen’s Theatre. 4 Mar 2018
“God help me. How do I get out of this mess?” Having intoned these pitiable words, Julia Hastings slumps over the piano and her left hands starts the slow introduction to Frédéric Chopin’s painfully beautiful Berceuse. Hastings could not have chosen a more poignant musical selection to illustrate the anguish and deep sorrow that Eileen Joyce felt as she faced the inevitable decision to end her career as concert pianist and reflected on the sum of her life. The Berceuse is a lullaby, and Joyce was probably not a model parent, having sent her three-year old son to boarding school so that she could concentrate on her career as a concert pianist. But we should be careful not to judge. Exceptional people do extraordinary things.
Hastings’ show is a tribute to the life of one of Australia’s most famous pianists who had a celebrated international career from the 1930s to the 1960s. Through a series of vignettes, we are given a teasing glimpse into the life of Joyce, from her arrival in Germany as a talented student through to other key events in her life, both musical and personal. Playing Joyce, Hastings delivers a carefully constructed spoken narrative that she has researched and written herself, and underlines it with musical selections that she plays at the piano. Occasionally there are voice overs that provide the opportunity to move from soliloquy to dialogue.
Hastings becomes Joyce. She dresses and wears her hair like Joyce, and her pianism is in some respects reminiscent of Joyce’s style (when compared to some of what can be heard on the recently released Eloquence/Decca studio recordings of Joyce.). The whole event is quite delightful, and transporting. My only criticism is that it is too short, even though it does play for an hour. There is the potential for more material to be introduced and for deeper exploration of Joyce’s life.
Hastings is a talented pianist, writer, and actor. Let’s hope she reworks this show and brings it back to the next Fringe. It deserves to be seen again, and again.
Kym Clayton
4 stars
When: Closed
Where: The Lab, Queen’s Theatre
Bookings: Closed
parker and mr french. The Grand Ballroom at Hilton Adelaide. 2 Mar 2018
Stunning a packed house at the Grand Ballroom, the four handsome singers of the California Crooners Club are polished and deliver a solid performance; albeit, 20-minutes late to start.
Led by Adelaide’s home-grown star of stage and screen, Hugh Sheridan, the group at this year’s Fringe features new members TSoul and Connor Boatman – both from the United States. Returning for his third Fringe is the group’s soulful South African, Emile Welman.
Sheridan plays to his home crowd well, littering his performance with local references packed with funny quips. The entire group performs much of show from the floor, dancing and getting up and close with the audience.
With a set-list ranging from the 50s to today, the audience is treated to near flawless vocals. A highlight is the wonderful mash-up of Frank Sinatra’s New York, New York and Jay Z’s Empire State of Mind.
There are moments where the vocals sound tired, but this does not detract from the overall outstanding performance. The tight harmonies thrill the audience. In this group, Sheridan has found an incredible balance with each voice perfectly complimenting the others.
Newly minted Club members TSoul and Boatman are very impressive. Boatman, dubbed “Millennial Spice” by Sheridan, has a subtle tenor voice and provides a pleasant contrast to the heavier sounds.
Sheridan’s new song Dreamers is also a hit with the audience.
Not one moment of the performance leaves the audience wanting.
Alex Bond
4.5 stars
When: 2 to 12 Mar
Where: The Grand Ballroom at Hilton Adelaide
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
House of Sand. 2 Mar 2018
Director Charles Sanders is spot on when he describes his sister’s work as having “the logic of memory, dream and emotion.”
Pedal offers an extraordinarily striking range of contrasting images in movement and colour presenting themselves as a sort of tale peddled to the audience, as Eliza Sanders ‘cycles’ from one phrase of choreography and word song to the next.
It’s quite captivating once you surrender to it. There’s a sense this tale is one of a journey to another country, or another place within the self. Sanders is robed in a delightful multi coloured one piece costume, the set comprising a bare stage crossed by two long washing lines with pegs, suitcase and a small mirror representing water, rules the space. Sanders fills it with known contemporary moves, some highly exotic, some fabulist in construction.
Words repeated become at one with repeated actions. Beautiful songs wistfully glide aside the choreography. Moments addressed to the audience seem half an appeal to engage us directly and half to shift the direction of the piece, as if something stronger is needed to peddle the audience successfully.
A magnificent Fringe experience in the true spirit of the term.
David O’Brien
4 stars
When: 28 Feb to 17 Mar
Where: Holden Street Theatres, The Studio
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Empyrean at Gluttony. 3 Mar 2018
The name says it all: ‘fuego’ is Spanish for ‘fire’, and, well…. ‘carnal’ needs no explanation. Put them together and you have a fiery (literally) and hot (in the sensual sense) display of circus skills that have you on the edge of your seat for an hour. Take away the fire, and there are probably better circus acts, but add the fire and it’s altogether something else. All of a sudden the bizarre seems almost unbelievable: not just fire blowing, but swallowing it; aerial gymnastics while on fire, and then a balletic landing on ice; sword swallowing, but ones that glow in the dark, even while they are deep within your torso; playing up tempo anthems on the bagpipes which shoot burst of fire on beat; fire sticks blazing at both ends being flung about and twirled around contorting bodies with seeming abandon.
The question on everyone’s lips is: how do the performers NOT get burned? It’s madness!
But it’s not all shock and awe. There’s humour as well, with the almost obligatory “let’s drag a poor unsuspecting punter up from the audience and embarrass him”. Such routines can be tiresome, but not this one. It was sharp, well-constructed, and, like good pantomime, was riddled with sexual innuendo that sailed completely over the heads of the kids in the audience but had the adults roaring with laughter; no doubt then left with the inevitable follow up questions from their sons and daughters!
The show is well choreographed, and the acts fit seamlessly together. The hour passes very quickly almost leaving you wanting more, but not quite. The show finishes with a traditional parade of the cast, rather than a fiery up-beat bang!
Recommended for all the family!
Kym Clayton
3.5 stars
When: 3 to 18 Mar
Where: Empyrean at Gluttony
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Adelaide Festival. Ex Machina. Her Majesty’s Theatre.
The footage of early Russian space missions is grainy old black and white as seen from the porthole of Robert Lepage’s Far Side of the Moon.
There’s Soyuz, Luna, Saluyet, and Sputnik.
Actor Yves Jacques writes large upon the blackboard wall the name of Tsiolkovsky, the father of Russian rocketry, for the audience to ponder. The space program is more vanity than science, he asserts. It is the narcissism of the mortals who see the moon above them as a mirror. They probe space. They send messages into the mysterious infinity.
SETI is the computer reach of everyman to find and make contact with extra-terrestrial life. A puppet spaceman is seen in and through the portholes which open onto the void of space. He’s a little white space walker, a man probing the moon and yonder.
But, suggests the play’s creator, perhaps the sacred place should be the far side of the moon where instead of looking at himself, man would look into the great void.
Thus arrives the name of this renowned piece of Ex Machina Theatre.
And from the artistry of the marvellous French Canadian actor, Jacques, emerge the characters of an earthly story. Two estranged brothers are brought together by the death of their mother. Andre is a successful TV weather man. Phillipe is the thinker and dreamer, the space wonderer, but a man with an unlucky streak. He enters the SETI competition, to make a short film to be sent into space. He also gets all his timing wrong when he makes his own first air trip to a conference. His brother, Andre, is the busy one, too busy to take care of his mother’s fish, his mother’s last living thing. Indeed, he was too busy for much of the clean-out of her apartment and is left with the final chore of taking out the shelves which the brothers used to stay apart from each other in their bedroom. It gets stuck in the lift, another symbolic void in the story, stranding him against the clock. He telephones angrily for support and for someone else to tell work why he is going to be a no-show.
This and the many scenes of the play are delivered via the opening and closing of a wall of sliding panels which cover the lower quarter of the stage. The washing machine throbs there and the porthole opens there. A lecture theatre materialises from there. An apartment materialises there with that poor fish swimming in its own black void. The actor moves between characters, with an ironing board as his primary prop becoming all things, most spectacularly, a motor scooter zooming past a projected landscape to Quebec’s Plains of Abraham whence a war with the English was lost.
The low-set staging of Far Side of the Moon is fascinating to behold. The solitary actor segues between characters, including his mother and a doctor, with practised ease. It is two hours of hard work for the actor, his only companion the puppeteer, Eric Leblanc, out of sight. He, himself, must fly through the porthole into space. It is an extraordinary moment. But, none more so than the climax of the production when he is seen as a weightless man floating upside down in space. It is quite spectacular and it’s all achieved through mirrors.
Samela Harris
When: 2 to 7 Mar
Where: Her Majesty’s Theatre
Bookings: bass.net.au