The Morning After: Performing arts in Australia

J. R. Ward: Writing like a motherfucker... again.

2012-01-10T17:24:00.006+11:00

Gotta love J. R. Ward, the self-proclaimed “best-selling paranormal romance author.” If there is ever a prize given for the creative and gratuitous use of “like a motherfucker,” my money would be on her.

Lover Mine, the 8th book in the Black Dagger Brotherhood series, has the following usages:

Lash “fed like a motherfucker.”

Qhuinn “cursed like a motherfucker.”

Qhuinn, later, is reported to be “shaking like a motherfucker.”

A ‘lesser’ is yanked into an arch that would leave his spine “humming like a motherfucker.” Youch!

And poor Tohr... “hurt like a motherfucker” just to look at a place.

At a mating ceremony, John “was smiling like a motherfucker.” As you do.

Prior to Lover Mine, Ward’s creations typically only ever ‘smiled’ or ‘grinned’ like motherfuckers.

In the just published 9th book of the series, Lover Unleashed, Ward cuts the like-a-mofo tally to just two, including another “shakin’ like a”... but there’s also my favourite to date. The King reports that the Lessening Society is “recruiting like a motherfucker.”

Nice one, J. R.

Reminds me of good old fashioned NSW Labor branch-stacking.

Now I’m gonna listen to ‘Pretty as a Swastika’ by Marilyn Manson.

BTW, JR is pretty good with her sure as shits too.

Urban Display Suite: The Real Estate Musical Spectacular

2012-01-10T16:52:00.003+11:00

You do what you’ve got to do to survive. I know that. I’ve seen Michael Dalley singin’ Christmas Carols at Southland. But that was a million years ago in the nineties... if I can quote Beckett.

Compromise can be good for the wallet, but it’s rarely good for the soul. And it’s often not a good career move. When Eddie Perfect made the transition from the fringes to the main stage his material, if anything, became more hardcore, more strident and more spectacularly offensive. Rather than compromise, success brought out the very worst in him. And thank god for that!

The cast, minus Dalley, photo: Mike Emmett

In Dalley’s latest venture, which has already played to full houses at fortyfivedownstairs in Melbourne and the Adelaide Cabaret Festival, the sweet and sour man allows a softer side out. One part Perfect, one part Doris Day, Dalley lets the sugar overwhelm the medicine in this commercially palatable and flavour-enhanced number about the modern Australian obsession with Real Estate.

In taking on soft targets -- the tastelessness of the nouveau riche, the zeitgeist-hunting and zeitgeist-killing suburban-and-Coke crowd who seek out and then root out all the character in a city -- Dalley has created an undoubted crowd-pleaser. But Urban Display Suite is looser and far less substantial than the works that preceded it, especially Vaudeville X and Intimate Apparel. UDS has more heart -- perhaps -- but it is way less sharp.

It might seem dumb to demand some consistency and more careful dramaturgy in a 15-song, 65-minute cabaret show, but... it is playing in a mainstage theatre rather than a loft in a pub and we have come to expect a lot (and a lot more) from Dalley and his High Performance Company. Let’s not forget that this is the third outing of a show which has been kicking around since May in one form or another and that tickets are fifty bucks a pop... not $23-28 at fortyfivedownstairs. Expectations are heightened. Mine were high. And mine were not met.

I wanted satire, I got the latter day equivalent of Beautiful People by Aussie Crawl.

Urban Display Suite: The Real Estate Musical Spectacular by Michael Dalley. High Performance Company. At the MTC Lawler Studio, Southbank, January 3. Tickets $49.90. Bookings: 03 8668 0800 or mtc.com.au/uds.aspx. Season ends January 21.

Art Nation: late, lamentable...

2011-11-29T16:48:00.008+11:00

I watched the final ep of Art Nation on the ABC on Sunday avo to pay my respects I suppose. “At the setting of the sun” and all that jazz. And also to see Antoinette Halloran sing a little bit o’ Tosca.

Last rites... (Photograph: Serafini)

Art Nation’s not a show I’ve watched religiously. Or even desultorily. Sunday’s farewell ep was a reminder why I didn’t bother with it. It reminded me of the lazy Sunday evening news bulletins of ABC TV circa James Dibble... that’s Lazy Sundays rather than lazy news bulletins I hasten to add! Anyone remember Weekend Magazine?
“the people making these stories don’t actually know what’s interesting about them...”
The best one could say about the final line-up for Art Nation is that a couple of the segments might make the Stateline cut. Maybe. Segment after segment I thought: the people making these stories don’t actually know what’s interesting about them. About their subject.

Now, I don’t doubt that the team was overworked and under-resourced and working to impossible deadlines. But everything seemed so half-arsed. The segment on Tim Storrier was the pick of the bunch. I’ve known the man’s work for decades, and was fascinated to see and hear him for the first time. But when it ended, I imagined I had seen a video audition by the producer for a job on Australian Stories. With half an hour available, even the most meandering of stories can reach a kind of critical mass. But five minutes, it was hardly even scattergun.

But the clincher for me -- the moment when sadness at the loss of an arts show turned to “let’s scuttle this wreck” scorn -- was the finale. Had the team played more than the final minute of Vissi d’arte, Fenella Kernebone might’ve worked out how to pronounce the fucker -- it’s not Fizzy D. Art like some comic book rapper -- and we could’ve actually heard the bit where Floria tells us she has lived for art... which, surely, was the point of playing it. On top of all that, it was an inexcusably harsh and ugly recording.

Kernebone piss-pronounciation reminded me of a Radio National presenter renowned for his Molly Meldrum-like approach to the language. Anyone remember Wagner’s “chronic” (instead of chromatic) harmony? Pisser!

Clybourne Park: The long and the short of it...

2011-09-26T11:03:00.008+10:00

Hands up if you noticed...

Kate Herbert’s (rave) review of Clybourne Park was posted on the Herald Sun web site on the afternoon of the 23rd, 15 hours after the first performance ended. It’s here. [UPDATE: the link is still live and current, according to the Herald Sun's entertainment/arts home page, but is going nowhere at the moment.]

Kate’s review is the print edition of the Herald Sun today, on page 58.

Now, according to newstext.com, the print review clocks in at 260 words. From experience, newstext counts headers, footers and captions. So it might be 20-40 words less than that. Fair enough. Par for the course in the 2010s, more’s the pity.

But, interestingly, the on-line review (without captions &c.) is a tad over 300 words. So, bully for the Herald Sun. Especially now, when Age reviews tend not to be published on-line in a timely way... if at all.

Meanwhile, at the Australian, a one hundred word teaser of my review of Clybourne Park was on the Oz’s web-site late on Friday morning. (I beat Kate by two hours!) It looked like this:

click on the image to enlarge

And, like Kate’s review, mine appears in the print edition today. It’s on page 16 and clocks in (according to newstext) at 487 words. (I reckon it’s closer to 425 words of actual content.) It’s also on-line, here.

And, hey, a big shout out to the MTC for putting on another great production of an unusually interesting and provocative play. And to Peter Evans and his cast for a truly kick-arse ensemble performance. Credit where it’s due.

UPDATE: Kate Herbert has started a blog, it’s here. You’ll find her full Clybourne Park review there.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Cameron Woodhead’s review for the Age is now on-line at his blog, Behind the Critical Curtain.

A couple more Bangarra pics by Jeff Busby

2011-09-19T15:56:00.006+10:00

Ella Havelka and Jhuny-Boy Borja in About by Elma Kris. (On Friday night, Jasmin Shepard partnered Borja.) Note the twisted wire design in this section by Jacob Nash.

In the abstract and evocative Totem section of ID by Stephen Page, the women removed the dead? male spirits? from the barky husks of the trees and replaced them with themselves. (Costume design by Emma Howell.)

Production photographs by Jeff Busby, click on the images to see full size. Images used with permission.

Belong -- a double bill by Bangarra Dance Theatre

2011-09-17T05:08:00.007+10:00

So, if I told you there was a ‘death in custody’ scene in ID, Stephen Page’s new work for Bangarra, would you be put off? Chances are, the only people who would avoid ID on the strength of that little spoiler are the uninitiated... those not familiar with Bangarra and its artistic director of 19-and-a-bit years.

On the stage, yes, of course that scene is harrowing. But it’s not mawkish or manipulative. Indeed, the dead man’s rigor mortis is a magical transformation, like something out of Ovid. Before our eyes, this blackfella martyr (played by Patrick Thaiday last night, Waangenga Blanco alternates in the role) metamorphs into a gnarly, petrified tree.

Patrick Thaiday in ID (Photograph: Jeff Busby)

It’s an oddly thrilling moment, it lights up the mind while piercing the heart.

It’s not the first such moment in Page’s career as a dance maker, nor will it be the last. It’s merely the latest highlight. Add it to Ochres, his breakthrough piece for Bangarra in the early 1990s, and Alchemy for the Australian Ballet in 1996. (I regard Alchemy as a more significant milestone than Rites, which he created the following year on the joint forces of Bangarra and the Australian Ballet.) Page -- as a dancer -- was also part of the legendary, game-changing AIDT tour of 1989 which blazed the trail for the creation of Bangarra. I remember comin’ out of the Melbourne Town Hall awed.

Another moment in ID also had me gasping. It was as if Leah Purcell’s Black Chicks Talking had been condensed into a single conga line. Five dancers: two women, one man, two more women. The man has the number ‘1’ painted on his chest. The others turn to reveal their ‘fractions’ which are painted on their backs. Instantly, we realise his 1 = full-blood.

Before reading Purcell’s book, I’d never encountered the word quadroon. (I’m kinda shocked, I’ve gotta say, that my spell checker doesn’t blink when I type the word.) I guess that makes Yolande Brown a hexadecaroon, cos she’s the one with 1/16 painted on her back. There’s an eighth, a twelfth and a fourteenth behind her. I immediately thought of Purcell asking the Tassie beauty queen (whose name escapes me just now) point blank: which part of you is Aboriginal today?

The United Colours of Bangarra (Jeff Busby)

ID, in case you haven’t already twigged, is about identity. But -- like Purcell’s TV show and the book and stage show spin-offs -- it’s not specifically for white audiences. It’s a representation of what Page calls the “internal debate amongst Aboriginal people.” About the “thousand dialects” in his culture.

Perhaps inevitably, the piece is unintegrated and sometimes clunky. Even jarring. But it begins incredibly strongly (with the centrifugal dancing of Daniel Riley McKinley) and is never less than engaging... especially when the dancers are blacking their faces with Vegemite! (!!)

Just as the success of the Australian Ballet is underwritten by the quality of the Australian Ballet School, Bangarra is underwritten by NAISDA and to a lesser extent by the ACPA. The quality of the first year dancers in the company is astounding, while the mid-rank and established dancers continue to evolve. Hell... Yolande Brown actually stole a scene from Patrick Thaiday in Elma Kris’s new work About. I’m pretty sure that’s never happened before! (When Thaiday’s on stage, you tend not to blink for fear of missing something.)

About by Elma Kris (Photograph: Jeff Busby)

Elsewhere Ella Havelka gave Deborah Brown (another of the company’s stars) a good run for her money. And if Waangenga Blanco soars any higher, his wings’ll catch fire.

Kris’s new work, her second, is a wonderfully lyrical piece about the winds of the Torres Strait. (She was raised on Thursday Island.) The frieze-like choreography is simple compared to Page’s, but no less apt or effective. And, here, it’s exceptionally well executed. It’s also beautifully set, musically as well as visually. It’s a satisfying and complete work... four seasons in half an hour.

Only a few hundred seats are still available to Belong, so you’ll have to be quick.

Belong, a double bill by Bangarra Dance Theatre. Playhouse, the Arts Centre, Melbourne, September 16. Season -- and national tour -- ends September 24. Set designs by Jacob Nash. Costume designs by Emma Howell. Lighting designs by Matt Cox.

About by Elma Kris. Music by David Page and Steve Francis.

ID by Stephen Page. Music by David Page. AV design by Declan McMonagle. Cinematography by Eric Murray Lui.

Melinda Schneider in Doris Day — So Much More Than The Girl Next Door

2011-08-25T05:10:00.013+10:00

The trick of these narrative concerts -- Bold Jack’s “house style” if you like -- is to exploit every possible connection between the star subject and the stellar performer. So we learn that Doris Day and Melinda Schneider are unhappily-married, dog-loving children of German Catholics. Doris anglicised her name from Kappelhoff and Melinda did the reverse, opting for her yodelling mother’s maiden name over the one on her birth certificate: Bean.

It’s a narrative device that can work well, but it relies heavily on our interest in the performer. In Eva, audiences were fairly evenly divided between Eva Cassidy devotees and Clare Bowditch ’shippers. The tactic was less effective in The John Denver Story, where Rick Price was drawing a longer bow, comparing Denver’s childhood in Kansas to his own in Beaudesert. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

Melinda Schneider singing with a smile
(Photographs © Gavin D Andrew, click on the image to enlarge)

In Doris, Schneider gets away with it mostly -- even slipping in a couple of her own songs -- because of her life-long passion for Doris Day. (Schneider released an album of Doris Day songs ‘Melinda Does Doris’ last winter.)

There’ll be more in tomorrow’s Australian. In the meantime, here’s the set list...

Overture: Que Sera, Secret Love &c.

Act 1

1. Shakin’ the Blues Away (from Love Me Or Leave Me)

2. The Windy City (from Calamity Jane)

3. (Why Did I Ever Leave) Ohio (from the 1953 Broadway Musical Wonderful Town, recorded by DD for her album Show Time)

4. (Why Did I Tell You I Was Going To) Shanghai

5. Sentimental Journey (DD had her first #1 in 1945 with this song by Les Brown)

6. Embraceable You (originally from Girl Crazy)

7. It’s Magic (from the 1948 film Romance on the High Seas)

8. On Moonlight Bay (from the 1951 film On Moonlight Bay)

9. There Once Was A Man (from the 1957 film The Pajama Game, DD replaced Janis Paige who created the role on Broadway in 1954.)

10. Hey There (The Pajama Game)

11. Mean To Me (Love Me Or Leave Me)

Sam Ludeman and Rohan Browne lending a hand in Act 2

Act 2

1. The Deadwood Stage (Whip-Crack-Away!) (Calamity Jane)

2. Black Hills of Dakota (Calamity Jane)

3. Teacher’s Pet (from the 1958 film Teacher’s Pet)

4. Love Somebody (recorded by DD & Buddy Clark in November 1947)

5. Autumn Leaves (from the 1956 album Day By Day) (English lyrics by Johnny Mercer) (Jacques Prévert/Johnny Mercer/Joseph Kosma) [Note to Melinda: it’s “The falling leaves drift by my window”!]

6. The Byrds’ Turn Turn Turn (produced by DD’s son Terry)

7. Your Eyes Could Never Lie (Melinda Schneider’s song for her dogs Rosie & Daisy!)

8. Everybody Loves A Lover (charted in 1958)

9. Put ’Em In A Box, Tie It With A Ribbon (And Throw ’Em In The Deep Blue Sea) (Romance on the High Seas)

10. Wish You Were Here (from Melinda Schneider’s Hits & Rarities.)

11. Secret Love (Calamity Jane)

12. Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be) (from the Alfred Hitchcock film The Man Who Knew Too Much)

13. I’ll See You In My Dreams (from the 1951 film I’ll See You In My Dreams)

Beggin’ for a DD Smash headline, I reckon...

Doris Day — So Much More Than The Girl Next Door. Created by Melinda Schneider. Written by Melinda Schneider and David Mitchell. Directed by Tom Healey. Choreographed by Andrew Hallsworth. With Sam Ludeman and Rohan Browne.

Presented by Bold Jack and Mike Walsh. At Her Majesty’s Theatre, Melbourne, until September 4. Also Regal Theatre, Subiaco WA, October 12-23; the Twelfth Night Theatre, Bowen Hills QLD, November 15-27; with a Sydney season, dates to be confirmed, in between.

Set list: Eva — tales from the life of Eva Cassidy

2011-08-12T03:48:00.011+10:00

UPDATE: My review for The Australian is on-line, here.

UPDATE: Production photographs added.

Apparently 1000 tickets sold to this show before it had any press whatsoever. Clare Bowditch fans would follow her anywhere. And, hell, why not? She’s a brilliant choice for a show like this... a born story-teller and a great great voice. And she has a ball. It’s her karaoke show!

Clare Bowditch channels Eva Cassidy

The show opened last night at the Athenaeum. My review’s on the way. (You’ll have to wait until it’s in print. Probably Monday.) In the meantime, here's a run down of the Cassidy songs performed by Bowditch, Ashley Naylor and the ‘Blues Alley Band’.

Clare Bowditch and Monique diMattina, Hallelujah I Love Him So.

Act 1

1. Time After Time
2. People Get Ready
3. Summertime
4. Fever
5. True Colours
6. Hallelujah I Love Him So
7. Wade In The Water
8. Fields of Gold

Eva Cassidy (the cover of the 1997 album Eva By Heart)

Act 2

1. Songbird
2. Cheek to Cheek
3. I Wanna Thank U (from E-40’s 1996 studio album Tha Hall of Game)
4. Natural Woman
5. Waly Waly (When cockle shells turn to silvery bells) [that’s ‘silvery’ Clare, not ‘wintry’!]
6. Bridge Over Troubled Waters
7. Over The Rainbow
8. What a Wonderful World
9. Take Me to the River

Clare Bowditch in Eva — tales from the life of Eva Cassidy
(Click on the image to enlarge)

The Rabble: Special

2011-08-10T04:28:00.013+10:00

UPDATE: Now with (some) words!

Mary Helen Sassman as Special (Photograph: Marg Horwell)

Liz Jones as Goldie (Photograph: Marg Horwell)

What... you didn't expect me to review a show like this using words did you?!? Fat chance!!

Special. A production by The Rabble. Directed by Emma Valente. Concept by Emma Valente and Mary Helen Sassman. Devised and performed by Liz Jones and Mary Helen Sassman. Designed by Kate Davis. Lighting, sound and composition by Emma Valente.

Presented by La Mama. At the Carlton Courthouse, 240 Drummond Street, until August 21. (Wednesday to Sunday.)

Conspiracy by John Kiely, a La Mama production.

2011-07-15T06:53:00.003+10:00

John Kiely's play about Lionel Murphy has been doing excellent business at the Carlton Courthouse. I had a tough time getting in last week and, by all accounts, remaining performances are close to sold out. So, there is plenty of interest in Gough Whitlam's Attorney-General, the man who took his reformist zeal from parliament to the highest court in the land.

If I may write, for a moment, as an amateur theatregoer instead of pro critic, the questions I'd want to know before signing up for a night out at a biographical play -- or one tackling recent and/or contentious events -- would be these...

Firstly, I'd want to know if the play is tendentious. If the play is a character assassination or a tirade -- pro or con -- I don't think I could be bothered... unless it put a compelling case with strong new evidence. I'm equally uninterested in hagiographies. Conspiracy, i.e. Kiely's play, manages to be both and neither. It has a prosecutor chastising the judge for attempting to pervert the course of justice and a defence barrister singing his praises.

I'd also like to know if the playwright has the authority to tackle the material. Much is made of the fact that John Kiely was chief sub-editor at the Melbourne Herald when Murphy raided ASIO HQ and that Kiely was a deputy editor at The Age when the broadsheet was waging a war against Murphy, which more or less literally hounded the high court judge into an early grave.

There's no indication in the program (or the press notes) as to whether court transcripts were consulted in the creation of the play or not, or if any books (like Jenny Hocking's) were referenced. The factual holes in the script and the dramatic holes in the production didn't inspire much confidence in me. Most glaringly, the play refers to an incident in 1968 concerning the Australian Federal Police! I'm reasonably sure that the AFP didn't exist at all until the late 1970s.

I'd also want to know if Conspiracy would help me make up my mind about Murphy. (In a word, no. There's nothing new or world-shaking here.)

Above all, the thing I'd want to know is this: is Conspiracy a fair fight? The answer is a qualified "oh, yeah... s'pose so." Rather than siding with Murphy, or siding against him, Kiely opts to side against everyone! The media, ASIO, Murphy himself... all have a manic desire to have their own way... if I might misquote Andrew Peacock challenging Malcolm Fraser, who in turn was quoting Malcolm Fraser challenging John Gorton. (What goes around, comes around!) Fictional Age editor John Hunter (Dean Cartmel) just about froths at the mouth in his vendetta against Murphy. Ditto the ASIO spooks determined to nobble the man who dared interfere with their own secret hegemony. And Murphy (finely played by Kevin Summers, a law graduate no less) is painted as a kamikaze crusader.

That just leaves the production itself, which is imaginatively directed by Peta Coy. Without having seen the script, and without having been party to the machinations back stage, it's hard to know who is to blame for some of the gaping dramaturgical cracks. I'm unaware of any other plays penned by John Kiely, so it's easy to blame him... but perhaps the fault lines were worsened by a director keen to reduce the running time of the play. It's impossible to tell from outside.

Much is made in the play of John Hunter receiving a subpoena to appear at Murphy's trial. We even see him in the courtroom. But there's not a single word of his testimony presented. Another frustrating flaw -- which robs us of an opportunity to see Murphy's accusers and judge them for ourselves -- is the absence of testimony from NSW Chief Magistrate Clarrie Briese and from Judge Paul Flannery. Murphy was accused of attempting to influence both men when his "little mate" Morgan Ryan was on trial... for conspiracy.

A brief review of this play appeared in The Australian on Tuesday July 12. It's not on-line.

Conspiracy by John Kiely. Directed by Peta Coy. Designed by Sophie Woodward. Lighting design by Phoenix Bade. Sound by Henry Finn-Madin. With Kevin Summers as Lionel Murphy. A La Mama production. At the Carlton Courthouse, 349 Drummond Street, until July 17.

Blogging means never having to say you're sorry...

2011-07-06T06:03:00.003+10:00

To me, blogging is never having to say: er, sorry I haven't posted, old chum! You get what you pay for, right? But, for once, I feel an explanation -- for the "dead air" -- is in order. But it would be more of an apologia than an apology... and the bottom line would be: I haven't abandoned blogging or this blog.

Let's just say there have been mighty good reasons for me not posting in the last two months, both technical and personal. And the demands on my time are likely to continue for the next few months at least. So, TMA might be kinda desultory for a while.

[No point hitting 'read more..." on this occasion -- there's nothing extra unless someone has commented!]

Rick Price in The John Denver Story: Take me home, country roads

2011-07-06T05:37:00.009+10:00

Rick Price does John Denver? WTF! Price looks more like a footy commentator than a butch Barbie doll, which is how Sinatra cruelly described the planet's poet.

Okay, Rick looks like a crooner here... no argument!

But the fact that Price doesn't look like Denver, and doesn't remotely sound like him, does us a favour -- this is a show with a much broader appeal than you might expect -- it also does Denver a favour. Instead of relying on that unique and clarion voice, Price and his band are forced to rely on the songs (which stand up to the extra scrutiny, mostly, especially in the context of a biographical concert) and to rely on arrangements and delivery. Instead of torch songs, they're played as country rockers. And that works surprisingly well.

The song that started it all, 'Leaving on a Jet Plane', is not a bit churchy here. The twangy, slow version of 'Back Home Again' -- with mandolin, pedal steel & double bass -- is a ripper. Only 'Thank God I'm a Country Boy' crosses into vomitous territory... all those fiddle/griddle rhymes. Shudder!

The John Denver Story actually starts out as the Rick Price Story. Price compares and contrasts his childhood with that of Henry John Deutchendorf, Jr: growing up in Beaudesert in Queensland for Rick and in Kansas for John. Rick got the music from his father's family, John's musical roots were in his mother's family. (Deutchendorf senior was a test pilot and so 'Junior' was christened in Roswell New Mexico where the family were stationed!)

Weirdly enough, the only song in which Price attempts to scale the rocky mountain heights of Denver's voice is just about the hardest in the catalogue: 'Calypso'. And, damn, he nails every yodeling note. It's bloody miraculous.

On the downside, Price gets lyrics wrong, even in the greatest hits. The best one can say about his rendition of 'Annie's Song', for example, is that Price is consistent. He gets his lines wrong throughout.

Price is also leg-roped by the show's structure and a very ordinary script. When he looks like letting rip in the opening song of the second act -- a terrific rendition of 'Grandma's Feather Bed' -- the narrative appears like a speed bump on a freeway. It goes beyond hagiography. It goes beyond Kamahl. The script is pitched at die-hard sycophant fans. Price looks embarrassed to deliver it.

Happily, the music wins the bout by a TKO.

Here's the set-list...

Act 1

01. Take Me Home, Country Roads
02. Matthew
03. This Old Guitar
04. My Sweet Lady
05. Leaving on a Jet Plane
06. Love Is Everywhere
07. Follow Me
08. I'd Rather Be A Cowboy
09. Back Home Again
10. Thank God I'm a Country Boy

Act 2

11. Grandma's Feather Bed
12. Annie's Song
13. Welcome to my Morning
14. Perhaps Love
15. Goodbye Again
16. Calypso
17. Some Days Are Diamonds
18. Rocky Mountain High
19. Sunshine On My Shoulders

Encore

20. Country Roads singalong.

The John Denver Story: Take me home, country roads. Written by Jim McPherson. Directed by Simon Myers and Jodi Gallagher. Produced by Simon Myers and Andrew Barker for Bold Jack. Music direction by Ed Bates. Sound design by John O'Donnell. Lighting design by Michele Preshaw.

Performed by Rick Price (vocals, guitar and piano), Ed Bates (pedal steel), Tim Matthew (basses), Luke Moller (vocals, mandolin, violin) and Roger Bergodaz (who looks like he strayed from the Moody Blues, circa mid 1970s) on drums.

At the Athenaeum Theatre, Melbourne, then Brisbane from July 12. More information here.

My Darling Patricia’s Africa on tour...

2011-04-28T13:46:00.005+10:00

Like Black Lung before it, My Darling Patricia took full advantage of the Tower Theatre residency at the Malthouse in 2009. Residency? It looked more like a squat! And the tenants weren’t gonna be easy to evict.

The team draped the entrance to the Tower theatre (and curtained the stage) with brilliant, colourful bed sheets. Kids’ bed sheets emblazoned with blocks and Garfields and toys... The on-stage home was a dump. More or less literally. In radation/biohazard boilersuits the human cast members rummaged through the junk like a forensics team. (Is this a used condom I see before me?)

We were given a kids-eye view of an adults only world, presented the lower half of a groovy guy and girl in a bathroom, partying, and just the shadow of their top halves. Meanwhile, downstage, the kids (played by dolls) played. There was a plastic doll head in a toy microwave... A plastic bag over the head of one of the ‘real’ dolls... the baby of the three children.

It felt like CocoRosie Theatre: a plastic rocker turned into a Zebra. The TV doco on Africa was filled with wonderful lies: “Chips grow on trees in Africa... Be Karaoke Queen in Africa.” There was a Grace Jones-like African Queen dance routine and a copper with a wah-waahing voice, just like a cartoon.

My Darling Patricia’s excellent show Africa is back, and doing the rounds in the next six weeks -- Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide, Brisbane, Hobart, Launceston, Bathurst and Lismore -- before a longer season at Wharf 2 in Sydney in August/September.

Doubtless, there have been some tweaks since the premiere in November 2009, but (equally doubtless) the rave reviews are still deserved. Here’s mine for the Herald Sun.

Though it is inspired by a too-saccharine-to-be-true story of German kids who decide to go to Africa to get married [news article here], this show is actually about escaping rather than eloping. Escaping from harsh reality and escaping into a fantasy world. The official police photograph of the real life German kids, aged 5, 6 & 7, shows a trio of happy and smartly-dressed kids packed and ready for an adventure. (The “sweethearts” decided to take the bride-to-be's sister along with them to be a witness at the ceremony!)

Anna-Bell, Anna-Lena and Mika in custody at Hanover station

The three children in My Darling Patricia’s show, by contrast, are shabby, neglected and a little angry. They’re puppets, actually, brought to vivid life. Two girls and a boy. The googly-eyed boy stares in fear and awe rather than wonder. He’s jittery, abused, abandoned. The girls’ mother (Jodie Le Vesconte) is single, youngish, a bit of a party-animal and keen to hook-up. The cubs, mostly, have to fend for themselves while the lioness preys. The TV is their minder.

Rather than try to relate a story, My Darling Patricia give us a 3D storyboard, a graphic novel made flesh, a physical cartoon if you like. Here is a company -- an extraordinarily inventive company -- that tailors its events to suit the content rather than the reverse. Patricia is just as likely to dance a narrative as speak it. There is an impressive commitment to design within the company, too: sound, lighting, stage and props, you name it.

The only limit is imagination... oh, and budget. Which is where Malthouse Theatre steps in. The second company in the Malthouse Theatre's residency program, My Darling Patricia -- like Black Lung before it -- is an excellent choice for this kind of investment. Both companies have responded with brilliant, risky, experimental theatre.

Africa devised and performed by My Darling Patricia. Concept by Sam Routledge. Written and directed by Halcyon Macleod. Designed by Clare Britton and Bridget Dolan. Composition and sound desig by Declan Kelly. Puppets by Bryony Anderson. Lighting by Lucy Birkinshaw. With Anthony Ahern, Michelle Robin Anderson, Clare Britton, Jodie Le Vesconte amd Sam Routledge. Commissioned and presented by Malthouse Theatre. At the Tower Theatre until November 29, 2009.

Currently at Arts House (Meat Market) until April 30, 2011. Then May State Theatre Centre of WA, Perth, May 4-7; Adelaide Festival Centre, May 11-14; Brisbane Powerhouse, May 18-21; Salamanca Arts Centre, Hobart, May 25-28; Earl Arts Centre, Launceston, June 3 & 4; Bathurst Memorial Entertainment Centre, June 8; NORPA Lismore, June 11; Wharf 2, Sydney, August 29 to September 18.

This review was published in the Herald Sun on November 18, 2009.

Another look: Matthäus-Passion BWV 244 (version c. 1742) by JS Bach

2011-04-28T04:40:00.004+10:00

At the risk of provoking a “Well, derr Chris” chorus, I just have to state for the record that J.S. Bach was a revolutionary. (Even if Wikipedia would have you believe otherwise.) He did for music what Giotto did for art.

Talk about a proto postmodernist... Here’s a dude who spelled out his name in notes (good thing there’s an H on the German stave); who threw out the keyboard tuning of the day cos he wanted to compose in every key; whose music, in its way, makes physical gestures, like the sign of the cross; and who, with the skill of a dramatist, drew us -- and still draws us -- into the action... even when that action is as remote as the passion of Jesus.

But a quarter of a millennium (give or take) before Andrew Lloyd Webber -- the St Matthew Passion was first performed on Good Friday 1727 -- there was no way this Lutheran Cantor could turn Jesus into a ‘Superstar’. Indeed, never has the son of god been so in need of a make-over as the one in Bach’s St Matthew Passion...

JC could do with a speech writer -- though we can blame St Matthew’s gospel for his passive aggression -- and Bach’s scoring is, at best, rather cautious. (JS’s saviour is a stately -- if bland -- bass.)

So what does the composer do to compensate? First, he gives Jesus an orchestral ‘halo’. (It’s only relinquished in the moment when he believes he has been forsaken.) But, more importantly, Bach also gives him an evangelist: a PR man.

At the pre-Easter performance at the Recital Centre, Robert Macfarlane did the honours as the evangelist. His brilliantly agile and youthful singing reminded me of a young Eberhard Büchner. He has to do waaaay too much of the “he saids” and “she saids”, but that material has rarely been so easy to tolerate.

The casting of the Palm Sunday performance was really shrewd. Illuminating even. Emo alto Lynette Alcántara was a brilliant choice. So too was Siobhán Stagg in the soprano solo role. Stagg began with a treble-like opacity of timbre, then opened up her voice to bring a more womanly presence as required. (Her vestment purple dress was a nice touch too... wrong for Good Friday, when the Passion should be performed, but spot on for Palm Sunday in a Lutheran church!)

But the directors finally baulked at bringing the piece to life as a piece of religious theatre. It takes so little to differentiate between the New Testament protagonists, the actual character roles, and the other soloists... who are our proxies. But something this simple can transform the piece from an abstract musical experience into something unforgettable.

As the Rev Dr Andreas Loewe pointed out before the concert, Bach turns listeners into witnesses. He requires that we be intent. And, finally, to participate. (Not literally as singers, but spiritually.) Not only are we implicated, we take our place among the protagonists. And we might have if the invitation had been made a bit more clearly.

Judas, for example, popped up from the chorus for his occasional line, then quickly disappeared back into obscurity. (In a nice bit of doubling, Nicholas Dinopoulos also bobbed up as Pilate.)

Though this one-off performance had a couple of road accident moments, mostly in the untemperable woodwinds, it provided an opportunity for old fans of the work to look for additional riches in the writing. (This was a performance of the 1742 rewrite.)

This time, I noticed the “Buß und Reu” in the alto solo. As Alcántara sang about penance and remorse, the double bass was the instrument showing real penance while the flute showed only remorse. Bach, that shrewd old Christian, makes clear that ‘penance’ is the worthier of the two occupations. The bass is authoritative while the flute is indulgent, almost despairing... and therefore contemptible.

I liked Alcántara’s downward attach on the word Knirscht too.

Later, repetitions of “süßes krequz” [sweet cross] were made to sound like “Jesus Christ”, and ‘armen’ [arms] like ‘Amen’. No accident, I’m sure.

Yet again I was fascinated by the (surely undeserved) respect Bach shows to the chief priests and elders who betray Jesus. Their music is too damn likable! Like Milton in Paradise Lost, Bach seems to be on the devil’s side with or without knowing it.

And, finally, it’s a shining achievement on Bach’s part that a passion -- which, by definition, ends in the dark limbo between death and resurrection -- should make ‘rest’ seem so attractive. The best he can offer us, or Jesus, is a cessation from suffering.

Matthäus-Passion by J.S. Bach. Version c 1742. Presented by Melbourne Recital Centre. Elizabeth Murdoch Hall, Sunday April 17.

Performed by Ironwood Chamber Orchestra, the choir of Trinity College, the Consort of Melbourne, Ensemble Gombert and trebles from the Melbourne Grammar School Chapel Choir. Conducted by Jeremy Summerly. With Robert Macfarlane (Evangelist), Michael Leighton Jones (Jesus), Siobhán Stagg (solo soprano), Lynette Alcántara (solo alto), Paul Bentley (solo tenor) and Paul Tregear (solo bass).

My official (and officious!) review for The Australian is on-line, here.

Not really about Opera Australia’s new La bohème... more about Don Shanks

2011-04-13T15:04:00.002+10:00

I’ll have plenty to say about Gale Edwards sizzling and harrowing new production of “L-Bo” for Opera Australia in the not-too-distant. For now, some random reminiscences.

Last night’s premiere -- the opening performance of the national company’s Autumn season -- was dedicated to the memory of Donald Shanks AO OBE, the 70 year-old bass who died of a heart attack a few days ago.

I might have been tempted to wait until the Mikado, next month, for a dedication like this, as the gentle giant made his debut in the G & S in 1964 with the Elizabethan Trust Opera Company, the forerunner of the Australian Opera and Opera Australia. On his retirement from Opera Australia, forty years later, the Mikado was the last work he appeared in. In between, there were more than 60 principal bass roles. Including, of course, Colline in Bohème.

Owing to a ticketing hiccup last night, I ended up on the OP end of the third row. I reckon I’ve sat in just about every one of the State Theatre’s 2000-odd seats over the years, and I’ve gotta say it’s a rare treat to be so close to the action.

It’s actually the best place (in the stalls at least) from which to hear the music. The orchestra sounds at its absolute best -- thick and broad, a truly visceral presence -- from front and left. It’s not so good if you need surtitles -- they’re a long way up when you’re that close -- but the compensations are immense.

I noticed the black net sitting tautly over the pit as we waited for the last stragglers to arrive. It actually looked brand new. I remembered when -- and why -- nets were introduced. In the mid 1980s, a specky production of Boris Godunov used live chooks on stage. One of the musicians, I’m thinking it was a cellist, fell fowl (sorry, can’t help myself!) of a kamikaze chook and ended up covered in feathers. (Sounds like an Alice Cooper recital!) Hence the introduction of the safety net. Boris, that year, was played by none other than Don Shanks. (He has also taken the role of Pimen in other productions.)

As I twittered a few days back, Don was a regular (and always welcome) presence in the Australian Opera’s rep productions in the years after this theatre opened. He was a perfect Sarastro in the Magic Flute, a rare mix of stateliness and something rather more avuncular. I saw him take the role of Hunding in Die Walküre here, too, in 1985. (He’s also done a Wotan or two over the years.)

Timur, Don Pasquale, Nourabad, Bartolo, Banquo... there wasn’t much The Don couldn’t do. And do well. In Blair Edgar’s words, he was a truly lovely man.

Review: the Australian production of Rock of Ages

2011-04-11T06:25:00.004+10:00

It’s hard to fathom here -- in the home of AC/DC -- that Quiet Riot could be regarded as the godfather of anything in the USA, least of all hard rock. The band certainly can’t claim to be its biological father. QR’s breakthrough hit in 1983 was a cover of ‘Cum On Feel The Noize’ which Slade topped the UK and Irish charts with, a decade earlier. (Slade’s version didn’t rate much more than a blip in the US in 1973, #98 without a bullet, and just two weeks on the charts.)

But ‘Cum On’ broke some kind of ceiling in the States. It was the first ‘metal’ [more ‘late-onset glam’ if you ask me] song to make Top Five on Billboard’s pop charts. And it set the tone for what was acceptable on the pop charts: pomp rock and hair metal and overblown AOR. That shiny little song opened the floodgates for mullet metal. Took it from its LA ghetto to the rest of the continent.

Apart from the brief but spectacular success of QR’s album Metal Health -- it sold 5 million copies -- the band was more famous for the musicians that left it: Randy Rhodes for Ozzy Osbourne, Rudy Sarzo for Whitesnake and, infamously, frontman Kevin DuBrow was finally overthrown and turfed out as an ‘egomaniac’.

Quiet Riot doesn’t actually have an original song in the set list of Rock of Ages, but the band’s shadow looms.

The lead singer in ROA’ fictional cock rock band ‘Arsenal’ Stacee Jaxx (Michael Falzon) is about to suffer the same fate as Kevin DuBrow... for identical reasons. And the bar in which the show is largely set is suspiciously named the Dupree... which is kinda close to DuBrow, right? And ‘Cum On’ is the opening number in this Eighties musical.

You know, I reckon my one reservation about Rock of Ages is the title. But I guess ‘AOR of Ages’ doesn’t have quite the same ring to it!

Production photograph: Jeff Busby

Songs by Foreigner, Asia, Styx, the Styx-like Damn Yankees, REO Speedwagon, Quarterflash and their ilk certainly outnumber the hair metal and hard rock numbers by Whitesnake, Poison, David Lee Roth, Twisted Sister, Joan Jett et al.

But with Tzan Niko on lead guitar, man... I’d probably hold up a lighter for a song by Hush.

My ‘real’ review is in today’s Australian. It’s on-line here. Short version: It’s a party... even for a snobby purist like me who hated mainstream ’80s pop and rock. (I reckon the song ‘We Built This City’ is an absolute abomination... arguably the worst song ever to chart!)

Like Xanadu, Rock of Ages takes some dated and dodgy original material and fashions it into something shrewd and sharp. But unlike Xanadu, the sound and staging are close to flawless.

I had a ball. Scratch that... everyone has a ball. Rock of Ages really is irresistible.

The Prodigal Son: Bill Henson at Tolarno Galleries [Untitled 2009/2010 series]

2011-04-01T06:41:00.012+11:00

You've gotta love an exhibition minded by a pair of the biggest crowd-controlling gorillas you'll see this side of a hot New York night club opening. But this is Melbourne, not Sydney, so they are there to protect us from overcrowding (they pretty much failed on that score) rather than protect the art from the threat of Family First fundamentalism.

Given that Bill Henson is currently grappling with the technical challenges of his inevitable shift from photographic paper to archival inkjet pigment paper, this latest series is a surprising and marked progression on work shown at Roslyn Oxley9 in Sydney, and Tolarno Galleries before that. Always the painter's photographer, Henson's new work had me thinking of Goya and Francis Bacon as well as various earlier series by the man himself: the Paris Opera series, his photographs of a deserted art gallery, the ruined eroticism of his 1980s monochrome Palace triptychs and the deathly cyans of his post-Venice work.

Instead of cyan -- the colour of the newly dead -- the naked flesh is the waxy colour of bodies that have bled-out. The highlights are coppery twists of hair, or are lit by a source with a dramatically higher colour temperature than the pallid prevailing light.

Bill Henson NH SH346 N10B [CAT 11] (detail)

Henson, I think, tries to use the speckled blue of the inkjet/digital manipulation process as an asset. Whether he is successful is a matter for debate. The blue shift and visible grain (into which freckles and blemishes finally blur) reminded me of high speed Ektachrome trannies pushed to 400ASA. But what appealed to me annoyed others I spoke to.

As we've come to expect from Henson, there's quite a spread of subject matter in this series of thirteen large images, which are available for sale (in editions of five) for $30,000 a pop: a couple of mysterious landscapes; lean, sinewy, sickly bodies in ones and twos; and, this time, there are even a couple of photographs taken in a crowded gallery, with punters jockeying to get a glimpse of some Rembrandt.

Bill Henson CL SH767 N17B [CAT 3] (detail)

Yes, this is kinda obvious, but what the hell... it's my homage to Henson:

Rembrandt's Prodigal Son, a scrunchie and a glass of 'whine'...

I was puzzled by the foreshortening distortion in some of the images. Torsos seemed longer than legs, even when those legs were trained at the lens. Maybe Henson is opting to use very long lenses.

Another feature I noticed in Henson's new work is an almost calligraphic figuration. The photograph, left, [AH SH28 N8, CAT 7] was the very first I faced. I've reproduced it small not out of modesty (or, er, copyright violation considerations!) but to highlight the figure-4 pictogram quality of the limbs and torso and the line of the forearm/wrist/fingers.

This one, I thought, was a wonderful throwback to the Paris Opera series:

We've come to expect ambitious, painstaking, breathtaking art from Bill Henson. He has not disappointed us.

The 2009/2010 series is on show at Tolarno Galleries, 104 Exhibition Street Melbourne, until April 21. Open Tuesday to Friday, 10am to 5pm. And Saturday, 1pm to 5pm.

The Music of Andrew Lloyd Webber: review, set list and 2011 tour dates

2011-03-23T02:40:00.006+11:00

When the Australian production of Love Never Dies opens here in May, it will be 39 years (to the month) since the first Australian production of Jesus Christ Superstar premiered. It was the first in a procession of pop musical hits for Andrew Lloyd Webber.

His greatest successes, financially and artistically, have been the ‘packaged’ theatre shows like Cats and Phantom of the Opera, where the production and design have been inseparable from the composition itself. Remember the dire warnings to the rest of Australia that the Sydney production of Cats would never tour? “Too expensive,” the producers intoned. “If you want to see it, you’ll have to come to Sydney.” There have been at least four national tours.

Cats ran for 21 years in London. Phantom is in its 25th year on the West End and 24th year on Broadway. But can you name anything Lloyd Webber has created since Sunset Boulevard, 18 years ago? (If you’re thinking the Requiem, you’d be wrong. It’s older than Phantom.)

The Music of Andrew Lloyd Webber is an odd beast. It’s a teaser for the up-coming premiere and a recapitulation of Lloyd Webber’s hits since Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat went viral in British schools 40-odd years ago.

It also (rather deliberately) puts a case for reconsidering our lowly opinions of Starlight Express, Aspects of Love and Sunset Boulevard. (This, admittedly, is fairly glib case to make when the shows in question only have two good jingles apiece and you can entwine them in an absolutely brilliant two-minute medley.)

Photographs: Jeff Busby (click on images to enlarge)

So, instead of its anthemic and torch-bright title song, Starlight Express is represented by the Grease-inspired ‘One Rock’n’Roll Too Many’ and the gospel-sounding ‘Light at the End of the Tunnel’. Lloyd Webber’s little-toured 1998 musical Whistle Down The Wind is also revealed to have a sacred dimension: ‘The Vaults of Heaven’ is a full-blown (and damn fine) Negro spiritual. (That show is shown the additional courtesy of having its title song performed.)

“The songs are performed for all they’re worth... and, often, quite a bit more than they’re worth.”

Aspects of Love’s one hit (some would say its one melody) ‘Love Changes Everything’ -- oft parodied [by me, certainly] as “I sleep with everyone” -- opens the show. Though performed by Delia Hannah and the estimable Michael Cormick, the song is ejected after about sixty seconds in favour of a Cher-like remix of ‘Jellicle Ball’ from Cats, all bombast and brightness. It serves as an overture for what follows. Throughout the show, inspired successes and disastrous failures jostle for attention as equals. It’s like some utopian schools system! You know: you’re all valuable! The songs are performed for all they’re worth... and, often, quite a bit more than they’re worth.

Andrew Conaghan, the leader of the pack. With Hannah & Cormick.

Hannah does the show’s heavy lifting, dramatically speaking. She is such a strong actor, vocally as well as physically, that everything she touches turns to platinum. God, if only we could clone her... Hannah and director Gale Edwards were pretty much responsible for Aspects of Love not disappearing without trace. (Damn them to hell for that!) In a classic example of taking coleslaw to KFC, the Australian production won the composer’s imprimatur and went on to tour the UK in the mid 1990s.

Hannah’s ‘Memory’ is incredibly affecting. Her ‘With One Look’ from Sunset Boulevard is so good, one would wish to have the show revived just so we might see her perform the song in situ. Even the hoary old ‘Tell Me on a Sunday’ has an apotheosis in her palms. ‘Don’t Cry For Me Argentina’, likewise, is perfectly judged.

Vocally, the entire ensemble is equal to the demands of the material: Shaun Rennie’s Judas is thrilling, Alinta Chidzey’s Magdalene is quite perfect, Cormick’s Phantom has immense authority, Trisha Crowe and Kirsten Hobbs in Lloyd Webber’s own flower duet Pie Jesu... All are impressive. Spectacularly good even.

That said, some of the music theatre tricks, the narcissism and mugging, particularly in the opening songs of the first performance, were a bit hard to stomach. But once the individual artists found parts that were a good fit for them, or songs that were just plain easier to sell, cast and audience relaxed.

The set is a tumble of animated billboards. They look good and work well enough, lip sync problems on the pre-recorded Lloyd Webber interview excepted. But, hell, I could have done without the Jesus screen saver... a fantasy sequence which would not have looked out of place in the Led Zeppelin film The Song Remains the Same. (Which, I suppose, makes it the right era for JC Superstar!)

A much shorter and much more disciplined version of this review (with a rather nice pic) was published in yesterday’s Australian.

The Music of Andrew Lloyd Webber. Devised and directed by Stuart Maunder. Musical supervision by Guy Noble. Set and costume design and digital media art direction by Julie Lynch. Lighting design by Gavan Swift. Sound design by Michael Waters.

Presented by Lunchbox, David Atkins Enterprises and the Really Useful Company (Asia Pacific). Regent Theatre, Melbourne, March 20. Season ends March 27.

Then Adelaide Entertainment Centre Theatre, March 30 to April 3; Lyric Theatre, QPAC, Brisbane, April 6-10; Burswood Theatre, Perth, April 16-24; The Civic, The Edge, Auckland, May 3-8; St James Theatre, Wellington, May 10-15; Lyric Theatre, Star City, Sydney, May 25-29; and Canberra Theatre Centre, June 1-5; The Lyric Theatre, HKAPA, Hong Kong, June 8-19; Tanghalang Nicanor Abelardo, CCP, Manila, from June 24.

For more news, information and ticketing, click here.

The Music of Andrew Lloyd Webber: songs performed

ACT I

Overture/medley (Aspects of Love, Cats)

1. ‘Take that look off your face’ from Tell Me On A Sunday (Alinta Chidzey)

2. ‘On this night of 1000 stars’ from Evita (Shaun Rennie)

3. ‘And the money kept rolling in’ from Evita (Blake Bowden)

4. ‘High flying, adored’ from Evita (Michael Cormick)

5. ‘Don’t cry for me Argentina’ from Evita (Delia Hannah)

6. ‘One rock ’n’ roll too many’ from Starlight Express (Cormick, Rennie, Bowden)

7. ‘Light at the end of the tunnel’ from Starlight Express (Andrew Conaghan & co)

8. ‘Unexpected Song’ from Song & Dance (Kirsten Hobbs)

9. ‘I don’t know how to love him’ from Superstar (Chidzey)

10. ‘Coney Island Waltz from Love Never Dies (Trisha Crowe)

11. ‘Love Never Dies’ from Love Never Dies (Crowe)

12. ‘’Til I hear you sing’ from Love Never Dies (Bowden)

13. Cats medley (Skimbleshanks, Mungojerrie & Rumpleteazer, Macavity, The Rum Tum Tugger & Mister Mistoffolees. (Rennie, Bowden, Hobbs, Chidzey & Cormick)

14. ‘Memory’ from Cats (Delia Hannah)

ACT II

1. ‘Heaven on their minds’ from Superstar (Rennie)

2. ‘I believe my heart’ from The Woman in White (Conaghan & Chidzey)

3. ‘Tell me on a Sunday’ from Tell Me On A Sunday (Hannah)

4. ‘Sunset Boulevard’ from Sunset Boulevard (Cormick)

5. Pie Jesu from Requiem (Crowe & Hobbs)

6. ‘No matter what’ from Whistle Down The Wind (Bowden, Rennie, Conaghan)

7. ‘Whistle down the wind’ from Whistle Down The Wind (Hobbs)

8. ‘The vaults of heaven’ from Whistle Down The Wind (Conaghan, Chidzey & Co.)

9. ‘With one look’ from Sunset Boulevard (Hannah)

10. Phantom of the Opera medley (Cormick & Co.)

11. ‘Superstar’ from Superstar (Rennie & Co.)

12. A bit of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat for the road.

When a trial is not a trial: Neil Cole’s The Trial of Adolf Eichmann.

2011-03-18T04:29:00.008+11:00

In the late 1980s, Colin Golvan had a crack at dramatising the interrogation of Adolf Eichmann, in Haifa, for the Melbourne Theatre Company. Three hundred hours of interrogations -- which took place between Eichmann’s capture in Argentina and his trial in Israel -- were reduced to a couple of hours in the dark. Not your typical MTC fodder, the company mounted the play at the Athenaeum Theatre, upstairs, in the smaller space. Compelling as Nico Lathouris was, as Eichmann, the play was too much the documentary. Too faithful, if anything, to its source material.

Adolf Eichmann on trial

Neil Cole makes a surprisingly good fist of much the same narrative in his recent play The Trial of Adolf Eichmann, which is back for a third season at the Tower Theatre, until April 2.

Cole contrasts Eichmann’s easy willingness to obey his superiors with Alfred Rossner’s defiant subversion of Nazi policy in Upper Silesia. The German-born factory manager adeptly protected the families of the factory’s Jewish employees. It would eventually cost him his own life.

Rather than present the trial as a face-off between the dissembling Eichmann (Kevin Hopkins is all huffy innocence and brazen indignation) and the prosecutor (a pit bull-ish Ross Williams as Israeli Attorney General Gideon Hausner), Cole gives us a human prosecutor as well in the form of Kitia Altman, shiningly played by Belinda Misevski.

Belinda Misevski as Kitia Altman

The real life Altman was one of Rossner’s favourite employees, apparently, and is still very much alive and well... and living in Melbourne. (She was present and spoke, movingly, at Wednesday’s opening night performance.) Her evidence -- her very presence -- is damning of Eichmann and his obedient complicity.

By concentrating on character, Cole and his director Drew Tingwell renew the story and, paradoxically, stop it from being a grind or a kind of penance. In a symbolic and most effective doubling, Adrian Mulraney plays both Rossner and the trial judge. It is the goodness of one German that condemns the evil in another.

The Trial of Adolf Eichmann by Neil Cole. Directed by Drew Tingwell. Lighting design by Matthew Klock. Sound design by Stephen Lovelight. At the Tower Theatre, the Malthouse, until April 2.

Odd sods. I’m sorry, I’ll read that again. Odds and sods.

2011-03-14T14:37:00.006+11:00

T-Time

Tim Minchin’s orchestra tour of Australia was pretty much sold out before the first date. There were a few tickets still left for one of the Perth concerts and a couple still available at the Opera House. They’re all long gone, of course. The good news, as reported by Linzy at timminchin.com, is that the final concert of the tour (March 27, 2011) will be broadcast live from the Opera House on ABC2. Tim says:

“It is an incredible honour to be playing with the Sydney Symphony and such a huge thrill to perform in the Opera House. That people will be able to watch the show live from their lounge rooms fills me with dread and excitement, and will fill the switchboards of right-wing radio djs with calls from the outraged. I can’t wait.”

Xana dos & don’ts

Not since the gloriest glory days of the Victoria State Opera, when PR prince Robert Gibbs couriered fish bowls and Beethoven busts draped in French flags to arts editors to drum up interest in VSO productions of Pearl Fishers and Fidelio, has there been such a pretty and inspired little media teaser as this:

Yep. It’s a media kit. Only problem? It didn’t occur to 99% of the luddites in the Yartz that this was more than just a toy. Under the lid is a USB drive. 4GB no less.

But before you get too jealous -- assuming it was bursting with hi-res pics and videos and interviews and mp3s galore -- I have to tell you mine came with a single word document. All of 5 MB. And it is a total bitch to find a USB port with enough clearance to plug it into... Still, great toy Lara!

Yes, I confess. That is a giant box of matches!

What’s that? You wanna know what the show was actually like? I’m relieved -- and a little bit ashamed -- to admit that it ROCKED. Well, it rolled actually... unlike the fixed wheels on the media toy. [Really, there’s no pleasing some people!]

My review of Xanadu for the Australian is on-line, here.

I pushed for a muse/musical pun in the headline... and was politely ignored.

Review: Tim Minchin vs the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

2011-03-03T11:54:00.007+11:00

I can’t actually remember, now, what finally killed the Doug Anthony All-Stars. I’ve got a feeling it was a mix of television (which sucks comedy into its maw at a prodigious rate) and DAAS’s mostly teen-female audience (ditto, an’ I don’t mean Beth!). There was a point in their fledgling career when their well-crafted show, a careful mix of comedy and damn-fine singing, became a liability. I reckon I was at the concert (at the old Universal One in Fitzroy) when they realised... there was a bunch of girls at the front of the crowd that knew every word. Verbatim. From that day, DAAS turned from entertainers to audience abusers... and self-abusers.

It’s a mystery that passeth understanding that someone like Chris Rock, who can hone a show til it’s word perfect and tour the world with it, can get away with completely un-improvised stand-up while others -- like Wil Anderson who I saw do an identical show in successive years -- we revolt against.

Tim Minchin, bless, looks like getting away with a largely fixed show. It’s partly because it’s song-based, even if many of his songs rely on unfamiliarity for their effect. As I wrote in my review of his concert with the MSO in Monday’s Australian, included below, Minchin’s “arena” tour is pretty damn shrewd, a great mix of new and old material. A good spread for new fans, and enough repackaging to keep his old friends happy.

What I wonder about -- worry about -- is Minchin’s Rock ’n’ Roll Nerd persona. It’s almost too perfect. I can’t see any scope in it for evolution. Now, chances are that the persona is Tim himself, and his life -- so far -- has been great fodder for his work. Especially the new stuff about being a father. But in the longer term, who knows!

Anyway, for now, the man is a brilliant mind, a great songwriter and a damn fine entertainer.

The following review appeared in The Australian on Monday February 28.

“Nothing ruins comedy like arenas ” says Tim Minchin, strapping on a Dean V-shape electric guitar, a few minutes into the first date on his month-long national speed-date. He’s standing in front of a capacity crowd -- the first of three -- at St Kilda’s Palais Theatre, a venue which still lays claim to the title of greatest seating capacity theatre in the country.

Arenas may or may not kill comedy -- Chris Rock’s firm of accountants could gun down that claim without glancing up from their Wall Street Journals -- but whatever it is that Tim Minchin does lends itself to scale. To excess. Minchin’s a rapper balladeer, part John Cooper Clarke and part Loudon Wainwright III. In his anthemic hit ‘Canvas Bags’ he sounds for all the world like Great Britain’s answer to Eminem: The Streets.

Kink, taboo and self-revelation are his ‘thing’. I was tempted to write anguished self-revelation, but that is exactly wrong. It is the lack of anguish in his revelations, the lack of guilt in (what should be) his guilty secrets, that make him so adorable and refreshing. So liberating. So cathartic.

‘Lullaby’ is a classic example of what he does. Forgive the spoilers, or skip to the end of the paragraph if you’re one of the few who haven’t see Minchin and the MSO perform this song on TV in the lead up to the tour. The punchline [ahem!] is that the parent singing the waltz-like lullaby loves his baby most when it’s not making a noise, when it’s barely breathing... in short, when the child most looks like it’s dead!

Given his skyrocketing international success, Minchin’s decision to perform with various orchestras around the country is a shrewd one. By presenting a broad spectrum of old, recent and brand new material, he brings his latest converts up to speed. Meanwhile, the faithful are treated to a big band version of ‘Cheese’ and refurbishments of Minchin classics: ‘Dark Side’ and ‘Not Perfect’ come with brooding and feisty orchestrations.

Don’t be conned by the use of ‘vs’ in the advertising. There’s no battle at all between Minchin and his orchestra (the Melbourne Symphony under the magic wand of Benjamin Northey for the first concerts). They work magnificently together for two and a half hours. The sound is impeccably clean -- importantly, every sung word is decipherable -- and the mix between Minchin’s bantam-sized band and the orchestra is careful.

The one downside of the arena scale of the show is that Minchin has to heckle himself, but even here it’s a privilege to be privy to the Rock ’n’ Roll nerd’s innermost voices.

Tim Minchin vs the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. Palais Theatre, St Kilda, Friday February 25.

Also Tim Minchin vs the West Australian Symphony Orchestra, Pioneer Women's Memorial, Kings Park and Botanic Garden, Perth, March 4 & 5; Tim Minchin vs the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, Festival Theatre, Adelaide, March 10-12; Tim Minchin vs the Queensland Pops Orchestra, Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre, March 18; Tim Minchin vs the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, Wrest Point Entertainment Centre, Hobart, March 21; and Tim Minchin vs the Sydney Symphony, Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House, March 24-27. Tickets: $79-$139. Most dates sold out.

Sex On Sunday: ’Tis Pity She’s A Whore (Malthouse Theatre)

2011-02-28T09:02:00.008+11:00

I didn’t make it to yesterday’s Things On Sunday forum at the Malthouse which was devoted to sex. But it seems appropriate, the morning after, to direct a few questions to Marion Potts about ’Tis Pity She’s A Whore. They’ve been rattling around my head since the first night of her production. (Which, in case you were wondering, I rather liked.)

Now... as Tim Minchin used to sing in his concert opener ‘Hello’, “If you are offended by strong language or blasphemy, maybe you should choof off home. Cos it’s only gonna get worse...” Very soon.

Potts comes out swinging in her production. It begins with Punch using some spit to lubricate Judy. And Judy is promptly, er, digitised. Shall we say.

Crass, yes, but all right... If we’re gonna get nitrogen in our blood, it’s gotta happen quick. We’re sent plunging into the deep.

But, Marion, mate... What I wanna know is:

If you’re gonna screen a video of Real Fucking, why do it on a tiny computer monitor behind Jethro? (You pussy!) Why not a massive flat screen for B’s (and our) viewing enjoyment? Afraid the on-stage action won’t compete?

Why did you choose ‘9 Songs’? [I swear to god, that’s the first time ever my fingers have ever obeyed my brain and typed ‘Songs’ instead of ‘Snogs’ after the number 9!!]

Why not a film about incest? Is Blue Lagoon not hot enough for ya? [I’ve just discovered they were supposed to be cousins, not brother and sister... boy am I pissed off... retrospectively!!] Or Chaotic Ana? [The incest in Julio Médem’s film -- which has deep family significance for the director, and it shows -- is between a reincarnated mother and her son from a previous life!] Why not some Greenaway? The Cook, The Thief was inspired by this play, no?

And why only screen the sex scenes? (Is that a dumb question?) In a loop? Okay, I understand you might want to plug into the frisson -- the ridiculous flap -- that surrounded the release of the Winterbottom film, containing actual sex and all that jizz [sorry]... but then why did you edit the “money shot” out of the loop?

You show actual oral but cut the climax!?!

Now, I realise I tend to overanalyse these things, semiotically, but the video was there for a reason, and the cum shot was left out for a reason. But what, precisely, those reasons are eludes me. Is it something prosaic, perhaps? Is it a classification problem? Are you not permitted to show X-rated Ken Park-level footage in public? (Or do you only have a Region 4 release and it has been circumcised for local audiences?)

I’ve answered my own question haven’t I? It’s like Rowan Atkinson’s hell... when one of the damned asks for the dunny, Rowan pointedly responds that there are no toilets, as hell is “damnation without relief.” [In my review for The Australian, dear non-Marion Potts reader, I argue that ‘hell’ in the three-tier world of the production is all coitus reservatus... The shadow falls between the hunger and the meal. Between chewing and, er, swallowing.] [Can’t believe I’m writing this at nine in the morning!]

Still, Marion... WTF? Please explain!

Anyway, since Cameron asked so nicely, here is my Australian review. Uncut. Heh!

Marion Potts’ abridgement of John Ford’s early 17th century story of incest and vengeance is sweeping but discriminating. It slashes every single distraction from the main game. Gone are the Friar, the Cardinal, the murdering Roman gentleman Grimaldi and other suitors for Florio’s daughter.

That leaves the girl herself, Annabella, pregnant to her brother Giovanni, and the man Annabella consents to marry to avoid scandal. But Soranzo is no Saint Joseph: he beats his new wife and threatens to kill her if she doesn’t identify the man who stole what was rightfully his. She refuses. (Soranzo’s servant Vasques then tricks Annabella’s governess -- the inexplicably-named Putana -- into revealing the awful truth, then blinds her and has her nose slit.)

Apart from the clunky introduction of the character Hippolita -- a jilted lover of Soranzo’s whose husband is believed dead -- the storyline is clear and often awesomely powerful. But this production is far more than just a ‘John Ford for Dummies’ exercise. The new Artistic Director of Malthouse Theatre gives us a three tiered extravaganza.

In Ford’s play, Annabella first appears -- like Juliet -- on a balcony, high above a brawl between her suitors. She then sees and desires -- apparently without recognising -- her brother Giovanni. Annabella’s descent is literal and, of course, metaphorical. Potts’ universe preserves that layering. Her underworld is hellish and contemporary, built out of tagged shipping containers.

The action begins there with a character named B (Chris Ryan) crudely using Punch and Judy puppets to simulate sex. Maybe he’s “the wanton” that the Friar warns Annabella of: “On racks of burning steel... he feels the torment of his raging lust.”

Ay, you are wretched, miserably wretched,
Almost condemn’d alive. There is a place,
List, daughter! in a black and hollow vault,
Where day is never seen; there shines no sun,
But flaming horror of consuming fires,
A lightless sulphur, choak’d with smoky fogs
Of an infected darkness : in this place
Dwell many thousand thousand sundry sorts
Of never-dying deaths: there damned souls
Roar without pity; there are gluttons fed
With toads and adders; there is burning oil
Pour’d down the drunkard’s throat; the usurer
Is forced to sup whole draughts of molten gold;
There is the murderer for ever stabb’d,
Yet can he never die; there lies the wanton
On racks of burning steel, whilst in his soul
He feels the torment of his raging lust.—

In the tier above B, the action of Ford’s play takes place. It’s clean -- almost Mozartian -- in design, with a mural combining creation and crucifixion. In the uppermost tier, a harpsichord-playing soprano (the heavenly Julia County) reigns like an taintless angel.

Potts manages these extremes -- both formal and thematic -- with infectious confidence. After thirty minutes, her audience was ready for any journey. To any destination. By any means. And she demonstrably has the confidence of her cast, who act with the kind of fearlessness that comes with lucid and firm direction. Elizabeth Nabben is a memorable and delightful Annabella. Making a welcome return to the Malthouse, Anthony Brandon Wong is an excellent Vasques, like an evil Figaro. But they are first among equals.

’Tis Pity She’s A Whore by John Ford. Adapted and directed by Marion Potts. Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne, until March 5. Tickets: $21-$55 plus booking fee. Bookings 03 9685 5111.

Original Music by Andrée Greenwell. Set & costume design by Anna Cordingley. Lighting design by Paul Jackson. Sound design and live music performed by Jethro Woodward. Dramaturgy by Maryanne Lynch.

Cast: John Adam, Julia County, Laura Lattuada, Elizabeth Nabben, Richard Piper, Chris Ryan, Benedict Samuel, Alison Whyte, Anthony Brandon Wong.

Running Time: 100 minutes (no interval)

Alexi Kaye Campbell’s Apologia: saving us from the rampant stupidity of religion on the one hand and vacuous consumerism on the other. Or not.

2011-02-25T05:01:00.007+11:00

Apparently, we’re supposed to have forgiven our parents by the time we turn forty. But in the immortal words of one very famous mortal -- and step-dad -- “May one be pardoned and retain the offence?” (In Claudius’s case: his crown, his ambition and his queen.) He answers himself. Hell, no!

Kristin Miller’s kids -- one around forty, t’other a little under -- are maintaining their rage against the crusading, red-ragger, firebrand woman that bore them. And bully for them!

Patrick Brammall and Robyn Nevin in Apologia (Photo: Jeff Busby)

But what I find impossible to swallow is that they’re genuinely appalled -- newly appalled, appalled all over again -- when mummy dearest fails to mention either of them in her newly published memoir.

I think I can speak of this experience with some authority! My sister-in-law and a stray half-brother get chapters to themselves in my father’s memoir. But I’m the Lynn Redgrave of my family, only scoring an actual mention for dissing the old man in a eulogy. But did the gaping hole in my father’s yarn trigger an existential crisis? Again, hell no! Just a roll of the eyes. Or, more accurately, just another roll of the eyes.

Playwright Alexi Kaye Campbell admits his own mother is nothing like Kristin Miller. Actually, I don’t think Kaye Campbell’s creation is much like any human being. His portrait of a feminist radical and brilliant art historian is weirdly 2D and unconvincing. Where do I begin?

* The author and intellectual who inexplicably (and unforgivably) refers to the word ‘fucking’ as an adjective;

* The grown-up who can snap at Trudi in the first scene “Please don’t tell me what I mean” then blithely say to her younger son’s GF in the second act: “Surely you can’t mean that.”

* The atheist who calls her sons Simon and Peter (!!) and who specialises in religious art of the Italian Renaissance;

* The humanist non-believer who manages to give a lecture on punishment and reward without using the words paradise, heaven or hell yet still refers to her work as her ‘calling’ and her ‘vocation’. [Okay, that last bit made her a little bit interesting, but the earlier qualities [sic] just made her less believable.]

There are quite a few more holes in Kaye Campbell’s portrait than there are holes in the tribal mask that Kristin is presented with by her eldest son Peter and his fiancée Trudi. (Q. What’s a mask with only one hole? A. A bell.) [I’ve been asked not to attribute this riddle! But I’ll only take provisional credit for it until the angel outs herself.] [D’oh!]

Nevertheless... nevertheless... Robin Nevin almost pulls the contradictions off. Almost. In my review in today’s Australian, on-line here, I argue that director Jennifer Flowers concentrates on making sense of the to-and-fro powerplay between the characters, especially mother and (eldest) son. I found these ‘beats’ -- the rare occasions that one character catches the attention of another -- most interesting. (Prada did not. She left at half time.)

There are a couple of those beats in quick succession in the first scene. Kristin likens Trudi, Peter’s spunky Christian fiancée, to a peach tree. Peter -- for once -- is genuinely surprised by his mother. A moment later, he says to Kristin” “I read your book.” She turns, expectant in spite of herself, with an “Oh?”

But an enormous percentage of the script is devoted to staccato monologues rather than actual dialogue. The family members, in particular, talk in crossfire. No-one listens. No-one, apparently, wants to be heard. And that makes it a damn hard text to make work. And this production, as of Wednesday night, hasn’t quite made that part work.

But more in the official review...

Playwright Alexi Kaye Campbell imagined Vanessa Redgrave in the lead role of his play Apologia when he cast it in his mind. “I thought about strong women of that generation who really had to be... ground-breakers and pioneers; how difficult that had to have been.”

Like Redgrave, Kaye Campbell’s fictional heroine Kristin Miller is a life-long crusader and only partly reformed communist. As a student at Cambridge, Kristin was a part of the massive anti-war protest in Grosvenor Square that Redgrave and Tariq Ali led in March 1968, the one that ended in mounted police charges and riot.

Tariq Ali and Vanessa “Red Rave”, Grosvenor Square March 1968

A brilliant and pioneering art historian the sixtysomething Miller might be, but she was and is -- according to her sons -- a dreadful mother. The last straw for them is that neither is mentioned in her newly published memoir... something Redgrave’s kid sister could have related to. [Lynn’s birth didn’t rate a mention in Sir Michael’s diary.]

Younger son Simon (Patrick Brammall) puts it bluntly: “everything we are and everything we do is a response against you.” Kaye Campbell asks us to believe that Simon, in his late thirties, has never recovered from his mother having had a proverbial room of her own.

Out of tired habit, Miller urges her smug older son Peter (Ian Bliss), a banker, to change careers so that she can be proud to call him her son again. He arrives at her home in the English countryside with his new fiancée Trudi in tow. She’s young, pretty, American... and Christian!

The non-believing matriarch is appalled. “All of a sudden the idea of him keeping the whole of sub-Saharan Africa in crippling debt doesn’t seem quite as bad a proposition.”

Miller patronises the well-meaning but callow Trudi (Laura Gordon) cruelly. Simon’s soap-star girlfriend Claire (Helen Christinson) doesn’t fare much better. Claire, at least, gives as good as she gets.

The family, plus Miller’s beloved old friend Hugh (an utterly delightful Ron Falk), gather to celebrate Kristin’s birthday. The only listening that takes place in the course of the evening, and morning after, is critical scrutiny: research for future attacks.

Miller and her sons say what they have to say and don’t seem to care all that much if they’re heard. That makes Kaye Campbell’s script something of a challenge to perform. It needs to be conducted like a vocal score.

Director Jennifer Flowers has concentrated on the emotional transitions and powerplay, but her success here is at the expense of overall timing. Instead of a fugue, the individual voices are an overlapping and tin-eared cacophony. And the hard-won cracking of Kristin’s mask, her carapace of petrified idealism, seems strained and artificial.

Apologia by Alexi Kaye Campbell. Directed by Jennifer Flowers. Set design by Shaun Gurton. Lighting design by Nigel Levings. Melbourne Theatre Company. Fairfax Studio, the Arts Centre, until April 9.

CD Review: Beau Soir. Janine Jansen, violin.

2011-02-21T10:25:00.002+11:00

Like a thoughtfully curated exhibition, a recital program can light up our minds by revealing connections between composers and eras and nations or, as here, by merely offering a simple theme and narrative arc.

In Beau Soir, Dutch violinist Janine Jansen takes us on a starry tour of French music from the “beautiful evening” of Debussy’s title song (arranged for violin and piano by Jascha Heifetz) through moonlight (a transcription of Debussy’s Clair de lune) to darkness (Lili Boulanger’s winsome Nocturne) and dreams (Richard Dubugnon provides the rapid eye movement in the specially-composed Hypnos) and beyond: Faure, Messiaen, Ravel.

Were it no more than a commanding performances of these works on an exquisite instrument -- Jansen plays Stradivari’s ‘Barrere’ -- this would still be a blinder of a recording. But the dynamic rapport Jansen has with her accompanist Itamar Golan, their ability to turn an abstract compositional argument between two instruments into a passionate and increasingly heated domestic, and the almost shocking intimacy of the recording make this the kind of CD you want to commit to, as you would to a concert in a recital hall... or, more accurately, to one in the privacy of your own home.

Listening to Jansen and Golan playing Debussy’s Violin Sonata is like eavesdropping on young, sexy and ever-so-slightly neurotic strangers. The simple dusk-to-dawn program becomes a “long night’s journey into day.” No wonder the French smoke. It helps disguise the heavy breathing.

Beau Soir
Janine Jansen, violin.
With Itamar Golan, piano.
Decca

A shortened version of this review was published in the February 19-20 edition of the Weekend Australian

Review: A Behanding In Spokane by Martin McDonagh. Melbourne Theatre Company.

2011-02-14T03:41:00.009+11:00

My review of A Behanding in Spokane is published in today’s Australian. It’s also on-line, here. Below is the extended remix with commentary track version -- about four times as long -- so don’t say I didn’t warn ya!

The heart of contemporary Irish drama is not in Dublin or Belfast, it’s in the rural west. But its native voices -- George Fitzmaurice, John B Keane, MJ Molloy -- are virtually unknown outside the region let alone the republic.

Galway Bay’s Aran Islands were immortalised by Abbey Theatre co-founder JM Synge, who went there (on Yeats’ advice) to study and write about Irish peasant life. A century on, the names Inishmore, Inishmaan and Inisheer -- the three Aran Islands -- bring to mind another outsider: playwright and filmmaker Martin McDonagh.

The forty year-old McDonagh -- a magnificently foul-mouthed trouble-maker -- was born and raised in London. Like Synge, he only ever holidayed out west. But ‘authority’ is only afforded to those that are heard. And McDonagh has had the entire English-speaking world listening -- and listening rather anxiously -- since The Beauty Queen of Leenane premiered in the mid 1990s.

McDonagh boasts that the National Theatre declined to produce the middle play of his Aran Island trilogy, The Lieutenant of Inishmore, as NT director Trevor Nunn thought the play so incendiary a production might threaten the Northern Ireland peace process! (The INLA lieutenant of the title was thrown out of the IRA for “being too mad.” His only friend is a cat.)

Legend also has it that the first seven of McDonagh’s plays were banged out in just ten months in 1994. The last of these, The Pillowman, performed locally by the MTC in 2007 and Company B in 2008, was the first to be set outside of Ireland. McDonagh’s eighth, A Behanding In Spokane, is set in the US. It’s the first of his plays not to have been drafted in that initial creative burst.

Given that this is McDonagh’s first completely new play in a decade and a half, it’s hardly what you would call a dam-buster -- it’s not much more than an etude, a simple little one-acter in three scenes -- but it is extraordinarily assured.

It’s as fearless and offensively funny as The Lieutenant of Inishmore and morbid as The Pillowman. But if Synge has been a constant and obvious thematic influence on McDonagh’s first two trilogies -- that’s everything pre The Pillowman -- then Shepard is the role model for this one. (And just to be clear about this, McDonagh’s Synge was always decidedly Pinteresque with lashings of PoMo black humour a la Tarantino.)

Druid Theatre co-founder Garry Hynes neatly described McDonagh’s early work as merging the parochial and the postmodern. She told the Guardian, in 2001:

He has that mix of influences and experiences that second- or third-generation Irish people often have, and he has an extraordinary ear for dialogue.

People who say he has no right to write what he does, or that it is not authentic, are missing the point. If you're looking for authenticity, then do not go to the theatre. Period. We are dealing with a world of the imagination here, just like with Synge or O'Casey or whoever, and the imagination knows no limits. Surely that's the essence of theatre, not moral dilemmas or messages. I'd accept that he's young, and that he has a lot of living and a lot of writing to do, but the last thing we should be trying to do is close him off.

Over the years McDonagh has faced repeated accusations of “paddywhacking”. After the premiere of Behanding, in New York last year, the playwright found himself on the receiving end of racism accusations of a different kind.

In his New Yorker review Hilton Als came out swinging:

I don’t know a single self-respecting black actor who wouldn’t feel shame and fury while sitting through Martin McDonagh’s new play, “A Behanding in Spokane” (directed by John Crowley, at the Gerald Schoenfeld). Nor do I know one who would have the luxury of turning the show down, once the inevitable tours and revivals get under way. The play is engineered for success, and McDonagh’s stereotypical view of black maleness is a significant part of that engineering. Still, one wonders how compromised the thirty-one-year-old Anthony Mackie must feel, playing Toby, a black prole whose misadventures are central to this four-character show.”

[...]

He performs as though he were Stepin Fetchit in a room full of bickering ghosts. Toby’s characterization is as offensive as the language used to describe him. While Carmichael’s “nigger” talk could be put down to an attempt of McDonagh’s to expose the nastiness of a segment of the population—many writers have used ugly language to paint an honest portrait of racism in this country—the caricature he presents in Toby, the young black male as shucking, jiving thief, can’t be excused on those grounds, or by the slick professionalism that coats the play’s intellectual decay. McDonagh adds gag after gag to the show, as if he believed that comedy could cover up the real horror at its core: the fact that blackness is, for him, a Broadway prop, an easy way of establishing a hierarchy.

Stepin Fetchit (Lincoln Perry) and Will Rogers in The County Chairman

It’s difficult to tell from a review, of course, but I’d hazard a guess that Bert LaBonté’s Toby in the Melbourne Theatre Company production is less caricatured, less clichéd, than Anthony Mackie’s. Yes, LaBonté plays Toby like a cross between Chris Rock and Lou, the police sergeant in The Simpsons, but he’s way more than “the laziest man in the world” that the Stepin Fetchit character embodied. (Nowadays, the Stepin Fetchit scenes are deleted from broadcasts just as surely as the ‘abo’ verse from Rolf Harris’s ‘Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport’ is.)

Hollywood’s first black millionaire, Lincoln Perry.
His sixteen servants were Asian.

Toby and his white girlfriend Marilyn (Nicole da Silva) are trying to scam Carmichael (Colin Moody) who has been on a quest to recover his severed left hand for more 27 years. [In the premiere of the play, with Christopher Walken in the lead, the length of the quest was upped to 47 years to match the age of the actor, now in his middle 60s.]

Carmichael was “behanded” (behanded, beheaded, you get the picture) as a teen by marauding hillbillies, for reason or reasons unknown. He’s since disposed of the hillbillies, but he won’t stop searching until he has recovered the missing hand. Toby and Marilyn try to sell Carmichael a hand from the local museum, which came from an Australian aborigine. Carmichael, to put it mildly, is not pleased at the colour mismatch.

Rather gamely, Marilyn objects to the gun-toting Carmichael’s use of the N-word. Carmichael replies:

“I’d’a never used the word ‘nigger’ if you hadn’t brought me the hand of a nigger!”

And, later, when they’re on their own, Marilyn tackles Toby over his failure to ‘call’ Carmichael on his use of the word. To which Toby responds:

“Yeah, I’ve got a thing about calling a white supremacist motherfucker who’s got a gun in my face, and my girlfriend’s face, who’s waving a nigger’s hand around like it’s a motherfucking Kentucky Fried motherfucking chicken-wing, yes, I’ve got a thing about picking the dude up upon his offensive mis-usage of RACIAL MOTHERFUCKING EPITHETS!! I’ve got a thing about that!”

They’re both handcuffed to a radiator in a hotel room with a lit candle stuffed into the opening of a can of gasoline when that little exchange takes place.

At the very least, Toby gets 80% of the best lines of the play, which LaBonté delivers in brilliantly clipped, rapid-fire, staccato bursts: “The guy’s an amputee goddam racist motherfucking cracker motherfucking HAND-PSYCHO!” (See what I mean about Chris Rock?)

Enter the hotel’s bizarro “reception guy” Mervyn (Tyler Coppin channelling Tom Waits) -- who has a thing for gibbons, high school shootings and rescue fantasies -- and the quartet is complete.

Bizarre as they most definitely are, all four characters -- sociopaths, scammers and thieves one and all -- are wonderfully fleshy. They’re characters you can walk around... and would hurry across the street to avoid. Marilyn excepted. (Maybe!) The two least sane, if anything, are the most captivating and internally consistent. And most perfectly cast.

The aptly-named Moody makes a brilliantly menacing -- but oddly lovable -- Carmichael. Think Javier Bardem in No Country For Old Men, with a soft spot. (Ah, the powers of reflective listening!) Mervyn is the only one crazy enough to walk up to the propeller; to literally look down the gun barrel into Carmichael’s eyes... and not blink.

Nicole da Silva has a terrific capacity for clowning. There’s a great openness in her acting and fearlessness in physical work that we’ve been lucky enough to see on both stage (This Is Our Youth at fortyfivedownstairs and Hayloft’s BC) and on screen (especially Rush). Marilyn is a comfortable fit for her.

Toby is less of a fit for LaBonté. That’s no slight on him as a performer. The guy’s a star. It’s just a matter of having to dial his talent down for the role in a way that the other cast members don’t. (I haven’t quite nailed this thought. Contributions welcome!)

Peter Evans’ production is every bit as poised and inspired as the writing: from Ben Grant’s banjo and bass score (reminiscent of The Eagles’ Journey of the Sorcerer, which you might know as the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy theme music) to Christina Smith’s elegant, foot-lit, plush-curtained, stage-within-a-stage setting. It’s rare to see a production so well resourced and so well rehearsed, so bent and so enjoyable.

A Behanding In Spokane. Melbourne Theatre Company. At the MTC Sumner Theatre until March 19. Tickets: $61.10 to $83.15. ($30 for under 30s) Bookings: 03 8688 0800.

Directed by Peter Evans. Set and costume design by Christina Smith. Lighting design by Matt Scott. Sound design by Ben Grant. With Colin Moody as Carmichael, Tyler Coppin as Mervyn, Nicole da Silva as Marilyn and Bert LaBonté as Toby.

Review: Ruben Guthrie by Brendan Cowell. Red Stitch Actors Theatre.

2011-02-09T16:11:00.006+11:00

As a general rule, playwrights shouldn’t direct their own work... unless others have had a crack at it first. So Michael Gow didn’t direct a mainstage production of Away until 20 years after Peter Kingston and Neil Armfield had nailed it. And, let’s face it, there wasn’t much need for another production after Armfield’s Peter Brook-like rendition.

Wayne Blair directed the premiere of Ruben Guthrie, by the brilliantly versatile Brendan Cowell, in 2008. And Cowell himself has a crack at directing it for Red Stitch Actors Theatre in this all-new production.

Daniel Frederiksen as Ruben (Photograph: Jodie Hutchinson)

Cowell’s picaresque tale of a substance-abusing Ad-man begins thus: “My name is Ruben Guthrie, and I’m... in advertising.” Ruben is addressing an AA meeting. But ‘alcoholic’ is -- like the word ‘love’ in Joan Armatrading’s ‘Love Song’ -- entirely absent from the play. Unmentionable. Rather than mess with us, Cowell keeps his titular hero off the turps. His resistance is herculean.

As a writer, Cowell’s one conspicuous fault is in failing to sell us Ruben’s relationships with past and future fiancées. Okay, we get it... Zoya, the Czech model is the Zinfandel: balls and class. [Note to Brendan: Zinfandel is a Croatian or even Southern Italian grape. You could even make her a Napa Valley Girl and get away with it!] And the newie, Virginia, is the sparkling mineral water: fizz without intoxication.

But with Erin Dewar playing Virginia, rarely has abstinence seemed so appealing. Virginia is so bloody good to Ruben, she’s so adorable and sexy, it’s hard to buy that he’s still hung up on the superseded (super-) model who is so icy cold and insufferable.

As written -- and as played -- Zoya (Anna Samson) is no more than a trophy he snatched when she was young and vulnerable. There’s no evidence of any connection between them whatsoever. And this makes Ruben look like an ungrateful, insidious, unreformed BASTARD. Well, more of an ungrateful, insidious, unreformed BASTARD than he needs to look.

Either Virginia needs to be far more annoying -- or blatantly failing to get Ruben -- or Zoya needs to have something more substantial on her side than unavailability and history and height!

As a director, Cowell’s one conspicuous fault is not trimming his own words. And, when the catastrophe finally arrives, it’s too long and too loud. Daniel Frederiksen is both shouty and a wee bit one-dimensional, vocally. (Think Sid Snot from the Kenny Everett Video Show or Vivienne from The Young Ones.)

As Ruben’s funboy friend Damian, Simon Maiden is magnificent, irresistible, brilliant.

Simon Maiden and Daniel Frederiksen in Ruben Guthrie
Photograph: Jodie Hutchinson

Nevertheless, under Cowell’s guidance, the estimable Red Stitch ensemble (Erin Dewar, Andrea Swifte, David Whiteley, Anna Samson) and very fine guest actors (Simon Maiden and Dennis Coard) help turn a good script (clever, delightful, well-observed, blunt, you name it) into a great play.

Ruben Guthrie, written and directed by Brendan Cowell. Set design by Peter Mumford. Lighting design by Stelios Karagiannis. Costume design by Kasia Kaczmarek and Olga Makeeva. Sound design by Marlene Samson and Jonathon Shaw. Red Stitch Actors Theatre, St Kilda, until March 5. Tickets: $20-$34. Bookings: 9533 8083.

Review: Song of the Bleeding Throat by David Tredinnick

2011-02-02T13:30:00.001+11:00

Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh documented their lives not wisely but too well! They crushed their world with chronicle and make us long for a purgatory for writers like the one imagined by Hesse in Steppenwolf. Around ten thousand letters went back and forth between them alone.

Cheekily, Samuel Butler praised God for letting Thomas and Jane marry... thus making “only two people miserable and not four.” The famously cranky Thomas devoted 13 years to his six volume biography of Frederick the Great. (By all accounts, it wasn’t just writers block that he suffered from... his bowels were pretty congested too!) Yet Jane dared complain (in a letter, natch) about artist Robert Tait’s excessive attention to detail, painting their home with “Vandkye fidelity”.

Despite photographing the house, Tait worked from life. His 1857 painting ‘A Chelsea Interior’ is, according to Mark Cumming, the only painting in which the husband and wife appear together. The coziness of their living room, Cumming writes, contrasts with the distinct spheres the Carlyles inhabit. “Their separateness indicates their personal differences.”

The 90 minute first part of David Tredinnick’s diptych (more of an installation with actors than a common-or-garden play) literally animates ‘A Chelsea Interior’ using the Carlyles’ published writings and letters and countless other sources. Animates it like a Kit Kat commercial rather than bringing it to fleshy three-dimensional life.

It also depicts Tait’s prolonged and intrusive presence which so irked Jane. Weirdly enough, the Carlyles’ dog Nero (James Saunders) is the most animated character of the lot!

Like a pair of Beckett characters frozen in space and time, the famously cranky couple moan about their ailments, their noisy neighbours and the not-quite-soundproof attic room in which Thomas is attempting to complete his massive biography of Frederick.

The cut-up portrait of the couple is clever enough, but it is territory charmingly and thoroughly covered by Thea Holme in her book The Carlyles at Home. (Holme lived and work in the same house as the Carlyles a century after them. And a few punny jokes aside (“My stock is reduced.” “Oh! A culinary metaphor!” Boom, boom!) Song of the Bleeding Throat is dry to the point of aridness.

The shorter second half is a slapstick and jokey encounter between Walt Whitman (Richard Bligh) and Abe Lincoln (Neil Pigot), who is delirious on his deathbed. John Wilkes Booth (Saunders) and Liberty herself (Anne Browning) also materialise.

Like a lop-sided cluster of stars, Song invites us to make a constellation out of the opposing tableaux; to infer a grander significance from the parts. There’s a chance, I suppose, that we might one day regard this text as a classic, like one of Bowie’s cut-up songs on Diamond Dogs. But, right now, to me at least, it’s hard enough to infer a grammar out of the bits let alone muster up the energy to read any significance into them. And the words, by themselves, don’t have much in the way of music to sustain them.

Given the randomness of the text, Richard Bligh’s performance (especially as Thomas) is an awesome feat of memory. But then admiration is a long way short of satisfaction.

Song of the Bleeding Throat by David Tredinnick. Dramaturgy by William Henderson. Directed and designed (with Alexis George) by Brian Lipson. Lighting by Niklas Pajanti and Nicola Andrews. Commissioned and presented by The Eleventh Hour. At The Eleventh Hour Theatre, 170 Leicester Street Fitzroy, until February 12. Tickets $40, $25 concession. Bookings: 9419 5649.

Dance Australia Critics’ Survey 2010

2011-01-21T04:09:00.000+11:00

Phoebe Robinson in Sandra Parker’s Transit

Here’s my contribution to Dance Australia magazine’s annual survey of critics.

Highlight of the year

Tempest: without a body

Tempest: without a body by Lemi Ponifasio/MAU (Sydney Festival, at the Seymour Centre)

Coppélia - the best staging of this Australian Ballet production in decades.

Most significant dance event

The announcement that Gideon Obarzanek would step down as AD/CEO of Chunky Move at the end of 2011. Few would have predicted, 15 years ago, just how generous and egoless a director Obarzanek would make.

Most interesting Australian group or artist

Red Moon Rising, especially its Butoh-lite piece for Next Wave: The Oak’s Bride.

Emiline Foster, especially her multi-medium piece for the Fringe Festival: Dust.

Atlanta Eke, as a solo artist in Private Dances (Next Wave) and in the Deborah Hay project.

Most interesting overseas group or artist

The Akram Khan company (Vertical Road, Melbourne Festival)

Most outstanding choreography

Rafael Bonachela’s We Unfold for Sydney Dance Company

Stephanie Lake’s Mix Tape for Chunky Move

Best new work

Frankie Snowdon and Benamin Hancock in Something Blew

A new version of Something Blew by 2ndToe Dance Collective for Theatre Works in St Kilda

After some teething problems, Graeme Murphy’s The Silver Rose

Most outstanding dancer

Jorijn Vriesendorp

Jorijn Vriesendorp (recently Chunky Move’s Mix Tape)

Sabina Perry (JACK Productions’ Human Abstract)

Phoebe Robinson (recently Sandra Parker’s Transit)

Daniel Gaudiello (especially in Coppélia)

Dancer to watch

Eloise Fryer, Brett Chynoweth (Australian Ballet)

Frankie Snowdon (as a solo artist and with 2ndToe)

Biggest disappointment

The expected disappointment: come, been and gone by the Michael Clark Company... I saw them in 1987 and had no wish -- ever -- to see them again.

The unexpected disappointment: Maybe Forever by Meg Stewart -- an ordinary piece from an extraordinary artist.

Best book of 2010: Richo

2011-01-17T07:07:00.005+11:00

I’m the first to admit that my “book of the year” choices over the past dozen years -- first in The Big Issue then in the annual “Must Have” wrap in the Financial Review -- might have tended towards the eccentric. A bit. Maybe. In 2000, I planted the rosette on the Oxford Australian Dictionary... and I’m still tryin’ to live it down.

In my defence, I’d like to point out that I was wrangling a team of reviewers, that year, headed by the estimable Stephanie Holt and Thuy On, both of whom could be relied upon to cover the usual suspects -- or in Thuy’s case the most recent Martin Amis book -- in their respective wraps.

My gong in 1999 went to Thea Astley’s Drylands. I wrote at the time that it would’ve been a strong contender for book of the decade. 2001’s nod went (somewhat belatedly) to John Banville’s Eclipse. Then came the non-fiction years, post 9/11: Noam Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival, John Miller’s Al Qaeda book The Cell, and so on... Then fiction caught up with the apocalypse again... with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

All were made after long hard thought and a lot of reading.

But, hell, even I’m hesitating about this latest one. And, I confess, I haven’t read as much or as widely as in previous years. Nevertheless, I’ve gotta say the best book I encountered in 2010 was Richo. No, not an as-yet unpublished expose on the NSW Labor power broker. The other Richo: former Richmond full-forward in the AFL.

It’s billed as co-written by Matthew Richardson and Martin Flanagan, but it is a Flanagan book through and through. You know, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Flanagan chose Richo, the man, as the perfect pretext for the book he wanted to write. This is a mighty book of history -- of inner urban Melbourne as much as it is of VFL footy -- of sociology and anthropology.

It’s a book driven by curiosity rather than fanaticism. As a result, it has a much broader appeal than you might imagine. The fact that I could be arsed flicking through a book about a player I didn’t know from Adam Ramanauskas [kidding], in a team that has been down on its luck for decades, in a game that doesn’t exactly lend itself to great literature says a lot about [a] the author and [b] the sheer quality of the story-telling. And I could not put it down.

So, even if your interest in AFL is passing, as long as you think there is something to be learned about society and masculinity -- about life itself -- from its blood sports, Richo is well worth a look. Better than that. It’s pretty much essential reading for Melburnians and the odd punter from Tassie. At the very least.

Richo is published by Ebury Press, a Random House imprint.

888 and out... or "It’s about time I updated my blogger profile!"

2011-01-11T01:11:00.004+11:00

Numbers? Hell. (Or, if I may quote the opening line of Apocalypse Now: "Saigon... Shiiiit.") 11/1/11. The review of Not Quite Out of the Woods in today’s Herald Sun (not on-line so far, so I’ll include it below) [update: it’s now on-line, here.] is the 888th piece I’ve written for HWT. (Yeah, yeah. Trust me to keep count.) It’s also my last for them. For the time being at least.

I managed to get to 6-6-7 for The Big Issue before I, er, walked the plank... a fountain pen instead of a cutlass in the small of my back. (Aptly, a Nick Cave CD was neighbour of The Beast.)

And I cracked the 700s with The Financial Review, no magic number there. That’s another relationship that has to be severed in my move to The Australian -- unless you’re Peter Craven you can’t review for both national dailies -- though ‘severed’ seems an odd word to use... I’m pretty sure the relationship is dead, but I’ve been waiting a year for the corpse to wash ashore. In my 20th year with the Fin, the work simply stopped. Without so much as a "so long."

Wish I could find something a bit more profound to quote than "and out again, upon the unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea" -- wish I were quoting Matthew Arnold instead of John Fowles too... but you get that. After the jump, the Wharf Revue reviewed...

Like a Chris Rock performance, you can almost carbon date Not Quite Out of the Woods by what’s not included. When a couple of blond boys walk on, hand in hand, everyone’s geared up for the inevitable Julian Assange gag... which never comes. They’re Hansel and Hansel and wanting to talk about Penny Wong and gay marriage. Assange doesn’t rate a single mention. Apparently the show was more or less locked down around the time of the election. (It premiered in Newcastle on September 9, last year.) Obviously the three little piggie indies, for example, are a relatively late addition.

Here’s the (short but sweet) Herald Sun review:

The Wharf Revue: Not Quite Out Of The Woods written and created by Jonathan Biggins, Drew Forsythe and Phillip Scott. (Jonathan Biggins director, Phil Scott music director.) At the MTC Theatre, Sumner, until January 29, 2011.

This is shock and awe comedy. It’s a well-drilled and completely overwhelming blitzkrieg of satire and smut, of rhyme and reason, of current affairs and fairy tales. In ninety minutes, there’s hardly time to draw breath between thigh-slapping guffaws and gasps of disbelief.

So much is packed into this one show, you quite literally won’t have time to be bored or disappointed by any single gag or routine. Even if you don’t get a reference, or don’t watch the TV show being sent up, you can still be sucked in by the scintillating rhyming couplets, the physical and vocal impersonations and the cleverness of the writing.

The annual STC Wharf Revue rarely crosses state lines. This is an above-average example. Indeed, it’s as good as we’ve seen from Jonathan Biggins, Drew Forsythe and Phil Scott as a creative team.

They’re joined, here, by Amanda Bishop whose impressions of Julia Gillard are terrifyingly good. She’s got the flat tones and wooden gestures down pat. (Bishop is a damn fine singer and dancer too.)

Other highlights are Tony Abbott in Abbotar (to the strains of Judas’s song from Jesus Christ Superstar) and a routine about Japanese whaling to a medley from The Mikado. But there’s something to offend everyone. Seriously.

Things seen and unseen...

2011-01-05T04:52:00.003+11:00

Asked to write a hit list of the best of the year to come in Melbourne theatre, I spun a yarn about the pittance that our so-called fringe artists have to live on, about project funding and the 0.01% of the Victorian state budget devoted to indie companies and projects.

That decimal point is in the right place incidentally. Just one percent of one percent. Yowza.

That Herald Sun article is on-line, here.

And, guess what? My actual prognostications didn't make the cut! The story was deemed more important than the prophecy! (I can't argue with that.) So, for what it's worth, this is a very short list -- the pointy end of a no-doubt massive iceberg -- of the shows I reckon will rock our worlds, in Melbourne, in 2011.

* After the stunning success of Thyestes, The Hayloft Project is adapting another ancient classic: Antigone. Another bloodbath!

* More fear and loathing from Black Lung: The Plague Cycle.

* Faith, religion and reincarnation are on the minds of both Stephanie Lake (creating Holy in 2011) and Phillip Adams’ (a new piece called Above).

* Last, but never least, Rawcus Theatre Company’s Small Odysseys.

If I'd been asked to do my crystal ball act re the year in ballet, the glass would have been fogged up with my drooling anticipation of what Graeme Murphy will do with Romeo & Juliet and Prokofiev's electrifying score.

Good to its word, the Herald Sun is ramping up its on-line coverage of the arts. Bout time too... Out of the 900-odd articles and reviews I've written for HWT, I reckon I've seen about five on-line. Counting this one.

Astute TN readers (aren't they all?) will already know this, but -- er -- I'm the new Alison Croggon: the Melbourne theatre crritic for The Australian. The shoes might not be big -- they're rather dainty actually -- but the heels are stratospheric. (How oddly Shakespearean that sounds! "Our aery buildeth in the cedar's top/And dallies with the wind, and scorns the sun...") [Here's hoping I don't turn too many suns to shade!]

Proving that worlds sometimes begin with a whimper, my first review in the new role was just a shorty. Unusually for The Australian, it doesn't appear on-line. So, here 'tis:

What Australian circus may lack in skill levels is more than made up for in personality. Think Circus Oz, the Rock ’n’ Roll Circus and Legs on the Wall. And thanks to the establishment of the National Institute of Circus Arts in Melbourne, and regular tours from outfits as diverse as Cirque du Soleil and Archaos, local audiences are not so easily awed. Skill levels in Le Grand Cirque’s touring company range from adequate to spectacular, the acts swing from ho-hum to genuinely death-defying. But apart from a brilliant balloon routine from the otherwise obnoxious MC, Le Grand Cirque has all the personality of a diamante. Le Grand Cirque is at the Regent Theatre, Melbourne, until January 23. Tickets: $64.90-$84.90. Another production by Le Grand Cirque, Adrenaline, opens at the Sydney Opera House on Thursday January 6. Tickets: $59-$95.

This review appeared in The Australian on Monday January 3, 2011.

Degree of difficulty

2011-01-02T18:07:00.005+11:00

Le Grand Cirque:

Hải Phòng:

I don't want to split hairs here, but I counted nine on the bike at the Regent Theatre on Thursday night, not the twelve in the press pic. And, well, Circus Oz was doin' all this and more on a much much smaller stage, the Playhouse at the Arts Centre believe it or not, way back in 1987.

And while we're in Hải Phòng, here's one more for the road...

What is the place of serious criticism in the age of instant, ubiquitous opinion?

2011-01-01T15:43:00.002+11:00

There are half a dozen articles on literary criticism in Sunday's New York Times under the header "What is the place of serious criticism in the age of instant, ubiquitous opinion?" The index and editors' introduction is here.

They range from thoughtful to evangelical to downright hyperbolic (cop the quotation from Sam Anderson's piece, below!) but they make interesting reading.

Anderson writes:

Martin Amis, one of my reviewing heroes, made an apt comment once about the special nature of book criticism: he said that art critics, when they review art shows, don’t paint pictures about those shows, film critics don’t review movies by making movies about them and music critics don’t review concerts by composing symphonies. “But,” he said, “when you review a prose-narrative, then you write a prose-narrative about that prose-narrative.” This is the magic, and the opportunity, of the form. In reviewing a book, we respond artfully to a work of art in its own medium. We write words about words — and then, as the conversation progresses, we write words about words about words about words. Our work is a kind of ground zero of textuality, in which one text converges on another text to create a third, hybrid, ultratext. This self-reflexiveness doesn’t make critical writing secondary or parasitic, as critics of the critics have said for centuries: it makes it complex and fascinating and exponentially exciting. It reminds me of Aristotle’s description of the mind of God, an apparatus so divinely perfect it can think only of itself: “Its thinking is a thinking on thinking.”

My reaction? Maybe Marty should get his hand off it. (You too Sam!) Composers have been responding to each others works critically, in kind, for centuries. Visual artists too. Rare is the literary critic that can match, let alone eclipse, the original writer.

My fave reviews Of All Time were by DH Lawrence, especially his responses to Walt Whitman. DH skewers Walt. Oh, yeah! That's art! But it's all DH innit? I didn't love Walt any less after seeing him disemboweled. But I did like DH a whole lot more. Enough to forgive him (most of) his trespasses.

August Strindberg’s Creditors — a new version by David Greig

2010-11-22T05:19:00.010+11:00

Of all the writers and artists in history, the one I’d most like to see on Dr Pamela Connolly’s Shrink Rap sofa is August Strindberg. Married and divorced three times -- there were a couple of actresses in there too, poor fool! -- and as mad as a cut cat. He waged war against Ibsen for feminising the stage and, less unreasonably, for allowing his women to dance about on their men’s graves singing hallelujah. Strindberg wanted fair fights... he wanted Ibsen’s men to have the opportunity to tell their side of the story.

Dion Mills and Brett Cousins in the first scene of Creditors
Photograph © Jodie Hutchinson, used with permission.

Funnily enough, Ibsen had one of Strindberg’s self-portraits on the wall where he wrote. He joked, late in his life, that he couldn’t write a word without Strindberg glowering down at him.

Of Strindberg’s great naturalistic ‘confrontation’ plays, I’ve always preferred this play, Creditors, and (to a lesser extent) The Stronger to Miss Julie and The Father. The clumsy inclusion of class differences in the latter plays makes them look dated, more like a Lorenzo da Ponte opera libretto for Mozart than a psychodrama.

A passing familiarity with the early plays (The Father 1887, Creditors and Miss Julie 1888, The Stronger 1890) brings with it a number of automatic spoilers: the reveal of identity, for example, and Strindberg’s inclusion in the action... usually as a character named Adolph!

But if you’re a newcomer to this play -- and I haven’t betrayed any of those surprises so far -- you might want to see it a second time.

Scottish playwright David Greig (known here for Yellow Moon, Outlying Islands, The American Pilot and others) has taken a literal translation of Creditors and refashioned it as a script worthy of Neil LaBute. It’s as harrowing as The Captive by Proust too, if you’re the pathetic/possessive type.

... I haven’t entirely decided if Greig’s version is good Strindberg, or even if good Strindberg is possible 122 years on, but it’s definitely impressive and thought provoking...

I haven’t entirely decided if Greig’s brilliant new version is good Strindberg, or even if good Strindberg is possible 122 years on, but it’s definitely impressive and thought provoking. It’s feminist, too, in an accidental way.

Having been raised on Man Made Language by Dale Spender, and the rest of the canon, I found the argument in this play about the Male Protection Racket quite fascinating. Gustav (Dion Mills) argues, instead: it’s an escort racket... i.e. that first husbands are a means of escaping the stifling environment of family. (And that reminded me of Head On, a fairly recent and very powerful Turkish/German film about a suicidal young woman who opts to marry a decrepit stranger, at her own expense, so that she can hold hands with boys -- for starters, heh! -- and not have her nose broken by her brutally ‘protective’ brother.)

On the whole, this is a strong production too, though director David Bell and the cast (particularly Kat Stewart and Brett Cousins as wife and husband Tekla and Adolph) urgently need to address the gaping contradiction between Tekla’s book-throwing tantrum in the middle scene and her appearance as a thoughtful, fair and intelligent woman in the last. They’re not irreconcilable.

Strindberg understood:it ain’t what you say, it’s the way that you say. (And that in itself is remarkable, because Strindberg the man was a complete slave to his impulses and would, one imagines, be entirely incapable of saying something critical to his wife without it erupting into a paroxysm of passion. Yet Strindberg the artist knew enough about himself, about humanity, to see that another person -- cooler and more evolved than himself -- could deliver the exact same message to his wife and have it heard and absorbed and accepted.)

“What my nature demands” is the catchcry in this version, reminiscent of “it’s beyond my control” in Dangerous Liaisons. Of course what strikes us about Tekla -- that she’s a thoroughly modern missy -- might have struck Strindberg’s audience as appalling. Her very honesty about her need for other men, to flirt with and more, is admirable to us. And might well be monstrous in the time he wrote.

But in defending The Father (I think) after it had been rejected by a couple of producers and publishers, Strindberg wrote that in the fullness of time the rejecting producer will see that the play “contains the future” -- even if the wise still think it mad. Touche.

One of the best lines in Creditors drew laughs on opening night, though was played perfectly straight. [Spoiler alert, skip to the end of this par.] Gustav, the ex husband, compares his rediscovery of Tekla to the tasting of wine -- “a wine of my own bottling”-- years after laying it down. She was an inexperienced new wife, then. He now finds her complex and mature. I thought this a brilliant and apt metaphor.

Meh.

Creditors, a tragicomedy by August Strindberg in a new version by David Greig. Directed by David Bell. Set and costume design by Loren Whiffin. Lighting design by Stelios Karagiannis. AV/sound design by Brett Ludeman. Red Stitch Actors Theatre. November 19, 2010. Season ends December 18.

My official [i.e. marginally less ranty!] review of Creditors is in today’s [Monday November 22, 2010] Herald Sun.

Cackling like a macaque: Carlee Mellow in Expectation

2010-11-12T04:28:00.007+11:00

UPDATE: Shirley McKechnie’s review is on-line, here.

Carlee Mellow is a superstar, a commando, someone I’d happily watch cleaning her teeth and expect to leave inspired. So, if she wants to cackle like a macaque, or prance around like a barbie doll in invisible high heels with a giant bag on her head, or sing backwards like an extra in a Twin Peaks red room dream sequence -- and she does all of those things in Expectation -- hell... I’m there.

I’ve gotta say, I prefer Diva Carlee -- hula dancing to a Donizetti aria, which she did at fortyfivedownstairs eight years ago -- to Grand Mal Carlee (which she played for Gideon Obarzanek in this very Town Hall) but a solo show from Ms Mellow is a once in a half decade thing, at best.

Promo image: Igor Sapina

This one... I found rather frustrating. (No, not like that!) (Though personally, I would have preferred if she’d kept her togs on and danced in a backless dress instead.)

Anyway, here’s the short [i.e. marginally less ranty] version...

In theatre -- in any art -- there’s a scalpel thin line between ‘open-ended’ and ‘noncommittal’. An image can evoke different things to different viewers -- a fine thing -- or anything to anyone... which is not so good.

To me, Expectation is about silhouettes and the ‘dark side’ of things, both literally and metaphorically... of planets and people. There’s an extraordinary moment late in the piece when Carlee Mellow has her back to us, the sweep of her repeated gesture is hidden, and the dance is revealed through the skin of her back, in her very musculature. [Here’s where I wanted backless... instead, she drops the lot... and leaves us in the dark. Metaphorically too.]

Elsewhere, thanks to the visual and aural genius of Bluebottle, Mellow appears as a mirage of radiant energy, pivoting and jog-shuffling in a haze of infrared light and infralow beats. Her mad singsong voice, later, is turned to a shimmering aurora of pipe organ sound.

As much as there is to admire and enjoy and be utterly dazzled by in Expectation, there’s not quite enough structure or coherence to hold the atoms together let alone engage our hearts and minds, which would transform a fascinating (and occasionally baffling) work into a great one.

Expectation. Choreographed and performed by Carlee Mellow. Music composed and performed by Kelly Ryall. Designed and produced by Bluebottle [Ben Cobham and Frog Peck with lighting operator Tom Rogers and Bosco Shaw]. Unfortunate non-backless costume design by Doyle Barrow. Dramaturgical consultant: Margaret Cameron.

Part of Future Tense at Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall. Tuesday November 9. (Season ends Sunday November 14.)

Evocative and provocative: Something Blew by 2ndToe Dance Collective

2010-11-12T04:04:00.005+11:00

The last 2ndToe season at Theatre Works was a pro-am affair, with one half performed by the collective, the other performed by secondary students who worked with the pro dance-makers. The ‘pro’ piece was ambitious but overwrought and messy. The ‘Am’ stuff, while simple, was disciplined and powerful.

After the jump is my Herald Sun review of the latest season, Something Blew... cos Luke George asked so nicely. I probably should add, up front, that the season is now closed, so don’t get your hopes up.

Something Blew -- a revised version of a piece first seen last year -- sees 2ndToe at its absolute best. There’s a real sophistication in the staging, and evidence of an instinctive and exciting theatrical imagination. It’s an hour-long physical theatre piece about hooking up, making out and breaking up; about love, sex, commitment and its death...

Photograph by Samuel Nicolausson

It begins with a barefoot bride (Emily Ranford) standing in an elaborate white dress, complete with veil and train. The elegant bridal party stands in a line against the wall behind her. Over the next several minutes the bride is cling-wrapped. Mummified. Turned into a cocoon. It’s an often-seen gimmick of late, but it works miraculously well here. First the gentle movement of the bride’s fingertips is restricted then, eventually, everything except her breathing is stopped.

The piece then fractures into spin-off stories -- from past and future -- perfect shards in a magnificently-lit kaleidoscopic whole. The metaphors are well calculated, both evocative and provocative.

Something Blew isn’t especially memorable choreographically, but the quality, intensity and unity in performance -- by the entire cast of eight -- more than compensates. It’s an extraordinary achievement from an indie company. Do see it.

Something Blew. Directed and choreographed by Adam Wheeler and dancers. Lighting design by Rose Connors Dance [a bloody talented individual, BTW, not a company!]. Costume design -- and we're talking serious couture here -- by Chloe Greaves. Sound design by the ingenious Alisdair Macindoe. Dramaturgy by Luke George.

Presented by 2ndToe Dance Collective and Theatre Works. October/November 2010.

Daniel Keene’s Life Without Me and Jack Charles V The Crown

2010-10-18T02:41:00.006+11:00

Gosh, doesn’t this look weird! And, hey, dya think the subbies are takin’ the piss outa me?

My review of Daniel Keene’s play Life Without Me is on-line, here.

After the jump, my Herald Sun review of Jack Charles V The Crown.

“Clay is land,” Jack Charles tells us. “We belong to the land.”

He means all of us.

Clay is the brilliant driving metaphor of his show, and a sustaining metaphor of Charles’ own life. This thieving, heroin-shooting actor -- taken from his mother soon after his birth in 1943 -- discovered pottery in one of his many stints behind bars.

Jack’s a natural. He throws a few pieces in the course of his seventy-minute story. The deftly-shaped pieces are unfired... rather like the man: still fragile and malleable, even at the age of 67.

Jack Charles (photo: supplied)

He tells us of a creation myth from the Kulin nation in which life is breathed into two clay figures, just as Adam is brought to life by the god of the old testament.

This is an earthy tale of survival, shaped with easy skill by co-writer John Romeril and director Rachael Maza Long. It poses many more questions than it answers and so we're sent out into the night wondering about justice, identity and addiction.

Jack Charles V The Crown could do with a bit of a glaze, but the shape is right and it invites us to fire up our minds to finish it off by ourselves.

Jack Charles V The Crown. Based on the life of Uncle Jack Charles and spoken in his own words. Co-written with John Romeril. Dramaturgy by John Romeril. Script consultancy by Melanie Beddie. Set and costume design by Emily Barrie. Lighting design by Danny Pettingill. Musical direction by Nigel MacLean. AV design by Peter Worland. Ilbijerri Theatre Company for the Melbourne Festival. Fairfax Studio, the Arts Centre, Tuesday October 12.

Dude dance: Adapting for Distortion & Haptic by Hiroaki Umeda

2010-10-16T15:22:00.007+11:00

Guest post by Jana Perkovic

Dude dance, or boy-choreography. The foyer discussion turned into an animated bitch fight about whether once we conclude that all men tend toward autism (as Simon Baron-Cohen argues, and so did some foyer men), this excuses male choreographers from engaging with emotion.

Adapting for Distortion (photograph by Alex)

I expected a work in the general category of Mortal Engine, and thought it was even closer to it than just generally close. All possible interpretations of Adapting for Distortion as metaphors for how contemporary technology eats people are as possible as they are simplistic: how innovative and progressive to produce the very object of purported critique (?!).

Haptic (photograph: Bertrand Baudry)

It was not the quality of the execution, but the thinness of it, that put off the female part of the foyer.

During the first part of A for D, I remember thinking: ‘well, I’m sure there are complex mathematical concepts behind the realisation of this work, but I don’t care because it’s just so damn pretty’. During the second half, I was thinking: ‘well, I don’t care how good-looking this light-and-sound machine is, there is no soul here’. Pay attention: not ‘heart’. It was not emotion that was missing, it was depth.

Dude Dance is technological, not emotional, by default. Hence Simon B-C: it’s Asperger’s choreography. I’ve seen in the work of other exponents of Dude Dance attempts to address this lack by tacking sentiment onto it (see Mortal Engine for the most crystalline example), and the whole work collapsing into a heap, now guilty both of heartlessness and sentimentality. However, the most interesting (to me) proponent of Dude Dance, Wayne McGregor, puts together works that are as emotionally illiterate as they are in every sense sublime; if anything, the other-worldliness of McGregor’s concepts universalises his dances into something like philosophy on slender legs.

I am in no doubt that Hiroaki Umeda aspires to making philosophy on slender legs too; alas, his work is still closer to a video game.

Hiroaki Umeda in Haptic (photograph: Shin Yamagata)

Parenthesis: I loved Haptic up until the moment another foyer guy insisted that for him it had all the qualities of early Super Mario. Until that point, Haptic was a colourful dance macaron of sorts: much less brutal than A for D, its combinations of complementary colours and a moving man creating intensely hallucionatory effects in one’s mind. A pink man dancing behind the black man; that sort of thing. Until the Super Mario point, I was deeply taken with the experience and, to the extent to which the judgement of a girl can override a boy’s keen-eyed identification with Umeda’s preoccupations, I would argue it is a subtle, beautiful and rich work.

But I came out feeling an uncanny urge to watch some Bill Viola. Inappropriate and unfair as this may be, Umeda’s diptych seemed to have tickled just the right part of me. By putting on a hi-tech binge of sub-emotional effect, which buzzes but also fizzes away, it seems to provoke a need for a hi-tech sub-emotional experience that hits you in the gut instead. It was as if we came out on a dubious, nervous high, and needed to validate it with a satisfying come-down.

cross-posted at Guerrilla Semiotics

Adapting for Distortion and Haptic. Choreographed and performed by Hiroaki Umeda. Sound and lighting by S20 with Bertrand Baudry (Adapting for Distortion) and Hervé Villechenoux (Haptic). Melbourne Festival. Merlyn Theatre, Thursday October 14. Season ends Sunday October 17.

Thomas Adès and Calder Quartet

2010-10-12T16:26:00.008+11:00

What is it about pianists that makes them so bloody memorable? Off the top of my head, I can name just one cello soloist that rocked my world: Pieter Wispelwey, who played his instrument like a ventriloquist... even moving his lips. One or two brilliant woodwind musicians spring to mind, a harpist, even a trombone soloist... though if you've ever seen Christian Lindberg play live, you will never forget him! I'd be struggling to name any but the most obvious violinists. (The Bovver Boy is unforgettable for all the wrong reasons.)

But when it comes to the piano, I could reel off my top ten indelible concert experiences without pausing for breath. Brilliant artists and/or brilliant performances. Cecile Licad stamping her way through Beethoven's third piano concerto is the first of those memories. Melvyn Tan (the man who decoded Beethoven's bagatelles for us by playing them on the Broadwood fortepiano that the composer owned at the time they were written) transmitting Chopin's preludes with his face is one of the more recent memories. Jorge Bolet (like Rudolf Serkin, a pianist from another era) playing Liszt like an old priest, with those massive hands of his, is another ancient-but-not-faded memory. Dimitris Sgouros was at the other end of the age scale. Young and old. All prodigies. And let's not forget the stylish and incomparable Jean-Yves Thibaudet playing Debussy. Playing anything. God. The ravishment.

To that list, I now have to add Thomas Adès. Hands like catcher's mitts. Think the "man's hands" ep. of Seinfeld, only much much bigger. I'm not an enormous fan of his music. More curious than committed. But the opportunity to see Adès playing his own piano quintet was incentive enough to get me to the Melbourne Recital Centre on Sunday.

Thomas Adès

As it happens, the quintet, the backmarker in the concert, was something of an anticlimax. But the climaxes were -- ah -- early and often.

The Calder played Adès's Arcadiana first up. Seven movements for string quartet. The first left me nauseous. It's one of those "classical music will eat itself" compositions in which centuries of Romantic and Classical music are gobbled down and chundered up... and the audience has the 'pleasure' of rooting through the chuck looking for bits of carrot and tomato skins that we recognise.

From there, though, the rest of the work is plain sailing. Better than plain sailing. It's as if the musicians left their rosin at home knowing the Elisabeth Murdoch Hall would carry their whisper music to the back row. Which, of course, it did.

Calder Quartet

Adès took the place of Calder Quartet for the remainder of the first half of the concert. Clumsily, but endearingly, he led by explaining that all of his music is other people's music. He then played Darknesse Visible, his solo piano take on John Dowland's 17th century lute song 'In Darkness Let Me Dwell'.

Whereas the Calder had taken us sailing into silence, Adès exploited both the dynamic limits of his piano and the dynamic limits of the recital hall. He floated left pedal notes so soft, it was as if they had drifted in, like Spring mist over Albert Park lake. He crashed other notes so stridently, one feared for the mechanism of the Steinway. (A tuner worked frantically through interval!)

It was so much more than mere emo sturm und drang. It was riveting. Spectacular. Absolutely unforgettable.

He backed up, after interval, with some fascinating solo pieces by Stravinsky and Nancarrow -- absurdly difficult pianola works which fit very nicely with Stifter's Dinge happening a block or two further south of the Yarra -- before Calder Quartet retook the stage to perform the piano quintet with its composer.

But, for me, the metaphorical cigarettes were smoked at half time! The rest was merely afterplay.

See also Clive O'Connell's excellent review, here. (He heard Martinu, I heard Bartók.)

Melbourne Festival: The Blue Dragon

2010-10-11T16:20:00.007+11:00

Cameron Woodhead's review of The Blue Dragon is on-line at The Age web site, here, and I find I pretty much agree with the major points he makes.

But what intrigues me is how a four star rating can be awarded a show in which "the narrative remains superficial", the plot "resembles [that of] a middlebrow midlife crisis novel", the characters "leave faint impressions" and where the show, like the protagonist Pierre, is "infected by orientalism" and might leave us "undernourished"... even the Chinese dance is "problematic".

I quite agree!

Henri Chassé contemplates... bathwater sans baby

Oh, and "the performers develop a static, exaggerated style that rarely moves beyond caricature." Touché again.

Cameron, oh Cameron... has your review been nobbled? I know (via Twitter) Michelle Griffin loved The Blue Dragon, and that Michael Shmith (IRL) adored it too... But, gasp, would they? Could they?

Me? I gave it a solid two outa five. My date slept quietly.

Robert Lepage and his Ex Machina company have been regulars on the festival circuit since the 1990s. For good reason. He is a brilliant story teller and actor, and an ingenious director of theatre, opera and more recently film. We’ve seen his one-person shows and his hardcore operas (Bartok and Schoenberg) as well as his marathon soap operas. His last work in Australia, Lipsynch, had five intervals and ran from early afternoon deep into the night. Like many of his works, it spanned generations and continents. It was gripping and deeply moving.

In comparison, The Blue Dragon (created the year after Lipsynch) is a mediocre work, a banal tale badly told. It’s Madame Butterfly set in a booming modern China instead of war-torn Japan. The contemporary twist is certainly topical -- the intersection of China’s one-child-per-couple policy and the West’s recent obsession with the adoption of children from non-Western countries -- but the treatment is superficial and the acting is soulless and half-hearted.

Five-star orientalism: Tai Wei Foo in The Blue Dragon

The star of this show, really, is Michel Gauthier’s set which morphs from the inside of a plane to a Shanghai loft to a railway station in the blink of an eye. What a shame the projected translations (the play is performed in French, Mandarin and English) on opening night weren’t anywhere near as well honed.

A slightly shortened version of this review appears in The Herald Sun today.

The Blue Dragon. Written by Robert Lepage and Marie Michaud. Produced by Ex Machina. Directed by Robert Lepage. Set design by Michel Gauthier. Sound design by Jean-Sébastien Côté. Lighting design by Louis-Xavier Gagnon-Lebrun. Costume design by François St-Aubin. Projection design by David Leclerc. Choreographed by Tai Wei Foo. Performed by Henri Chassé, Marie Michaud and Tai Wei Foo.

Jumping the gun: Ranters Theatre’s Intimacy and Affection

2010-10-07T15:50:00.005+11:00

Okay, so the 2010 Melbourne Festival doesn’t officially start until tomorrow, but jumping the gun this evening is the Malthouse with Ranters’ latest show Intimacy. It’s another collaboration between Adriano and Raimondo Cortese, this time with Adriano billed as directing the show -- and devising it with the cast -- and Raimondo providing the text. (Now there’s a loaded word! I assume they mean ‘text’ as opposed to ‘performance text’.)

It’s heretical, I know, but I wasn’t a great fan of the much lauded Holiday, Ranters’ last blockbuster, which the Malthouse gave a second life. But -- as I explain below -- I was happy to sit back and see what developed next from this adventurous, restless, intriguing company.

In winter last year, the next evolutionary step in the Cortese collaboration had an early showing. To the Paul Lum/Patrick Moffatt mix of Holiday, Ranters announced it was adding Heather Bolton. For anyone familiar with Bolton’s work, the mere mention of her name was enough to light up the mind. What a perfect choice. That expectant look she has perfected -- it seems to hold introversion and extraversion in perfect suspension -- would be a perfect addition to any sequel.

As it happens, Bolton was a late scratching from the production (which was entitled Affection) for personal reasons. Beth Buchanan -- no stranger to the work of the Corteses -- filled in, script in hand. And she lounged about, very much at home, as if the script were a magazine to leaf through while hangin’ with friends.

Intimacy (the play that opens tonight) reunites Buchanan, Lum and Moffatt. I’ve gotta say, I can’t wait.

After the jump is my review of Affection.

Affection by Ranters Theatre. FULL TILT at the Arts Centre. Black Box, until July 11, 2009.

What a journey Raimondo Cortese has had as a writer for the stage. His very earliest pieces were loose baggy monsters, novels turned into plays. A Shakespearean phase, lush and erotic, followed. Then came the pointillism, around the time of St Kilda Tales, where dialogue would come in tiny flashes, lit up and snuffed out.

But each step he has taken away from the dazzling, heightened, poetic language of, say, Lucrecia and Cesare (1994) has been a step towards something. I want to call it ‘verismo’ but it’s the ‘truth’ of literature (like Zola) rather than the potboiling melodrama of Italian opera. The language has become more and more natural -- indistinguishable from conversations we might eavesdrop on -- but there are blueprints... a clear, if hidden, structure. The dramatic ‘action’ has all but disappeared.

Cortese’s last play, Holiday, won rave reviews and a swag of awards. But, I’ve gotta say, it didn’t do it for me. Even on second viewing. (It was picked up by the Malthouse in its Tower Theatre program.) But I was happy to keep my mouth shut knowing that Cortese was off on a new tangent.

If Holiday was Cortese’s latest Big Bang, then this newest play, Affection, is the evolutionary step at which the dust starts to form into galaxies. There is a thematic coherence that Holiday singularly lacked. The sand’s just the same, but now we have castles instead of dunes.

Like Holiday, Affection stars Paul Lum and Patrick Moffatt, who (again) have random, ricocheting bursts of conversation broken up with longish silences and the odd ancient (and not so ancient) song, from Frere Jacques to the Ramones. Added to the mix, here, is a third variable, a young woman played by Beth Buchanan. She’s their flirtatious host, innocently offering food, kisses and the odd massage.

The character Lum plays (they’re all unnamed) sleeps on couches and has few possessions. He’s part way between adolescence and enlightenment, a kind of Po-Mo hobo. Just as he charms his new friends, they all charm us... with eye contact, big smiles and a winsome openness.

There’s a great deal of craft here, at every level, from acting and direction (Adriano Cortese) to the restless lighting design (Niklas Pajanti), but the effect is everything. And that, regrettably, is entirely indescribable. You’ll have to see it for yourself.

Dying City by Christopher Shinn (Hoy Polloy, MIPAC)

2010-09-08T02:21:00.006+10:00

Guest post by Catherine de Saint Phalle

Production photographs by Tim Williamson, used with permission

The streets were wary like they are in winter, their lights dim and church-like as I made my way to the Mechanics Institute Performing Art Centre on Sydney Road.

Dying City by Christopher Shinn was playing there.

The theatre itself has a strange atmosphere, maybe because of its name. You expect a schoolmistress to step out and pull you into line. I’d seen the actress Zoe Ellerton-Ashley play brilliantly in Gary Abraham’s wonderful play Something Natural, but Very Childish, so I was looking forward to this. She was already on set, lying disconsolately on a beige, suede sofa, surrounded by a wall of removal boxes – obviously on the verge of departure or moving in. As she lay there in a deep worry, her brows knit, her eyes glazed; we tiptoed past her.

Every shuffle felt guilty.

When the lights come on, the tenseness of the woman on the sofa escalates. We hear the buzz of the interphone. A bright male voice rings out. She tiptoes towards it and writhes in an agony of indecision. Will she press the button?

A young man finally bursts in. He has been trying to contact her for so long and she has not answered his letter. Far from being her private S and M instructor, he is blithe and confiding. We realize gradually that he wants to share the tragedy of his brother’s accidental death in Iraq. He suspects the military of covering up something more sinister. He wants her close, even to have a child so his brother lives on. We are not told how - probably artificial insemination. He is her husband’s gay twin brother after all. Follows a long interchange were he tries to convince her to grieve and reminisce in his company. Then, the direction creates a clever, swift change of lights. Kelly’s hair comes down and we are in the past. In a mesmerising piece of acting, the gay brother has become the straight brother. I even wondered if it was not another actor. The choreographic smoothness of his entries and sudden disappearances are deceptively simple but magically directed by Matt Scholten. We discover through several painful scenes that since their wedding, he loved her no more and had shoved off to war with a curt goodbye.

Then in the Hades why is she, a year later, still in an agony of grief while ineffectually trying to move on (as she painfully admits to her husband’s gay brother)? With one of the many faultless sound effects, why does the ring of the interphone remind her of the ring announcing her husband’s death? Has she not heard that interphone ring for a whole year, even by the postman or the milkman? Time must have stopped its relentless course. We are in the throes of a Greek tragedy. Why did the director whip up the actress in such a dramatic frenzy with such overblown theatricality? Does she not even scratch herself one wonders? No. Her pose is even more dramatic when she is in the kitchen making tea.

It felt such a waste of a talented actress.

Zoe Ellerton-Ashley (Kelly) and Brad Williams (Peter/Craig)

We are prodded on to share her angst. Andromache walking on the rampart looking at her husband Hector being killed by Achilles does not have more constant, unforgiving intensity. But even Andromache had to brush her hair or embroider flowers on a cloak to take her mind off things. In Dying City, locked in an even keel of pathos, the woman stuck behind her rampart of removal boxes sees her Hector die in a loop as she stares at the TV. But why should she be so distraught when her husband’s emails (which his brother artfully discloses to her) reveal he was probably unfaithful? Didn’t she guess that, when he left her in total indifference more than a year ago?

She explains the circumstances of her husband’s death to herself by seeing Law and Order over and over again on TV. This may be an example of female idiocy, but seems a poor trick to explain the much-more-complex story of a sick or dying society. A private cigar is sometimes only a cigar and not a wider simile. The brother’s happiness at his brother’s political turn of heart is more understandable. They were finally reunited in a common horror of the war before the straight one died. But their contrary belief on the validity of that war tells a tale of two cities, not of a dying one. And why does the surviving twin harp after a widow, who is only a widow in name? Doesn’t he know he is the only one to receive any redemptive emails? Is this supposed to represent the lies of American society? But the Americans’ behaviour is not unbelievable, it is sadly human, all-too-human, perversely so in terms of Abu Ghraib. The characters’ meaningless emotion and human inconsistencies make the choice of an intimate metaphor to illustrate the Iraq War and American society ill-judged and ineffective.

Hatred of women and misogyny is as good a subject as another, but if you want to humiliate and belittle a woman, her behaviour has at least to be believable. The director’s drive to create drama at any cost, on a constant crescendo, gives the female character a spurious, floating presence. By wanting to express too much, she ends up saying nothing. She is robbed of humanity, even a pathetic humamity. The feminine in her has a starched, stilted, totally unbelievable voice. What woman would behave like that? Even a splendid actress cannot save this extremely well written allegory on society by a cultured and clever writer who seems to have more literary references than emotional maturity. Attacking the feminine may be fashionable today. Yet, the wars fought to defend women or a woman seemed to have more meaning than the wars over petrol. This seems to me an explanation why even an excellent actress can’t shine through a character that is treated like meat and behaves as stupidly as a meat axe.

All this pent up emotion, pressing, pushing against us left me strangely aloof. Catharsis does not happen on command even if you are in the Mechanics Institute.

The direction was obviously in sync with the writer. Pulling in opposite directions results in a messy cocktail, but in this instance you wished Scholten had resisted Shinn a little more! The stage directions were economical and fluid. Simple and revealing, they supported the play and created the scene changes magically - yet I felt robbed.

The cruelty of wanting to share his grieving with his brother’s wife pounded a masculine view irrespective of her state of mind or heart. Just as the play pounded on its hapless viewers.

Jenny Kemp's Madeleine opens tonight

2010-08-04T16:26:00.007+10:00

The second installment of Jenny Kemp's On The Edge cycle, Madeleine, opens this evening at Arts House (North Melbourne Town Hall) and runs through to Sunday.

The first work in the 'triptych' was Kitten, which opened the 2008 Melbourne Festival and caused quite a stir, here ["yet another Malthouse Emporers New Clothes wank fest" writes an anonymous commenter] and there ["The whole is informed by an excruciating sincerity which... makes the show almost unbearably dishonest" quoth Alison.]

That first link is to my thoughts on the night, where -- rather bizarrely -- I liken the show to the Geelong Cats losing the 2008 AFL Grand Final. (Kemp's work, in my defence, has a way of ricocheting through one's head and heart and history, like a free radical or some unstoppable subatomic particle... it also causes one to hopelessly 'mex' ones 'mitaphors'.)

After the jump, my Herald Sun review of Kitten.

Kitten by Jenny Kemp. Malthouse Theatre until October 25. 2008.

At its best, Jenny Kemp's work for theatre is like an Impressionist painting made three dimensional, or a dream made substantial. It's poetic. Sensuous. Enveloping. Full of alarming longings and intense desires.

Lady In The Water (1947) by Antoinette Frissell Bacon aka Toni Frissell

Kitten is not one of those works. So adjust your expectations.

A man is missing. Probably drowned. Possibly suicide. The wife Kitten is in shock and the best friend Manfred tries to comfort her.

In the past Kemp might have given us a meditation on grief or loss, or searched for a quintessence of emotion. For something universal. But, here, she offers us something surprising. And a bit mad. Kitten a pin sharp study of how one woman fails to cope with loss.

It's also one of the most graphic and remarkable studies of mania I've seen on the stage. Rather than accept her husband's death, Kitten tries to enlist the help of some dolphins to help find him.

This latterday Dr Dolittle tries to do rather too much. And rather too fast. And Kitten rapidly becomes a candidate for a CAT team. She plans to fund her rescue attempt by staging some benefit concerts. Jenny Kemp's dreamy twist is that music, finally, saves Kitten. Kitten the person, that is.

What rescues Kitten the production is the acting of Natasha Herbert, Kate Kendall and Margaret Mills who all play Kitten. Simultaneously. Herbert's voice is astonishing, gutteral then dreamy. But all three Kittens are utterly fearless. They don't meow, they roar.

Sappho Unravelling by Jane Montgomery Griffiths (Stork Theatre)

2010-08-02T18:30:00.005+10:00

This is a review of an earlier version of the show that opens at the Malthouse this week, SAPPHO... in 9 Fragments.

Sappho Unravelling, written and performed by Jane Montgomery Griffiths. The Stork Hotel, 504 Elizabeth Street Melbourne, November 2007.

"Believe me," wrote Sappho of Lesbos, "in the future someone will remember us... because you love me."

How right you can be!

Despite the fact than only fragments survive from the nine volumes of verse she was said to have written, Sappho's fame -- her infamy -- has lasted more than 25 centuries.

Sappho by Charles August Mengin, 1877
(Manchester Art Gallery collection)

Aside from the fact that her poems are all about love, we know next to nothing about Sappho's life. The stories about her, stories made up centuries after her death, are many and varied. And totally contradictory.

Lesbian, wife and mother, exile... a woman who supposedly committed suicide for a lowly boatman. The stories are more fantasy than fact. Some of the stories even suggest that Sapphie wasn't a 'ho at all!

As many translators have had a crack at turning her Greek into English as historians have in telling the story of her life. So the moon, in fragment 3, is variously 'fair', 'beauteous', 'lovely', 'refulgent' or -- in Tennyson's translation -- just plain 'beautiful'.

Jane Montgomery Griffiths's one-woman show Sappho Unravelling is a double helix. One thread is devoted to Sappho herself as she rummages through the stories that have been written about her since her death.

The other thread presents a brilliant modernisation of Sappho's poem about Atthis. Here, a lowly actress -- a member of the chorus -- falls for the lead in the cast of Phaedra. They have a short-lived and tragically one-sided affair.

The first thread is frisky and brilliantly clever, full of erotic puns and wordplay. Really filthy puns, I've gotta say! But the scenes between the two women touch us in a way that is more theatrical, touching and satisfying.

Writer/performer Jane Montgomery Griffiths neatly demonstrates that the only way we can learn about Sappho herself is through her poetry. Through her fresh, shatteringly authentic and eternal verse.

This review was published in the Herald Sun on November 21, 2007.

“distinguish between the operations of my various senses” - a review of Human Abstract by Lucas Jervies

2010-07-28T16:24:00.008+10:00

There was a moment part way through Human Abstract when I actually wrote in my notepad: “if Leanne can’t make it [i.e. the choreography] look good...” But, of course, she could. And did.

Leanne Stojmenov, that is. The Australian Ballet’s form dancer. And that was pretty much when I stopped being anxious about the show being an overcapitalised wank and dared to hope that it might be a “glorious expedition... an honourable undertaking...” Which, it almost is!

For me, the weirder the show got, the better I liked it. (That said, I could have done without the fencing headgear -- I mean, WTF?! -- and Andrew Killian’s Little Red Riding hood act...) The opening choreography (the first dancy dance after the sofa prelude) was overwrought and way too florid for my liking.

But I liked the contrast between Sabina Perry’s jerky, hyperextended dance and the whirly-twirly balletic stuff happening around her. And I especially liked Stojmenov’s dancing behind Robert Curran and Perry, as if she were their subtext or their music. Laura Tong’s solo, too, was brisk, economical, precise and evocative... quite the best I’ve seen her do in a non-character role.

One final gripe: the sound was abrasive and way too loud. It lacked the sophistication and tact of the gloomy -- but effective -- lighting design.

After the jump, the director’s cut of my Herald Sun review.

Human Abstract by Lucas Jervies. Original music by Adam Ster. Lighting design by Rob Cuddon. JACK Productions. Merlyn Theatre, Wednesday July 7, 2010.

The best art is sniper fire: it slays you with a single well-aimed round to the head or the heart. Human Abstract is not that. It’s carpet bombing: overwrought, messy and wasteful. It kills you with shrapnel.

Formed by a trio of highly-ranked dancers from the Australian Ballet and ex-pat choreographer Lucas Jervies, JACK Productions is nothing if not ambitious. It takes the whirls and twirls of traditional ballet and the hyperextended jaggedess of the avant-garde and throws in spoken word, a commissioned score, fencing headgear and a karaoke version of an old Patsy Cline song. It’s a show to dazzle the senses.

But I doubt that lesser dancers than Leanne Stojmenov, Robert Curran, Laura Tong and Danielle Rowe could pull it off.

Star of this show, however, is guest dancer Sabina Perry. She recites extracts from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as if it were the easiest thing in the world. She also features in the work’s most outlandish scene in which she morphs into a vast, headless, tree-like thing, like something out of the film Species. Her belief in the work is contagious.

Meanwhile, other dancers enact her senses of touch and smell, sight and hearing.

Human Abstract is a show about loss and isolation and our unwillingness to connect with one another. It’s a product of an incredibly determined attempt by Lucas Jervies to connect with us. And for that, at the very least, it deserves commendation. And an audience!

Production photography by Sergey Konstantinov.

An edited version of this review was published in the Herald Sun on July 9, 2010.

Review: Self Torture and Strenuous Exercise

2010-03-11T08:52:00.006+11:00

Self Torture and Strenuous Exercise by Harry Kondoleon. Directed by Ben Pfeiffer. Set, sound and lighting design also by Ben Pfeiffer. The Artisan Collective. At the Guildford Lane Gallery, Melbourne, until March 13.

Playwright Harry Kondoleon had a very special contempt for long “family argument” plays where the on-stage brawling was less interesting than the fights you have in your own home. So, this play is both short (about an hour) and ‘heightened’.

Kristina Brew, sleight of hand and acting magic as Bethany

Unless you are dating a Berkoff-trained actor -- or some other kind of very highly strung artist -- the theatrics in Kondoleon’s play Self Torture and Strenuous Exercise should eclipse your own domestics... by about a million watts.

That said, the play might only make complete sense to highly-strung arty types. (Or those they have scorched.) Kondoleon’s idea of heightened involves putting his characters on the rack and stretching them until limbs come out of sockets. Or nailing them to a lover’s cross.

Here, a writer runs off with the partner of a close friend after a dinner party. The writer’s own ex has recently tried to kill herself. It’s like a David Lynch version of Patrick Marber’s Closer.

This early and rarely-staged play -- an Australian premiere according to the company producing it -- is an absolute treat for aficionados of non-soapy theatre and for practicing thesps. It calls for real bravura, exuberance and top physical and vocal skills from its cast of four.

Josh Price, jaw-droppingly good as the jilted Alvin

This company of young VCA acting graduates absolutely nails it. The acting is spectacular and really quite delicious without crossing over into indulgence... a fine line! Every detail of Ben Pfeiffer’s production is thought-out, exact and cleanly delivered, from the table setting on the ceiling to the choreography to the high-key paint job and lighting.

Marissa Bennett as Adel, slashed wrists healing

Josh Price’s hunched, distracted, vulture-like performance as the jilted Alvin is jaw-droppingly good. He makes a gullible and utterly wacky character seem entirely authentic. "I seem to have misplaced God," he announces. Likewise Kristina Brew (as Alvin’s partner Bethany) does an extraordinary conjuring job, all sleight of hand and acting magic.

Not for everyone, perhaps... but we're a very lucky few.

A shortened version of this review was published in the Herald Sun yesterday.

La Croggon's review is here.

Diana Krall's setlist in Melbourne

2010-03-01T03:30:00.005+11:00

Good thing I'm a girly swot who'd rather be sixty minutes early than sixty seconds late... The Melbourne Park web site said that Melody Gardot would start at 7:30 and the concert would wind-up around 11. (It was all over by ten! Diana Krall played for just 75 minutes.) Had I arrived at 7:30, I would have missed all of Gardot's (stunning) half hour set. Harrumph.

This is what Krall played with her band (and Orchestra Victoria) on Friday.

01. I Love Being Here With You [from Live In Paris]
02. Do It Again [When I Look Into Your Eyes]
03. Let’s Fall In Love [The Very Best of Diana Krall & Live In Paris]
04. I’ve Grown Accustomed To His Face [Quiet Nights]
05. So Nice [Quiet Nights]
06. I Was Doing Alright [From This Moment On]
07. Quiet Nights [Quiet Nights]
08. I Get Along Without You Very Well (Except Sometimes) [The Look of Love]
09. The Boy From Ipanema [Quiet Nights]
10. Cheek To Cheek [not recorded]

Encore

11. Love Letters [The Look of Love]

Diana Krall/Madeleine Peyroux/Melody Gardot 2010 Australian Tour Dates:

Perth: King’s Park (A Day on the Green): 23 & 24 February

Melbourne: Rod Laver Arena: 26 February

SA: Barossa Valley - Peter Lehmann (A Day on the Green): 27 February

Brisbane: Entertainment Centre: 3 March

Sydney: Entertainment Centre: 4 March

NSW: Hunter Valley – Bimbadgen Estate (A Day on the Green): 6 March

NSW: Bowral - Centennial Vineyards (A Day on the Green): 7 March

VIC: Yarra Valley - Rochford Estate (A Day on the Green): 8 March

My review's comin' up in the Herald Sun. Probably Tuesday. Will post it here at the end of the week.

As promised, the review:

You’ve heard of irresistible forces and immovable objects? Well Diana Krall is an irresistible object. She’s matter and anti-matter. She commands complete attention, but she’s personable and relaxed on stage. She seems to telescope space, making a huge barn of a venue seem intimate.

Krall is a performer of enormous range and variety, from Trad trios to Bee Gees covers, Nat King Cole to Antônio Jobim. The one constant is that ashes-and-embers voice of hers.

Given the soporific lushness of Diana Krall’s most recent release Quiet Nights -- I’m not a fan of it -- one might’ve reasonably assumed her “day on the green” tour would see Krall the soulful balladeer rather than Krall the jazz huckster. Especially here with a forty-plus member orchestra behind her. But, no. Krall was in dazzling. compelling, vibrant form.

Even songs that die a death on Quiet Nights came to shimmering life, performed live. None more so than ‘I’ve Grown Accustomed to His Face’ in which the “breathing out and breathing in” of the lyrics was echoed by the string section of the orchestra.

Orchestra Victoria (under Alan Broadbent) was marvellous in the two songs from Krall’s album The Look of Love: ‘I Get Along Without You Very Well (Except Sometimes)’ and ‘Love Letters’. Their sound was chromatic and mystical. They teamed superbly with Krall’s own band, especially bass-man Robert Hurst, in ‘Do It Again’.

Four of the eleven songs played in the 75-minute set were from 2009’s Quiet Nights, including the title song and ‘Boy From Ipanema’.

Krall was supported by Madeleine Peyroux who sang to her bowler hat much of the time... and (as she did last time she toured) sang in the shade of every single note. The other support act was 25 year-old singer songwriter Melody Gardot. Remember the name. I doubt I’ll ever forget the clarity and authenticity of her voice.

The Rochford Estate concert on Monday (without Orchestra Victoria) has an additional support act: Katie Noonan & the Captains.

The Motown Event, Australian setlist

2010-02-16T23:49:00.002+11:00

There have been a few changes since New Zealand in order of acts and sequence (and number) of songs. Instead of closing out the concert, the Temptations are the climax of the first half. And the Four Tops are now the (anti-) climax of the second.

Ain't no theatre wide enough... (Photograph: Chris Boyd)

Here's the set list from the first Australian performance (at Rod Laver Arena) tonight.

Mary Wilson of the Supremes

Love Child
Reflections
Medley: Baby Love/Stop in the Name of Love
You Can't Hurry Love
You Keep Me Hangin' On

The Miracles

You've Really Got A Hold On Me
Shop Around
I Second That Emotion
Tracks Of My Tears

Joan Osborne

My Guy
Don't Leave Me This Way

Ian Moss

Everything's Alright ("Uptight")

Ian Moss with Joan Osborne and Jimmy Barnes

What Becomes of the Broken Hearted

The Temptations

Get Ready
Just My Imagination
Ain't Too Proud To Beg
My Girl
The Way You Do The Things You Do

INTERVAL

Martha Reeves and the Vandellas

Heatwave
Jimmy Mack
Nowhere To Run
Dancin' in the Street

Joan Osborne

Destination Anywhere
Midnight Train To Georgia

Jimmy Barnes

Money (That's What I Want)
I Was Made To Love Her
I Heard It Through The Grapevine

Jimmy and Mahalia Barnes

River Deep Mountain High

Highlight of the Four Tops set... Chris Newman's lighting.

Four Tops

Baby I Need Your Lovin'
Bernadette
Medley: Reach Out/Walk Away Renee/Standing in the Shadows/I Can't Help Myself/...

Ensemble

I'll Be There
Ain't No Mountain High Enough

The Motown Event - celebrating 50 years of Motown Hits. Rod Laver Arena Melbourne, Tuesday February 16, 2010. Also Sydney Entertainment Centre on the 19th, Brisbane Entertainment Centre on the 23rd and Sandalford Wines, Swan Valley WA, on the 28th.

My review should be in Friday's Herald Sun.

UPDATE:

Here 'tis. As printed:

If Tuesday’s concert had been half an hour shorter, if the Four Tops had missed the plane and Mahalia Barnes had got the gig instead of dad Jimmy, if Joan Osborne had stopped after just the one song (a remarkably good rendition of My Guy), if the voices had been mixed as brilliantly and as cleanly as the band... then this gig would have won a perfect score, an even five stars out of five.

But Barnesy was brutal; completely out of place. And The Four Tops had me briefly considering topping myself. Everything after Vandellas’ survivor Martha Reeves’ rendition of Nowhere To Run was superfluous.

Up to that point, we had marvel after marvel after marvel. We had Mary Wilson’s delicious renditions of one hooky Supremes song after another: Love Child, Reflections, Baby Love and Stop In The Name Of Love... though she ran out of air and her voice flattened too soon.

Then, if anything, the Miracles upped the stakes. Perhaps because I didn’t expect them to. Mark Scott’s tenor was so silvery and natural, simple songs were revealed to have great riches under the tinny tarnish. And the Temptations closed out the first half with great fun and showmanship, singing Get Ready, My Girl and Ain’t Too Proud To Beg. Here, Bruce Williamson starred.

Martha Reeves might have been the least agile of the lot, physically, but her voice Catherine wheeled its way around the constellations in songs like Heatwave and Jimmy Mack and, best of all, in Nowhere To Run. Her performance was risky, soulful and utterly committed. She was an impossible act to follow.

After Reeves, Jimmy Barnes was as shocking as punk after disco or a chainsaw on soft flesh.

Concert projects like these reveal riches in old music that early recording technologies routinely gouged out. It’s as if we’re hearing the songs properly for the first time. It’s so much better than mere better than remastering. It’s a total restoration.

And, at fifty, Motown is looking -- and sounding -- damn fine.

Marianne Faithfull concert setlist

2010-02-07T20:09:00.005+11:00

For all my fellow trainspotters, here's the set list from Marianne Faithfull's first concert at The Forum in Melbourne on Friday February 5, 2010.

01. Times Square [by Barry Reynolds, from MF's A Child's Adventure]
02. Down From Dover [by Dolly Parton via Nancy 'n' Lee]
03. The Crane Wife Pt. 3 [The Decemberists]
04. Solitude [Duke Ellington via Billie Holiday]
05. Hold On, Hold On [Neko Case]
06. The Flandyke Shore [trad., dedicated to Kate McGarrigle]
07. Broken English
08. In Germany Before The War [Randy Newman]
09. Crazy Love [Faithfull/Cave, from MF's Before the Poison]
10. Kimbie [Jackson Frank]
11. Salvation [Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, from BRMC]
12. The Ballad of Lucy Jordan
13. Sister Morphine [Jagger/Richards/Faithfull]
14. As Tears Go By [Jagger/Richards] ["... the start of it all."]
15. Why D'Ya Do It? [Heathcote Williams/Faithfull et al.]

Encores

01. Dear God Please Help Me [Morrissey/Whyte from Morrissey's Ringleader of the Tormentors]
02. Sing Me Back Home [Merle Haggard]

My review is scheduled to run in Tuesday's Herald Sun. I'll post it here when I can be arsed!

In the meantime, Bob at That Striped Sunlight Sound has posted some nice pics of the Brisbane concert, at The Tivoli, and his thoughts.

UPDATE, FEBRUARY 16:

Okay, here 'tis...

At the ripe old age of 63 -- fully four and a half decades after her first international hit -- Marianne Faithfull is still stage struck. She feeds on adulation like a Russian ballerina, inviting ovation after ovation. And she gets it from the pilgrims, young and old.

And this tour, more than any of her recent visits, demands blind and unwavering loyalty from the faithful. Faithfull’s most recent release, the double CD Easy Come Easy Go, is far and away her worst since the 1990s: ugly recordings of indifferent arrangements of 18 covers, from Ellington and Bernstein to Neko Case and Morrissey. From Dolly Parton and Randy Newman to BRMC and The Decemberists.

On Friday, she sang *ten* of those songs. Which left just seven to span the previous 45 years. Ignoring the riches of Kissin’ Time, Faithfull offered just one song from the period 1983-2008: ‘Crazy Love’, a song she co-wrote with Nick Cave.

The three songs from her 1979 masterpiece Broken English were the best and worst of the concert. The title song was potent and urgent. ‘The Ballad of Lucy Jordan’ was pleasant enough but ‘Why D’Ya Do It?’ was dully mechanical instead of slashing and acid. Vague irritation instead of towering rage.

The very oldest songs (her first singles ‘As Tears Go By’ and ‘Sister Morphine’) were more than just crowd pleasers. They showed that Faithfull’s melancholy preoccupations are not the products of age or mortality.

The Black Rebel Motorcycle Club song ‘Salvation’ -- half way through the set -- nailed it: “Do you feel alive? Can you feel alive?” Those words -- for a moment -- closed the gap between singer and audience.

The live arrangements were generally good -- the seven piece backing band was excellent -- but the mix was unflattering. Marianne Faithfull’s voice is parched and weary and doesn’t stand up to bright lights and sharp focus. It needs the audio equivalent of candle light. It got fuzzy soft focus instead. Shame.

This review appeared in the Herald Sun on February 9, 2010.

A 21st century mystery play: B.C. by Rita Kalnejais

2009-12-10T15:39:00.006+11:00

Since Carl asked ever so nicely, here's my Herald Sun review, which was published Monday.

The only problem with “do what you wanna do, be what you wanna be” as a way of life is that it assumes a base level of goodness and maturity. What if all you want to do is kill living things, eat fried chicken and add to your collection of dead birds, like Gabriel (Dylan Young)? Or have sex with your 15 year-old daughter, like the creepy Joachim (Tyler Coppin)?

There’s no moral compass in the world that Rita Kalnejais creates in her play B.C. Many of the adults -- and at least one of the children -- are emotional and ethical ‘retards’. The childless Elizabeth (Yesse Spence) can’t distinguish her desire to have a baby from her desire to have a boy... sexually.

These godless people, unwittingly, are about to sire a messiah. And, boy, do they need one! Mary (Nicole da Silva) is knocked up by a birdman then falls for Giuseppe in trackie dacks (Ashley Zukerman). They don’t slouch towards Bethlehem, they wait for the bus.

Kalnejais’ plot is as messy and unruly -- and as adorable -- as real life. But there are great depths to her script.

Director Simon Stone writes that B.C. is a play about small moments of grace. It’s unclear if he’s aware that the matriarch in this play, Anne, the mother of Mary, takes her name from the Hebrew word for grace: Hannah. But I’m pretty sure the playwright would know.

She might be young -- B.C. is her first play -- but Kalnejais uses Christian (and Islamic) mythology in much the same way that Yeats used Greek mythology in his poem Leda and the Swan, in which the Queen of Sparta gets raped by Zeus disguised as a swan.

But in the space of half a lifetime, the stuff that we all knew -- as a culture, as a people -- is now arcane. And archaic. Known by few. A mystery to most.

I doubt, nowadays, that many hard-core Christians would know that Joachim and Anne were the grandparents of Jesus. Or that Elizabeth (Anne’s sister in the gospel, her niece in Islamic theology) and Mary fell pregnant at the same time. Nor, really, is that knowledge required to enjoy the play.

Bent as it is, B.C. is a touching and miraculous play. A 21st century mystery play. And Simon Stone’s production matches is, beat for beat, in genius, detail and barmy wide-eyed wonder.

B.C. by Rita Kalnejais. Directed by Simon Stone. Designed by Claude Marcos. Sound design by Stefan Gregory. Lighting design consultant: Kimberly Kwa. The Hayloft Project. Presented by FULL TILT at the Arts Centre. Black Box until December 19.

Jeff Busby: (double) cream on the whiskers

2009-12-01T02:11:00.004+11:00

The estimable Andrew Haydon (of Postcards from the Gods fame) recently lamented "the sorry state of stage photography" at the Guardian theatre blog just as I was considering a brief post on the stratospheric quality of Jeff Busby's recent work here.

What I say doesn't necessarily contradict Haydon. Maybe it's always been this way: freak individuals (Branco Gaica is another) who bring something very special to the proverbial table.

Now, it's pretty clear to me that of all the performing arts, dance is the one that really does it for Busby. (As a sometime photographer, I know what fearless and self-aware models dancers make.) I also happen to think that of all Busby's dance photographs, the work he's done for the the Dance School of the VCA -- over many years (check out Moving Generations: celebrating 30 years of VCA Dance) -- is the double cream.

(Photograph: Jeff Busby, click on the image to enlarge)

But he has really excelled himself in the pics he took for the recent graduate season. He goes far beyond mere documentation of the works. I looked at the photograph above, for example, and I reckoned I had a pretty fair idea of what the piece was gonna be like. He captures the rampant energy, the rhythm and the crucially important tonality of the design.

I was already booked in to see the show, but the photographs made me all the keener. Ditto the following image.

If you've got the time, do a google image search or search through this blog for Busby's work. His non-production work for Axeman Lullaby by Balletlab (of which he is a board member) is here.

Tori Amos “Sinful Attraction” Tour, set list and Australian tour dates

2009-11-13T03:05:00.002+11:00

Tori Amos started her 2009 Australian tour in Melbourne, tonight, at the Regent Theatre. Though the first concert was sold out, there are heavily discounted tickets ($59.90) available for the Friday November 13 concert, through Ticketek.

It’s a solo tour, this time. Just Tori and her various personalities!

Here’s the set list for the first concert.

01. Lady in Blue, from Abnormally Attracted To Sin
02. Smells Like Teen Spirit, from the 1992 Limited Edition EP Winter
03. Blood Roses, from Boys For Pele
04. China, from Little Earthquakes
05. Curtain Call, from Abnormally Attracted To Sin
06. Suzanne, Leonard Cohen cover
07. Wednesday, from Scarlet’s Walk
08. I Can’t See New York, from Scarlet’s Walk
09. Take To The Sky, a B-Side in US/UK, also on More Pink: The B-Sides
10. Cloud on my Tongue, from Under The Pink
11. Beauty of Speed, from American Doll Posse
12. Mary Jane, from Abnormally Attracted To Sin
13. A Silent Night With You, from Midwinter Graces
14. Purple People, a B-Side, also on To Venus And Back
15. Scarlet’s Walk, from Scarlet’s Walk
16. Ophelia, from Abnormally Attracted To Sin
17. Virginia, from Scarlet’s Walk
18. Barons of Suburbia, from The Beekeeper

Encores:

01. Sister Janet, a B-Side of Cornflake Girl
02. Twinkle, from Boys For Pele

Also

Canberra Theatre, Sunday November 15

Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House, Monday November 16 [sold out]
Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House, Tuesday November 17

Thebarton Theatre, Adelaide, Thursday November 19

Riverside Theatre, Perth, Saturday November 21

QPAC Concert Hall, Brisbane, Tuesday November 24

It’s been a long time comin’ — Seal in Australia

2009-11-06T02:51:00.002+11:00

Okay, the guy’s married to Heidi Klum -- they had a baby (their third) four weeks ago today -- so he’s not that easy to impress... but Seal looked blown away by the dress code of Melburnians at the date on his very first tour of Australia.

Dancing in the aisles were blokes dressed-to-the-nines and women in fascinators. Actually, many of the women there looked like they had spent more on their hairdo than their concert tickets. All up, we made him look pretty shabby! (Not easy!)

Okay, there were no morning suits and top hats, but you wouldn’t find a better dressed (or more fabulous looking) audience this side of a thousand buck-a-head charity fund-raiser in New York or Paris.

I reckon his opinion of Melbourne, and quite possibly all of Australia, will be ridiculously high. Why? Cos he kicked off his tour on Oaks Day... Ladies day in the Spring Carnival.

The concert was a last-minute assignment for me. (And one I could have turned down.) Seal’s always been a bit too close to M.O.R. for me, though I have liked some of his clubbier songs... easy dance music with an R’n’B flavour. You know the ones: Killer and Amazing and others.

But I haven’t much liked the mix on his studio releases, especially the most recent, Soul, which has sold millions. (Reportedly, Seal’s fave CD, which preceded it, hasn't sold a lot more than 1/20th that number.)

Anyway, the short version: his live sound is AMAZING. The arrangements of old and new songs, ballad and raver stuff alike -- and the soul covers in particular -- are far far better than the studio-engineered stuff.

So, consider me converted.

My (rave) review is comin’ up in the Herald Sun next week.

The first concert (November 5, 2009) set list and tour dates...

Papa Was A Rolling Stone
Killer
It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World
I Can’t Stand The Rain
A Change Is Gonna Come
Don’t Cry
I’ve Been Loving You Too Long
Waiting For You
Love’s Divine
It’s Alright
Here I Am (Come And Take Me)
Knock On Wood
Get It Together
My Vision
The Right Life
Kiss From A Rose
Crazy

Encores:

Amazing
Bring It On
People Get Ready

Seal's 2009 Australian Tour Dates

MELBOURNE

Thursday 5 November @ the Arts Centre, Hamer Hall
Friday 6 November @ the Arts Centre, Hamer Hall
Friday 13 November @ Palais Theatre

BRISBANE

Sunday 8 November @ Brisbane Convention Centre

SYDNEY

Tuesday 10 November @ State Theatre
Wednesday 11 November @ State Theatre
Monday 16 November @ State Theatre
Tuesday 17 November @ State Theatre

ADELAIDE

Saturday 14 November @ Adelaide Entertainment Centre ‘Theatre Mode’

PERTH

Friday 20 November @ Kings Park and Botanic Garden, Perth

UPDATE:

Band members:

Steve Sidelnyk - Drums
Mark Summerlin - MD/Guitar/Backing Vocals
Marcus Brown - Bass/Keys/Backing Vocals

Carol Jarvis - Trombone/Backing Vocals
Sarah Field - Sax/Trumpet/Backing Vocals
Katie Samways - Baritone Saxophone/Backing Vocals
Annette Brown - Trumpet/Backing Vocals

Mike Mills and the Beautiful Losers

2009-10-30T00:50:00.007+11:00

To be an artist at twenty, is to be an artist. To be an artist at forty is to be a sell-out, right? Unless you’re living in a cave -- or a bungalow out the back of your wealthy parents’ place -- the imperatives of making a living will tend to turn the most maverick of artists into a mini mogul. Eventually.

Which is what makes the loose collective of artists known as the ‘beautiful losers’ so fascinating. These scruffy, non-conformist, never-grown-up, skater-boy and punk artists from the east and west coast of the USA haven’t just bent that rule, they’ve tied it into a balloon animal, like a clown at a birthday party. Rather than sell out, they’ve been sought out.

They’re graffiti artists turned muralists, a skateboarder-turned-photographer, doodlers turned pro doodlers and “regular freaks” turned “cool freaks.”

From a commercial point of view, Mike Mills is the most interesting of the group. The 43 year-old speaks of the mainstream as if it were his first love: a high-school cheerleader that jilted him as a boy. His life since has been a quest to prove to her she made a huge mistake. And, yes, the mainstream is now courting him.

“...I don’t really find any corner of the world safe. To me the art world is at least as complicated and duplicitous -- and actually more about money than the ad world. Or can be...”

The small time graphic artist and sometime musician still makes album covers, poster art and music videos for friends, from Jon Spencer Blues Explosion to Blonde Redhead, Sonic Youth to former band mates Cibo Matto, but his bread and butter nowadays comes from shooting big budget commercials for international campaigns. His clients include Volkswagen, Apple, Mastercard, GAP and DuPont.

Interestingly enough, Mills doesn’t just shoot commercials to pay for his own film-making projects -- his fourth feature-length film is cast and ready to commence shooting in the northern autumn -- he also does it as a creative outlet. And for sheer pleasure.

He explained by phone from Los Angeles that he had “tried to quit” in 2005 but “started up again” last year. While admitting that advertising is “a complicated problem of consumer society” and that advertising, by definition, is ‘specious’, it is, he says, “the best and only way” he can make money as a director, and one of the few ways he gets to use his skills.

Rather than ask Mills to adapt his style for their campaigns, his clients want what he does. And does uniquely. Even his purely commercial work (see www.humans.jp) is indistinguishable from, well, art!

“Early on, I got to do [some] very creative ads for Nike. They were very successful -- deemed successful in the ad world. So, weirdly, when I do ads, I get treated like a king. I get treated like an artist. [Everyone is] deferential to my opinion and respects me and all that. When I was doing my feature film, no-one deferred to me at all!”

Asked if there’s any meaningful distinction to be made between commercial and fine art, he responds: “I don’t really find any corner of the world safe, or a safe haven. To me the art world is at least as complicated and duplicitous -- and actually more about money than the ad world. Or can be. So whatever world you’re operating in is fraught with complications and ways to be untrue to yourself. It’s a constant negotiation.”

“Again, it’s not like all fine art is commercial art, but it’s just as [easy for it] to be commercial... Our world is actually quite good at pretending -- at hiding -- that money and competition and consumerism is what drives it, or is a big part of it. For years, it’s mastered the art of disguising its financial basis, you know what I mean?”

Asked if it will be easier for the next generation of street artists, coming from x-box and gamer culture, to be swallowed up by the commercial world than his generation, Mills is thoughtful.

After a disclaimer that he has “no idea about big general cultural things” and “what’s making what happen” he continues: “in any scene, any generation, there’s gonna be people that just don’t fit in. That have whatever it is... the self-absorption, or the self-strength, or maybe just they’re so wildly insecure and desperate that they don’t follow the rules, whatever the rules are [at] that time.”

His own quest is to keep “hope and fluidity and flexibility alive.” To do that, he says, “you have to keep your eyes open, no matter where you’re working.”

Aaron Rose’s documentary Beautiful Losers has a couple of screenings at the new Speakeasy Cinema tonight and next Friday, November 6. (And wot a bloody fascinating idea that is... get a film and a feed -- burger and beverage -- for twenty-odd bucks. It sounds quite the hangout too.) There are some Sydney screenings coming up. The first is at Paddington Town Hall on November 21 at 6pm. Watch this space (and this one) for details.

Mike Mills’ web site is www.mikemillsweb.com

Beautiful Losers is also be available on DVD through Madman Entertainment.

For the record, a couple more Melbourne Festival reviews

2009-10-29T12:35:00.000+11:00

Le Salon by Peeping Tom. Playhouse, the Arts Centre.

It’s a shame to bring this Belgian company all the way to Melbourne and then present just the centre section of its celebrated Garden/Lounge/Basement trilogy.

The first piece (Le Jardin) is about hitting forty. This one, Le Salon, is about incontinence and death. The final section (Le Sous Sol) is posthumous. It’s set underground, where all the players are now buried. The trilogy is also about different body sizes and weights and capabilities. Sounds like a barrel of laughs, no?

Le Salon is a meaty eighty minutes, dazzlingly physical and sometimes riotously funny. But without the equally eccentric outer acts it floats unanchored and dimensionless. This brilliant centrepiece is reduced to an apparently over-resourced and overproduced curio.

Like Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, Le Salon has an ageing and failing patriarch (played by actor Simon Versnel) whose wealth and influence has gone the way of his bladder control. The family’s attention is firmly on smaller nappies. Which belong to the new grandchild.

Good as the staging is -- the set, the singing and the sleight of hand -- stripped of context, all that audiences have to hold onto is the physical work. Luckily these are amazing. Unforgettable even.

A body is ridden like a skateboard. The same body rocks as if made of curved steel then twists, kicks and rolls, again and again, in a brilliant impersonation of a hip-hopping, freshly-landed fish.

This vivid, joyful and exhilarating performance leaves us baffled, but strangely content.

This review was published in Monday's Herald Sun.

Pornography. Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg. Playhouse, the Arts Centre.

The seven separate sections of Simon Stephens’ play hang in space like a constellation. It’s up to us to join the dots.

The action takes place in and around London in the first week of July 2005, a week which had the Live 8 concert (Madonna, Pink Floyd, Coldplay), the G8 conference on third world debt, the announcement that London would host the 2012 Olympics and, the following morning, the 7/7 suicide bomber attack.

In the spooky central scene -- entitled The Soldier -- a man rises before dawn, kisses his wife and children goodbye and boards a bus. For a minute or two we imagine he’s fighting the good fight: the clean-cut white guy with wife and kids. But he’s the home-grown terrorist. One of the four self-proclaimed soldiers on their way to the City.

Though it’s framed by specific historical events, Pornography is a composite portrait of a people; of a culture; maybe, even, of Western culture. It’s not a flattering likeness! It’s riddled with corruption of the flesh and of the soul; it’s shot through with acts of violence, sabotage and incest. The pornography of the title, incidentally, is downloaded by an 82 year-old woman who has become addicted to it.

It’s an elegant and haunting script (written in English, performed in German) given a chaotic and highly physical production. It’s a provocative and thought-provoking piece of theatre which seizes our attention and doesn’t release its grip for 130 minutes.

Siren by Ray Lee

2009-10-21T17:27:00.003+11:00

Sirens? Don’t give me sirens. I’ve been spoilt. Rotten. On a Sunday in June 2005, I woke to the sound of a massive chromatic symphony. From my hotel room in North Sydney -- Milsons Point really, where the harbour bridge touches down -- the sound seemed to be coming from the harbour. Ship horns, I thought. The sound had mass, it had movement. It was too beautiful, surely, to be accidental. I imagined that some crazy composer had engineered this.

But, no.

Guess what? It was a protest. 630 truckies were jamming up the CBD and the Harbour and Anzac bridges. It was a go-slow. With horns honking. It was fucking magnificent. Instead of cacophony, which you might expect, there was extraordinary harmony. Amazing tessitura. Rising and falling tones. Rising and falling volume.

The whole thing reminded me of the story of Richard Wagner smuggling a string orchestra into his home to serenade his sleeping wife, Cosima, on the morning of her birthday, not long after the birth of their son Siegfried. (The Triebschen Idyll it was called. Later the Siegfried Idyll.)

Ray Lee’s Siren is a little like the Truckies Symphony on a puny scale. It’s endearingly retro -- like a musical happening from Germany in the 1960s -- and calculatedly unambitious. It’s a Noah’s Ark of tweeters, little Dalek-like speakers at each end of short poles which spin on stands of varying heights in tight little orbits.

Audience members are encouraged to wander the space.. and sternly asked not to speak to anyone for the duration of the event. About 45 minutes.

Pursuing the Noah’s Ark metaphor... there’s a small clutch of unloved (and unlovely) mid-range speakers making coarse honking noises. No-one wants to loiter around them, like ugly critters at the zoo.

I wanted to limbo dance under one of the taller towers, but the space is roped off. (Lying down is discouraged too. Shame. A travelator would be kick arse.)

At its best, Siren is reminiscent of the closing moments of Supertramp’s song Fools Overture, where the orchestra tunes up. I was also reminded of the watery synth keyboards (maybe a mellotron?) used in the (very) early New Order single Procession. (Hell, I was also reminded of Henry Purcell’s Trumpet Voluntary... so best not to read too much into any of this!)

Spoiler alert. Skip this paragraph if you’re booked in but haven’t yet seen the show. When the lights go off, maybe ten minutes before the end of the installation, the orbiting LEDs are like fireflies or retarded electrons! The flicker of the closer lights leaves a trail of dots in space.

Like the show, the moment is memorable. But a long way short of magical.

Siren, a sound installation created by Ray Lee. With Harry Dawes. Produced by Simon Chatterton. Stavroula Kounadea, technician. At the Meat Market, 5 Blackwood Street North Melbourne, until October 25. A part of the Melbourne International Arts Festival.

Pornography by Simon Stephens (Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg)

2009-10-16T11:36:00.007+11:00

Wow, I have a new role model: an eccentric, crotchety, unnamed 82 year-old porn-addicted misanthrope. Did I mention she’s a she? This, from Simon Stephens’ play Pornography:

In town everybody’s talking about the possibility that the Olympic Games might be coming to London. I’m struck by the irony of this. Because the people of London, palpably to me, are universally obese and under exercised. Fat fuckers. Gibbering about athletes. The lot of them. London in summer is a horror story. The underground is a cauldron. The shopping centres are brutalised. There is no such thing as air conditioning.

[...]

And then on Wednesday lunchtime the news comes in that London’s bid to host the Olympics in 2012 has been successful. And now people smile. Transistor radios broadcast the events over and over. We go live to Trafalgar Square. We go live to Tokyo where Lord Coe is speaking. We go live to the derelict battered crack dens of Stratford where residents there can barely contain their glee at the prospect of Kelly Holmes racing madly around the peripheries of their houses. Cars do little dances. Drivers toot their horns at one another with idiot inane grins on their faces. Shocked by their own daring. Epileptic with thoughts of how old they’ll be in 2012.

The Crotchety One (played by Juliane Koren, I think) is just one ‘tile’ in Stephens’ ‘tapestry’. The mixed metaphor is the playwright’s own. [Why not tile in the mosaic or thread in the tapestry? Or dish in the tapas bar fer fux sake?]

Set in London in the first week of July 2005, and taking us from the Live 8 concert to the 7/7 London bombings, Pornography consists of six scenes and a coda (in English) which reduces the lives of the 52 victims of the bombings to Twitterable proportions... the shortest of these is just 7 words.

The first scene is narrated by a professional woman troubled by her son’s physical vulnerability and by the possibility that her husband is having an affair.

Written in English and performed in German, Pornography is a fairly wordy play. And the opening monologue in particular is an avalanche of inessential detail, most of which is faithfully reproduced on surtitle displays either side of the Playhouse stage.

Happily, the reading demands are lighter in later scenes, and the 130 minute play turns out to be a fairly easy if not always comfortable sit. (And it is, incidentally, recommended!)

Translation, it seems to me, is a sustaining theme of this year’s festival. Translating page to stage, verse to drama, a Heiner Müller script to an opera and then on to a ballet, memoir to monodrama, and so on. The translation is more literal here.

Stephens’ play is spare and beautiful. It’s so at home on the page, it’s hard to read it as a play. Likewise, it’s so fixed in time and place, one wonders what’s in it for Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg producing it.

On a more literal level, I was a little distracted by the translation. Words missing and altered. Some quite innocuous. (Like ‘yoghurt’!) One character -- a half-Italian Aryan -- bitches about Madonna bringing a black man on stage with her at the Live 8 concert. I heard him say nigger, though it hit the surtitles as coon. It’s “coon” incidentally in the original play.

The surtitle system -- by design or otherwise -- lost the proverbial plot at the start of a section. We lost a few minutes of dialogue and the scene number and title. The scenes are numbered in the play, seven-to-one, but aren’t given titles... so the black-out was costly.

In DSH’s production, the woman in the opening scene (#7) contemplates (or actually commits) an act of industrial sabotage -- faxing a highly sensitive report to a rival company -- which is not mentioned in the script.

Likewise, an otherwise innocuous scene -- in which a teacher and his former student confess to having been obsessed with one another many years earlier -- is turned into something rather sleazier. In the script, the man says to the young woman: “Dance with me.” Here, he says: dance for me. She climbs onto a table and begins to undress. He masturbates. (Mercifully with his back to us! LOL)

But let me skip to the executive summary, otherwise this will never be posted... It’s an interesting production, more intriguing than engrossing. Chaotic but not lacking a trajectory.

My Herald Sun review is here.

Pornography by Simon Stephens. Directed by Sebastian Nübling. Set design by Muriel Gerstner, assisted by Jean-Marc Desbonnets. Costumes by Marion Münch. Music by Lars Wittershagen. Lighting by Roland Edrich. Dramaturgy by Nicola Bramkamp and Regina Guhl. Cast: Marion Breckwoldt, Katja Danowski, Juliane Koren, Hanns Jörg Krumpholz, Jana Schulz, Daniel Wahl, Samuel Weiss & Martin Wißner.

A Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg production for the Melbourne International Arts Festival. Playhouse, the Arts Centre, until October 18.

Look Mummy, I’m Acting! No, wait a minute...

2009-10-16T11:26:00.002+11:00

Multi-media rules the 2009 Festival: the plays have musicians and video projections, the opera has twice as many dancers as singers, even the visual art gets a technological and musical make-over. These are the “gesamtkunstwerks” that German composer Richard Wagner dreamed of, where several art forms ganged up for a common cause. To make total artworks.

And then there’s Look Mummy, I’m Dancing! A dimensionless speck. No length, no depth, no apparent aspiration. As I moan in today’s Herald Sun, “it’s as plain a piece of theatre as you could possibly get.” I was being kind. It’s not -- in any sense -- dramatic. It doesn’t deserve to be called theatre.

It’s woefully undernourished: misshapen and badly pitched. It’s an unillustrated lecture (adapted from a published memoir) pretending to be a monodrama.

Deliver us... Vanessa Van Durme.

Look Mummy, I’m Dancing by Vanessa Van Durme. Directed [allegedly] by Frank Van Laecke. Lighting design [!! Oh, look! A dimmer control!] by Jaak Van de Velde. Melbourne International Arts Festival. At the Fairfax Studio, the Arts Centre, until October 17.

A car-full of motherfuckers: Apocalypse Bear Trilogy by Lally Katz

2009-10-10T12:05:00.008+11:00

This is a mind fuck. A Möbius strip tied in time. A hypercube. A giant 3D perceptual illusion. It's a three-pronged play with two prongs at the other end. It dares you to stare, to see if the illusion holds. And, like a drawing by M.C. Escher, or a wireframe image of a cube, you can turn this play inside-out with an act of the mind.

(I believe this is a Walter Wick image.)

The first part of the trilogy, performed without break, is The Fag From Zagreb. (It was first presented as part of Melburnalia at fortyfivedownstairs in 2007.)

A schoolboy just home (Luke Mullins in short pants) finds a bear in his kitchen instead of his mother. The bear -- who politely introduces himself as The Apocalypse Bear -- makes Jeremy a peanut butter and cheese sandwich (pickles on the side) while the boy talks about his day (“I raped a faggot up the arse”) and messages a suicidal man in Zagreb from his laptop.

According to the bear (Brian Lipson in a slack-jawed bear suit), Jeremy’s mother is out shopping and his sister has been raped and murdered by “a car load of motherfuckers.” That said, she might be upstairs quietly doing her homework.

At this point, I’m thinking: Little Red Riding Hood, Gerald the Gorilla from Not The Nine O’Clock News (“When I caught Gerald, he was completely wild.” “Wild? I was absolutely livid!”) as well as the obvious bunnies: Donny Darko and Bat For Lashes (‘What’s A Girl To Do’).

The David Lynch twist happens in the centre section. (The rest of this paragraph might be considered a spoiler... take it or skip it. Your choice!) In it, a schoolgirl (Katherine Tonkin) in America reminisces about the husband she couldn’t satisfy, way back in her future. She chats away to the increasingly creepy and sinister bear, reminiscent of Robert Blake’s Mystery Man character in Lost Highway.

But enough of the plot and its fascinating resolution. The third section is the clincher for a number of reasons. Not least because it reveals a previously unexplored side of the playwright. It’s a touching domestic scene, far less surreal than those that have preceded it.

If David Lynch is the predominant influence in the writing, then Brian Eno rules the rest. The settings in the first two plays recall Eno’s “video paintings” of the 1980s, most famously Thursday Afternoon. Martyn Coutts slow-moving, phase shifting projections are of a domestic kitchen (Fag From Zag) and a school cafeteria in the second play.

The excellent original music also brings Eno to mind, though Jethro Woodward’s music is more focussed and urgent than most (certainly not all) of Eno’s compositions.

One way or another, Apocalypse Bear is a great step for both Katz and the Melbourne Theatre Company. It’s also an unexpectedly apt overture for Brett Sheehy’s first Melbourne Festival in which video paintings are everywhere (from Peter Greenaway’s video described Last Supper to the animated frieze in Sasha Waltz’s Medea) and music/sound design is an essential and overwhelming presence in just about every single art form.

Apocalypse Bear Trilogy by Lally Katz. Directed by Luke Mullins and Brian Lipson. Chris Kohn, artistic adviser. Sound design and original music by Jethro Woodward. Lighting by Richard Vabre. Set and costume design by Mel Page. Video by Martyn Coutts.

A Stuck Pigs Squealing production presented by the Melbourne Theatre Company and the Melbourne International Arts Festival. At the MTC Theatre, Lawler Studio, until October 24.

Look out for my review of the trilogy in the Herald Sun, this week. See also On Stage (And Walls) review.

Just a coupla reviews: One Night the Moon and The Year of Magical Thinking

2009-09-27T23:56:00.000+10:00

One Night The Moon, adapted from the film by John Romeril. Directed by Wesley Enoch. Set and costume design by Anna Cordingley. Lighting design by Niklas Pajanti. Sound design by Kelly Ryall. Presented by Malthouse Theatre. At the Merlyn until October 3.

This stage adaptation of Rachel Perkins’ terrific short film One Night The Moon has excellent ‘provenance’. The adaptation is penned by Perkins’ original writing collaborator John Romeril and the music is played by (among others) one of the film score’s composers, Mairead Hannan.

The beautiful and effective music -- by Hannan, Kev Carmody and Paul Kelly -- is driving, Celtic-infused folk. It powers the piece, from the reverent beginning to the catastrophic conclusion. And director Wesley Enoch makes a fair fist of turning cinema magic into stage magic.

But the transition from one medium to the other stumbles and staggers quite badly. You wouldn’t guess that the stump-jump plough had been invented fifty-five years before the action of the play. The spoken word sections trip up the flow of the narrative time after time after time, bringing it to a crunching halt.

Bizarrely, the country and folk voices of the film have been replaced by raspy rock and roll (Mark Seymour in Paul Kelly’s role) and classic music theatre voices in roles previously sung by actors. Good as she is -- and, really, she is the best of the actors -- Natalie O’Donnell sounded like she was understudying Debra Byrne in Les Misérables. As the white woman, and grieving mother of the missing six year-old girl, this was perfectly apt. But for the black tracker (Kirk Page) to sing like the romantic tenor lead from a musical comedy was more than a little off-putting.

Missing entirely from this production is the little girl. She’s a disembodied voice and a wraithlike projection.

Compared to the short film, this stage adaptation of One Night The Moon is incredibly heavy-handed. Lines like “beyond the known, we’re not alone” are left hanging in space. Mystery, which can be established in a single shot in a film, is infinitely harder to pull-off in a theatre. The comparison between a maggot-ridden lost lamb and the little girl seems mawkish and obvious.

Enoch and Romeril do better in illustrating the tension between the world having its way with us and us having our way with the world. But, overall, the parable-like simplicity of the original story -- while carried brilliantly in the music -- now seems simpleminded.

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. Directed by Cate Blanchett. (Jennifer Flowers, associate.) Set Design by Alice Babidge. Costume design by Giorgio Armani. Sound design by Natasha Anderson. Lighting design by Nick Schlieper. At the Cremorne Theatre, Brisbane, until October 17.

On Christmas Day 2003, Joan Didion’s daughter Quintana was admitted to the Intensive Care Unit at Beth Israel North in New York. A winter cold had spiralled into pneumonia and then complete septic shock.

Five days later, after visiting their comatose daughter, Didion and her writer husband John Gregory Dunne lit a fire at home and sat down to eat. John ended up face down on his dinner plate, dead of a massive coronary.

Though outwardly accepting of her husband’s death, the rational and intelligent Joan refuses to part with John’s shoes. He will need them if he came back, she thinks.

Thus began Didion’s “year of magical thinking,” a year in which the writer turned her life into a kind of fiction, a year in which she simply refused to accept that the outcome of her life with her husband was fixed, that it couldn’t be revised or rewritten like a screenplay.

Didion’s cool-headed account of that year sold hundreds of thousands of copies in hardback. This stage version, also by Didion, is a kind of sequel. (Tragically, Quintana died as the book was about to hit the stores in 2005.)

In this STC production -- presented by the QTC -- Cate Blanchett directs Robyn Nevin. Yes, the Sydney Theatre Company’s new artistic director directs the recently-retired boss. Just as BC (Before Cate) turned to AD with this production, the calendar of Didion’s life restarted with the death of the man she lived with -- and worked alongside -- for forty joyful years.

Didion trawls through their memories and re-dates them: their final trip to Paris becomes 32 days BC. Her last birthday, 25 days BC. Their daughter’s wedding, eight months BC. And so on.

A visit to LA where Quintana is again hospitalised -- this time with a life threatening brain injury -- becomes a desperate quest to avoid familiar places, from the days when the three lived in Malibu. Unguarded memories suck Didion into a vortex in which she has no control over fate. These memories are like improvised explosive devices on the roadside in Iraq.

The stage version of The Year of Magical Thinking -- like the book -- is anything but maudlin. It’s analytical. And very blunt. There are no euphemisms here. Didion likes her truth neat. And it takes your breath away like over-proof liquor.

Nevin, one of our greatest actors, is a joy to watch. Even at her quietest, her voice carries easily and clearly to the back of the theatre. She’s a definition of control, even here, portraying a wife and mother almost paralysed with grief.

It’s a good looking production, though like Cate Blanchett’s other recent productions, the sound is overdone and overly literal.

Review: The Colours by Peter Houghton

2009-09-09T07:52:00.002+10:00

In his novel Popcorn, Ben Elton playfully uses the fact that we begin each chapter not knowing a thing. Not even where and when we are. He uses it and abuses it. Peter Houghton does something similar to the monodrama, where one actor plays multiple characters.

A third of the way through The Colours, we’re still asking ourselves: are we watching a skilled actor doing lots of roles -- principally that of a Colour Sergeant Atkins barking orders at his infantrymen -- or just the one man, who has gone barking mad?

And just as Elton used comedy and satire to tackle very serious issues -- the media’s complicity in killing sprees -- Houghton uses his extraordinary comic skills to tell a sad and troubled tale of loyalty abused and an empire in decline. It’s an Apocalypse Now-style story related sitcom style, like a dark episode of It Ain’t Half Hot Mum.

Actually, Atkins has plenty in common with Battery Sergeant Major Williams from It Ain’t Half Hot Mum. He’s a regimental thug in a far-flung outpost of a bankrupt and overextended empire. And, yes, the natives are restless. It’s time for a changing of the colours.

The Colours, we eventually establish, is set just after the Second World War in a fictional African colony, Batundi. (I immediately thought Burundi, but that terribly poor country was never part of the British Empire. It was German then Belgian.)

The 98th, of which Atkins is a part, is a regiment that has fought for King and country since the Napoleonic Wars; a regiment that has distinguished itself on no fewer than eighty battlefields. Atkins principal duty is to guard the regiment’s ensign, the flag under which the infantrymen rally. He literally flies the colours. With a bolt-action Lee-Enfield rifle in hand.

Houghton and his director Anne Browning -- the team that brought us The Pitch -- quite brilliantly balance sympathy and contempt for Atkins: admiration for his determination and loyalty on the one hand and disdain for his brutal methods on the other. The real heroes are the volunteers and conscripts who have fought and died under the blood red ensign: the Irishman determined to feed his extended family, the Marxist-sympathiser, the artist and so on.

It’s neither a black armband nor a white blindfold view of Empire. It manages to be nostalgic without ever romanticising a bloody past. It’s comedy with bayonet fixed. It’ll gut you.

The Colours, written and performed by Peter Houghton. Directed by Anne Browning. Set and costume design by Shaun Gurton. Lighting by Richard Vabre. Music by David Chesworth. Melbourne Theatre Company. At the MTC Theatre, Lawler Studio, until September 12.

A slightly shortened version of this review was published in the September 9 edition of the Herald Sun.

The Man In Black, the Johnny Cash story. Set list.

2009-09-03T05:45:00.006+10:00

Yes, I am a trainspotter. Here’s the set list from The Man In Black, in which Tex Perkins stars as Johnny Cash. It opened last night.

Act 1

1. I Walk The Line
2. Hey Porter
3. Get Rhythm
4. Big River
5. Five Feet High And Rising
6. Were You There (When They Crucified My Lord)
7. Don’t Take Your Guns To Town
8. Sunday Morning Coming Down
9. Help Me Make It Through The Night (duet with Rachael Tidd)
10. It Ain’t Me Babe (duet)
11. Jackson (duet)

Act 2

1. Folsom Prison Blues
2. Busted
3. Cocaine Blues
4. Dirty Old Egg-Sucking Dog
5. A Boy Named Sue
6. 25 Minutes To Go
7. Greystone Chapel
8. Starkville City Jail
9. Man In Black
10. Bird On A Wire (Leonard Cohen cover)
11. If I Were A Carpenter (duet)
12. Hurt (NIN cover)
13. Ring Of Fire

Encore

1. Darlin’ Companion
2. Folsom Prison Blues (this time sung by Tidd) and medley

The Man In Black, the Johnny Cash story. Starring Tex Perkins, Rachael Tidd and “the Tennessee Four” (Peter Luscombe, James Black, Steve Hadley and Ashley Naylor). Athenaeum Theatre until September 12.

UPDATE: my review...

After a thundering version of ‘I Walk The Line’ -- so deep it would make a sub-woofer quake -- the black-suited singer steps up and delivers the trademark opening line: “Hello, I’m...”

It’s a shock and a relief when he says: “... Tex Perkins.”

As rich and deep as the voice is, as impressive as the figure-eight gee-tar strumming is, Tex is smart enough to know that a little modesty goes a long way. This man in black has a white shirt on. For now.

The first half of the show sketches Johnny Cash’s childhood and early career. It’s clumsy, but informative and often fun. And it takes us from the first number one hit (‘I Walk The Line’) to Johnny’s first number two with June Carter: ‘Jackson’. (They never quite hit the top together, though they made it back to number 2 a few years later with ‘If I Were A Carpenter’... which features in the second half.)

Interestingly enough, the selection of songs in this half (‘Hey Porter’, ‘Get Rhythm’, ‘Big River’, ‘Five Feet High And Rising’) is smarter than the banter. The renditions are conservative and rock solid. And the focus is firmly on Perkins.

After interval, the show kicks up several notches. This time, Tex opens with a “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash,” his white shirt replaced with a black one. And the band fires off the opening songs from the legendary 1968 Folsom Prison concerts: ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ and ‘Busted’ which they follow with another four songs that featured in the Folsom concerts.

Just when the show is barrelling along like an express train, the narration brings the show to a crunching halt. But not for long.

Covers of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Bird On A Wire’ and Trent Reznor’s ‘Hurt’ (which Cash released on two of his ‘American’ recordings, in 1994 and 2002 respectively) lend the show an unexpected complexity. For a moment, we hear how Cash might have sounded if he had sung these songs as a young man, in rude health, not an ailing man in his 60s.

Perkins is as close as we’re likely to get to Johnny Cash in Australia. He makes Walk The Line star Joaquin Phoenix sound like an anaemic karaoke singer. His speaking voice is uncannily like Cash’s. More could be done in the sound mix to thicken up the mid-range of his voice to match it with Cash’s unique timbre, and Perkins needs to concentrate less on mimicry and more on character.

Still, Tex is Tex. Captivating and entertaining. And so is the show.

It will satisfy hardcore fans of both men. And that’s no mean feat.

Por vos muero casts, Australian Ballet, Melbourne season

2009-08-25T17:00:00.005+10:00

The Australian Ballet is very good when it comes to posting casting information on-line and keeping it up-to-date during the season if there are last-minute substitutions or injuries. The Melbourne casts for the current triple bill Concord are here.

Kevin Jackson and Halaina Hills in Por vos muero
(click on the image to enlarge)

Well, all except for the first piece, Por vos muero, which is listed simply as Cast 1 and Cast 2. For the record, the casts are:

Cast 1.

Vivienne Wong, Tzu-Chao Chou
Gina Brescianini, Daniel Gaudiello
Rachel Rawlins, Rudy Hawkes
Lucinda Dunn, Andrew Killian
Stephanie Williams, Damien Welch
Jane Casson, Robert Curran

Cast 2.

Robyn Hendricks, Brett Chynoweth
Halaina Hills, Luke Marchant
Laura Tong, Andrew Wright
Lana Jones, Luke Ingham
Dimity Azoury, Ty King-Wall
Amy Harris, Kevin Jackson

Each cast has its attractions, of course. You'd queue up to see Robert Curran in a walkathon I reckon. And, interestingly, the stars of the show vary from performance to performance. On first night, Vivienne Wong was in killer form. Suddenly, that cool upper-body sophistication of hers -- so rare in a young dancer -- was eclipsed by something else. An acrobatic attack, hot and committed. It's hard to pin down.

Lucinda Dunn, Vivienne Wong, Gina Brescianini, Rachel Rawlins
Por vos muero cast 1 (click on the image to enlarge)

Rachel Rawlins' wrists (believe it or not!) ran a close second to Wong's -- er -- thighs. (You'll understand when you see them!)

But the second performance by the first cast was dominated by Gina Brescianini.

In the second cast, Halaina Hills did the same. (In Brescianini's role, interestingly enough.) Dimity Azouri -- always impressive in the modern repertoire -- also went for it.

Por vos muero and the final piece on the bill, Dyad 1929 by the justifiably overrated Wayne McGregor, are miraculously well performed and very fine pieces. You'd be an absolute idiot to miss them! Seriously.

The Melbourne season ends on September 1. The Sydney season is November 11-30.

Rehearsal photographs by Jim McFarlane, used with permission.

UPDATE: Michelle Potter's excellent review is on-line, here. Other reviews, including my own (rave) review for the Herald Sun, are quoted at length, here.

Slava’s Snowshow, “a sadistic show for a masochistic world.” Athenaeum Theatre, Melbourne.

2009-08-23T17:11:00.004+10:00

The executive summary: If you don’t have “clown issues” comin’ in, you’ll sure as hell have them comin’ out.

The obligatory gag: What, a show about snow with a character called Yellow, and not a single joke about Frank Zappa or Coldplay?!

First impressions:

Variety reckons Slava’s Snowshow is to clowning what Cirque du Soleil is to the circus. Clearly, Variety is to good judgement what I am to good manners. Cos, in two words, their observation is Bull Shit.

If they’d said “what Archaos is to the circus” they’d be fifty degrees warmer. Like the French circus outfit, Slava’s Snowshow is grungy, Euro-style, raucous and menacing.

The main character ‘Yellow’ is a grotesque Semitic stereotype. He’s just a hook-nose short of a class action from the Anti-Defamation League.

...every trace of the old Slava -- the “thoughtful, gentle, poetic” clown -- has been blackened and killed off like a wart after cryotherapy...

Now, the Snowshow had a wildly successful season in New York and, apparently, didn’t cause any riots there. So perhaps I’m being a touch sensitive. (Then again, New York’s Jewish community is one of the most self-flagellating in the world. Maybe, like Seinfeld, they thought the Snowshow was a documentary. You know... life really is this bitter.)

Yellow is more like the creation of Samuel Beckett than, say, Charlie Chaplin. Not so much sad and funny as morbidly depressed and vengeful. Like something out of Godot, Yellow has a love-hate -- or, rather, need-loathe -- relationship with his companions, the green clowns. (Equally stereotypical and every bit as contemptible... in an oddly adorable way.)

Yellow’s relationship with the audience is a bit like Eva Peron’s reputedly was to hers. He’ll take your adulation... and steal your wallet. Actually, he demands both.

The performers are skilled, and their craft is so well-honed it’s almost undetectable. But it will leave you not so much transported as traumatised. It’s a sadistic show for a masochistic world.

My official review, published in the Herald Sun last week:

In the years since Slava’s Snowshow’s pre-9/11 debut, its heart has iced over. The white powdery snow has been packed down and turned into treacherous black ice.

It’s still extraordinarily spectacular, with its brilliantly realistic indoor blizzard, but every trace of the old Slava -- the “thoughtful, gentle, poetic” clown [I’m quoting an essay on Slava Polunin by Natasha Tabachnikova here] -- has been blackened and killed off like a wart after cryotherapy.

This is no show for young children... or grown-ups with clown issues! Think commedia dell’Arte in combat boots or Krusty the Clown dolls with their switches set to ‘Evil’.

Like Krusty, the Slava character in the Snowshow ‘Yellow’ (played by Canadian Derek Scott on opening night) has wild tufts of unruly hair and a seriously mean streak. He torments the Green Clowns... who eventually shoot him full of arrows.

It’s the stuff of fevered nightmares.

The show looks cramped in the Athenaeum Theatre, the stage is bursting at the seams, but there is good access to the audience and the clowns make repeated and effective use of that. Believe me, nowhere is safe from them... or safe from the elements!

Sound quality is not good -- it made my ear holes itch -- and the music is dinky and brutal. But like an Angelo Badalamenti score, it bores its way into your heart.

The performers are exceptionally skilled. They play the audience like a conductor plays an orchestra. But Slava’s Snowshow leaves its audiences not so much transported as traumatised. It’s a sadistic show for a masochistic world.

Slava’s Snowshow. Athenaeum Theatre, Melbourne, until August 30.

I beg to differ... David Harrower’s Knives In Hens (Malthouse Theatre/STCSA)

2009-08-19T10:27:00.004+10:00

Geordie Brookman’s production of Knives In Hens has copped a bit of a spray, around town, for its pacing, design, concept... you name it. But I kinda liked it. Now, I didn't see the production until it had been running for almost a week, so there’s a good chance it hit its proverbial stride in that time.

That said, one of the recurrent complaints about the production was that it was too fast. And I have to say that a good five minutes has been shaved off the running time since it opened.

Executive summary: I liked it. Don't be put off.

After the jump, the director’s cut of my Herald Sun review.

Good art is a revelation. It alters the way we see the world. Great art, I reckon, changes the way we see ourselves. David Harrower’s early play Knives In Hens succeeds on the first count several times over. It casts language and history -- as well as the natural world -- in a surprising new light.

Harrower takes us to a time in history when the written word -- once the exclusive preserve of priests and law-makers -- was starting to appear in villages, to be used by farmers and tradespeople; when the practicality of chalk was challenged by the permanence of pen and ink.

The power of words -- of naming things -- was like witchcraft to the peasants.

The playwright, remarkably, makes these abstract ideas as exciting as sex and death... which are also on the menu in this Chauceresque pot-boiler about a blunt-but-loving ploughman, his capable young wife and the miller, a widower.

The irony of the play is that the ploughman (Robert Menzies) -- who is deeply suspicious of the written word and creative use of language -- inadvertently plants the seed of metaphor in the mind of his wife (played by Kate Box) where it bursts into bloom.

She’s fascinated by the idea of a tree “standing”; she’s keen to name the shiver a tree gives in certain winds, even if she has to invent a word; and she feels embarrassed looking up at the canopy of leaves, as if she were looking up a skirt.

The miller (Dan Spielman) -- hated by all of the hard-working villagers -- reads books and writes in ink. Initially, this is cause for more contempt and frustration from the young woman, but she is vulnerable to his revolutionary ideas about recording events and translating thoughts into written words.

Music in the production is overused and sometimes tactless, and the lighting design doesn’t take into account the brightness of the theatre’s exit signs, but it’s hard to imagine the play better presented than it is here in Geordie Brookman’s measured and touching production. Acting is quite beautifully weighted, too. It’s a great credit to Kate Box that she more than holds her own alongside old sparring partners Menzies and Spielman.

Knives In Hens by David Harrower. A co-production between Malthouse Theatre and the State Theatre Company of SA. At the Beckett Theatre until August 22.

This review ran in the August 11 edition of the Herald Sun

Testing, testing... 1. 2. 3.

2009-08-15T16:12:00.003+10:00

I've been warned: if I request a Beargarden song, I'll be beaten up. But, fuck, I'll be listening to All that Fall on the way there. [Sings under breath: "I write the news... I write the news..."]

More information at Sam's excellent blog, Sails of Oblivion. Sam's also twittering bout the gig, rehearsals &c. here.

Here's one I prepared earlier: Red Sky Morning

2009-06-06T17:58:00.004+10:00

Red Sky Morning might not be the best show Melbourne's upstart theatre company Red Stitch staged last year -- that gong probably belongs to Pool (No Water) -- but it's right up there, and well worth a return season. It gets one, here, courtesy of the Arts Centre's Full Tilt programme.

Tom Holloway's script picked up the 2008 Green Room "New Writing for the Australian Stage" award.

Here's my review of the premiere, last August.

If ever the state government decides that Melbourne needs a full-time ensemble of actors to rival the Sydney Theatre Company's Actors Company, it has a ready-made in Red Stitch. It's an efficient and highly professional company. It's prolific, too, without sacrificing quality. But money is tight.

Red Stitch fills up its little theatre at the eastern end of St Kilda for weeks at a time. But most of Melbourne still doesn't know what it's missing.

The company's latest venture -- called Red Stitch Writers -- is to develop new plays. (Local plays haven't been much of a priority for Red Stitch, to date.)

This one, Red Sky Morning, is the product of a year of readings, workshops and rewrites. And it shows. It hits the stage sprinting. It's fully formed, impressively set and finely tuned.

It's a modest yarn about a day in the life of a family: store manager father, boozy mother and shy teen daughter. They're loving, but they're deeply and tragically bottled up. Heartbreakingly inarticulate.

What they can't say to one another they think aloud to us: their idle thoughts, their secrets, their fears, their black dog depressions... Sometimes all three chatter at once. (The script is written in columns.) So, the director has to conduct the play like a score for three voices.

Sam Strong (who directed Shedding, brilliantly, at La Mama earlier this year[2008]) does a fine job keeping it all comprehensible. But, all due respect to Strong, with actors of the calibre of David Whiteley, Sarah Sutherland and Erin Dewar, a drover's dog could have steered this one home. All three are chameleons. And all three are at their brilliant best.

The combination of lighting (Danny Pettingill) and set (Peter Mumford) is another highlight.

Red Sky Morning by Tom Holloway. Directed by Sam Strong. Designed by Peter Mumford. Lighting by Danny Pettingill. A Red Stitch Actors Theatre production. At the Fairfax Studio, the Arts Centre, Melbourne, until June 13.

This review was published in the September 15 2008 edition of the Herald Sun.

Laughing Clowns concert set list

2009-05-02T05:10:00.005+10:00

Corrections and comments invited.

The short version: the band took a while to warm up — half the main set really — but peaked when it counted.

01. Everything Is Not The Fault Of Minorities
02. Laughing Clowns
03. Come One, Come All
04. Theme From 'Mad Flies, Mad Flies'
05. Knife In The Head
06. Everything That Flies
07. Clown Town
08. Crying Dance
09. Collapse Board
10. Eternally Yours

Encores:

11. That's The Way It Goes
12. Song Of Joy ["We haven't played this for 28 years." — Ed]
13. New Bully In The Town

The line-up, as expected, was Ed Kuepper (guitars and vocals), the inscrutable Jeffery Wegener (drums), Louise Elliott (a co-starring role on saxophone, then flute in 'New Bully In Town'), Biff Miller (electric upright bass plugged into a smoke-billowing pre-amp) and Alister Spence (piano and other keyboards).

Laughing Clowns, live at the Forum, Melbourne, May 1. Part of the 2009 Melbourne International Jazz Festival. (Also May 2 & 3 at The Basement, Sydney.)

Saint, Clown, Bad Seed — an interview with Ed Kuepper

2009-05-01T14:47:00.006+10:00

Thirty-two years after posting a few dozen dodgy-looking 7” singles to the music press -- which led to the international success of the proto-punk anthem (I’m) Stranded and a three-record deal with EMI in the UK -- Saints’ guitarist and songwriter Ed Kuepper is still pressing his own music. Nowadays though, he hawks CDs to fans for ten bucks a pop.

Like folkies around the world -- from the grizzled Richard Thompson to “righteous babe” Ani DiFranco -- Kuepper is a bootlegger. He sells his own live recordings, made direct from the mixing desk. The seventh in the so-called Prince Melon bootleg series is a recording of the reformed Laughing Clowns made at Brisbane’s GoMA in January. You’ll be able to pick it up tonight, at the door, when Kuepper and the Clowns play the Melbourne International Jazz Festival (yes, the Jazz Festival) or at the Basement, in Sydney, on Saturday or Sunday night.

The Laughing Clowns were formed by Kuepper (and drummer Jeffrey Wegener) in the wake of the break-up of The Saints. The Saints, of course, were the dazzling harbingers of punk in the mid 1970s. They even beat the Sex Pistols to the draw. It’s taken the music world considerably longer to catch up with the Laughing Clowns...

Nowadays, Clowns music might be labelled free jazz, neo-jazz, avant-garde, experimental, post-rock, math rock or even post-metal. Hell, make up your own moniker for it! It’s brassy, dark and still scarily fresh. [Check out ‘Collapse Board’ or ‘I Don’t Know What I Want’ on iTunes.]

I last saw The Laughing Clowns early in 1982, sandwiched between The Go-Betweens (Kuepper’s singing voice is not unlike Robert Forster’s, I guess) and Nick Cave’s pre-Bad Seeds band, The Birthday Party. It comes as a bit of a shock to me to discover that I was enjoying jazz, however ‘free’ or ‘neo’ it might have been.

B.Y.O. (No Glass)?! What a concept!

Kuepper (I’ve since discovered) vehemently disputed claims by critics at the time that The Laughing Clowns were playing and recording jazz. Today, he’s rather mellower and happily lists Coleman and Coltrane -- that’s Ornette and John, incidentally -- among the band’s influences.

And speaking of mellowing, there was enough of a rapprochement between Kuepper and Saints singer Chris Bailey for that band to regroup for a couple of concerts on the east coast, starting at Pig City and culminating with the All Tomorrow’s Parties (ATP) gigs early this year.

Given that Laughing Clowns vinyl and CDs are next-to-impossible to find, my first question to Kuepper was how -- and why -- did that particular reformation happen?

“It’s kind of a surprise to me in some ways. It wasn’t something that we actively pursued. The Clowns, as a band, are in an odd situation in as much as we don’t have any current material to promote, we don’t have any affiliation with a label [or] anything. And everybody also has a number of other things with which they’re occupied.”

The invitation, in fact, came from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, who curated this year’s ATP. Kuepper had toured with the Bad Seeds on their last European round as support act. And, indeed, he’s been invited to join the Bad Seeds on the 2009 Summer tour of Europe... as a member of the band. He will be replacing guitarist Mick Harvey, one of Cave’s oldest collaborators and a founding member of the Bad Seeds... not to mention The Birthday Party and Cave’s first major band, The Boys Next Door, before that.

Kuepper stresses that the arrangement with the Bad Seeds is flexible and not necessarily long-term.

“There’s not an aesthetic problem from my perspective at all... I like what they do. I like what they do a lot. And I’ve liked what they’ve done for a long time... Whether it washes with their long-term fans or not is another question!”

Stylistically, what Kuepper does is very different from Harvey. Still, he says, he’s sure it will work out well. “I feel quite optimistic about it,” he adds with an unexpectedly hearty laugh.

Kuepper is so used to being outside of the musical mainstream that success and fame cause much the same bemusement as failure and obscurity. He accepts both with slightly puzzled grace. Still, he admits to being “pleasantly surprised” by the reception of the Clowns this year and the mixed of old and young in the crowds.

“I always searched out older music, myself, so I can identify with that... It’s a different thing to nostalgia, you know?”

“There’s nothing wrong with feeling a glimmer of nostalgia when you’re listening to something, but I think if it’s something that’s new to you, it works both in your current life and also opens up a -- this is what used to happen to me -- it opened up this mysterious world which was really fascinating. I used to listen to a lot of old blues and rock ’n’ roll stuff. And just the sound of it -- the difference between it and things that were on radio at the time -- there was something magical about it.”

Joining Kuepper for these three concerts are Jeffery Wegener, "long-time saxophonist" Louise Elliott, bassist Biff Miller and keyboardist Alister Spence. Wilco guitarist Nels Cline, playing solo, is supporting act at the Forum, tonight. The Lighthouse Keepers' Juliet Ward and and Greg Appel are the supporting act at both Basement performances.

link: Melbourne International Jazz Festival
link: The Basement

Rufus Wainwright Prima Donna is a Melbourne Festival co-commission...

2009-04-30T22:54:00.004+10:00

According to an article last month in Canada's Globe and Mail, Rufus Wainwright's first opera is now a Toronto/Manchester/Melbourne Festival co-production. Prima Donna's premiere is scheduled for July 2009 in Manchester. The North American debut is slated for 2010's Luminato, Toronto's Festival Of Arts And Creativity, a recent addition to the calendar each June.

According to a correspondent at the Rufus Wainwright message board, the Melbourne International Arts Festival is playing dumb, neither confirming nor denying MIAF's involvement. (Always a good sign when the response is "you'll have to wait for the official release of the program...")

And this from Radio Canada:

Prima Donna prendra également l'affiche du festival de Melbourne, en Australie, cet automne. D'ici là, Rufus Wainwright travaille sur une adaptation musicale des sonnets de Shakespeare, qui sera présentée en première à Berlin, en avril.

Got that? En Australie, cet automne! (Northern 'automne' of course!)

After the jump, the Globe and Mail article...

The debut opera from Canadian singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright will have its North American premiere in 2010 at Toronto's Luminato Festival.

Wainwright wrote the score and a French-language libretto for Prima Donna, his new work set in Paris in 1970, in which aging opera singer Régine Saint Laurent struggles to regain her status as a top-flight soprano on the world stage. In a statement released yesterday, Wainwright described composing an opera as a “daring and risky” endeavour and thanked Toronto “for having the guts to make it happen.”

Co-commissioned by Luminato, the Manchester International Festival and the Melbourne International Arts Festival, the opera will have its world premiere in Manchester in July. Wainwright had reportedly been in talks with New York's Metropolitan Opera for a Big Apple premiere, but negotiations broke down after the Met insisted Prima Donna be sung in English and made it clear they wouldn't mount it before 2014.

The Montreal-groomed Grammy nominee and self-described opera aficionado is also on the verge of premiering his musical adaptation of the sonnets of William Shakespeare, composed in collaboration with the Berliner Ensemble, next month in Berlin.

Of Moles and Molls: Spooks, Series 6

2009-04-06T05:15:00.001+10:00

For the record, the series of Spooks that starts screening on the ABC tonight -- which hasn't previously been broadcast on free-to-air -- is Series 6 (made and screened in the UK two years ago) not the latest, Series 7, which was recently released in Australia on DVD.

Here's a spoiler-free review of the DVD release of Series 6 and, for the record, of series five and four. The short version: 6 is a considerable comedown after the spiky adrenal heights of 5.

Spooks, Series 6

The Home Office takes a leaf from The Dummy's Guide to World Domination in Series 6 of Spooks. Defence of the realm turns to offence. And it proves not to be the best defence after all.

Mistakes are made -- both by ministers and MI5 operatives -- resulting in the deaths of countless civilians and, gasp, even the odd CIA field agent.

Unusually for Spooks, the sixth series has a narrative through-line -- so it's well worth watching on DVD -- it concerns Iran's nuclear and biological weapons, and America's eagerness to wage war. (Inexcusably, that plotline peeters out in the penultimate episode.)

While the stakes are impressively and increasingly high, the plotting gets farther and farther fetched. The scripts have some ludicrous mistakes and unbelievable twists. If series five was about killing agents off, six is about their miraculous (and sometimes laughable) resurrections.

With its combination of moles and molls, Spooks is an oil and vinegar blend of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and the Profumo affair. It's absorbing and exasperating. Finally, it is the extraordinary ensemble acting that keep us watching.

After the jump, reviews of series five and four.

Spooks, Series 5

In the course of the first few episodes of this still unscreened [at the time of writing, in May 2008] on free-to-air series, MI5 officers will be hanged, stabbed and poisoned... as well as beaten up, locked up and liberally doused with petrol. All (pretty much) at the hands of their colleagues at MI6. Indeed, a great deal of the terrorist activity happening in London in now initiated by the powers that be. Powers that envy the US Homeland Security Act. And by MOSSAD. At least the team get to whack a few in retaliation!

The few old-fashioned Le Carre-style operatives -- assassins and traitors -- turn out to be the Good Guys. And the fifth column at 5 turn a blind eye. Rather like Melbourne's gangland, only the guilty need look over shoulders.

If you're looking for a thoughtful and absorbing Ace of Spies-style spy yarn, Spooks -- increasingly -- is not for you. But what it lacks in fine detail, it makes up for in sheer adrenaline. Right up to the heart-stopping climax.

WARNING: There are MAJOR SPOILERS in the extras on disks 1 and 5. Do not watch them -- or listen to audio commentaries -- until you've watched the ENTIRE series.

Spooks, Series 4

"We're not philosophers, Harry, we're spooks." Adam's wrong. They're both.

Pre-9/11, before the battle waged between the US Department of Justice and the combined forces of the White House and Pentagon, a series like Spooks would be incomprehensible. Who would believe in a security organisation fighting against flat-earth conservatism?

But, here, a British counter-terrorism unit repeatedly finds itself on the cusp of treason. And MI5 acts as a fifth column for anti-CIA thinking. (On the one occasion in series four where Habeas Corpus is denied, the wrong man is imprisoned for two years... where he is radicalised.)

Episode 1 begins with Danny's funeral. Like Henry VIII's first three wives, the core agents have fallen: divorced (the dour main man, Tom, who departs after a big dummy spit), beheaded (Danny, executed), died (Zoe, faked death to avoid life imprisonment).

The newbies are good, especially Raza Jaffrey as Zafar. But the soul of this good-looking and well-written series is Peter Firth as unit boss Harry Pearce. Something of an equivocal character in the past, Pearce has emerged as a powerful -- if lonely -- voice for what Agent 86 would call goodness and niceness.

Extras: an hour's worth of fluffy promo interviews with cast and crew.

These reviews were published in The Big Issue: editions 282 (July 2007), 305 (June 2008) and 311 (August 2008).