Don Quixote, Victoria State Opera, 25 July 1995

 

 by Jules Massenet

By Victoria State Opera

At State Theatre, Arts Centre Melbourne, July 25, August 3, 7, 11, 1995

Reviewed by Kate Herbert on 3 Aug 1995 for The Melbourne Times

 

Jules Massenet's " heroic comedy" (c.1910) has not been performed here before. The Victoria State Opera production directed by Ian Judge incorporates staging as sparse as the beard of our windmill-tilting hero and a strangely spare re-telling of the Cervantes tale of this idealistic "champion of virtue" and his unrequited love.

 

 Richard Van Allen with his fine, warm baritone, is impressive as the tragic, lovelorn knight, a relic of the Age of Chivalry.  Mezzo, Suzanne Johnston, is both sexy and dulcet as Dulcinea, the seductive queen who taunts Quixote then sends him on a quest to retrieve her necklace from bandits.

Roger Howell was enchanting as Sancho Panza. It is a role which requires a voice equal to that of Quixote but demands a vivid physical and comic presence, all of which Howell manifests with verve and magnetism.

 

Richard Divall, as ever, conducts the orchestra skilfully, but the score itself seems a little thin and lacking in drama which probably explains its rare productions. Some of the libretto is pretty and poetic but overall the story hurries to its conclusion without really penetrating the drama of the knight's journey.

 

There was some good chorus work and charming pseudo-Spanish choreography (Lindsay Dolan) but the dance seemed not to be integrated into the whole piece.

 

I commend the VSO for presenting us with a totally new opera for our stages.

 

KATE HERBERT

240wd

Beauty and the Beast, Princess Theatre, Melbourne, July 2, 1995

 

 Music by Alan Menken, Lyrics by Howard Ashman and Tim Rice, Book by Linda Woolverton.

produced by Jacobsen/Edgley

At Princess Theatre, Melbourne opened July 11, 1995

Reviewed by Kate Herbert on July 2, 1995

 

Spinning plates are usually circus fare but Beauty and the Beast has a spectacular dinner scene with twirling human crockery, dancing cutlery and exploding giant champagne bottles. The scene, Be My Guest, is pure Ziegfeld Follies.

 

Now, I'm pretty attached to Jean Cocteau's 30's film version with its subtle black and white images but this Disney production, re-directed by Richard Wherrett, is a knock-out visual treat. Costumes are superbly quirky, (Ann Hould-Ward) the design (Stan Meyer) is classic fairy-tale with spooky forest and enchanted castle. The choreography (Matt West) is classy, and the lighting (Natasha Katz) is transformational. The castle seems to float on air.

 

Features are the pyrotechnics and the astonishing levitation as Beast transforms into Prince. The set has everything that opens and shuts, including actors who play a singing dressing table, (Gloden Mercer) a teapot (Robin Arthur) a walkin' talkin' clock, (Bert Newton) and a glittering performance by Grant Smith as Lumiere, a foppish candelabra.

 

Rachael Beck as Belle (the Beauty) has a fine musical voice and a warm presence. Michael Cormick as the Beast balanced perfectly the roughness with the evolving humanity and joyfulness of the Beast. Cormick is a rising star with the voice, face and presence of the Prince he plays.

 

The score is not a classic, but it has a couple of memorable songs, namely the title tune and Human Again during which all the servants, who are turning into furniture, pine for their humanity.

 

The lyrics by Tim Rice and Howard Ashman are both romantic and witty. Gaston (Hugh Jackman) the conceited village He-Man has some gems such as, "We'll make a perfect pair/ Just like my thighs", and the Beast's solo love song, If I Can't Love Her, is genuinely moving.

 

Get a look at this if you like a light musical or your kids loved the movie. It's a great family show.

 

KATE HERBERT

 

Lilies by Michel Marc Bouchard, 9 June 1995

By Hoy Polloy

At North Melbourne Town Hall, Tues - Sat until July 1995

Reviewed by Kate Herbert for The Melbourne Times on June 9, 1995

 

Lilies by Michel Marc Bouchard is an interesting play that moves between Canada of 1912 and 1952. In '52, Simon Doucet confronts Bishop Bilodeau with his dirty secrets from their youth. The 1912 narrative deals with Doucet's youthful, illicit romance with the young French Count Vallier, or "Lilywhite" as Bilodeau dubs him. The story of secret love and suppressed sexuality is tragic and romantic.

 

The text has potential, and director Wayne Pearn has found most success in the more intimate scenes between Doucet and Vallier or Vallier and his mad mother.  Larger scenes are often too static. Justin Fowler's performance as Vallier shows great potential. Much of the acting was uninspiring, unfortunately.

 

In the manner of Genet, all roles are played by male actors. This treads a thin line between avant-garde and drag.  There are moments when the campery works and others where it tends toward histrionics.  It seems to thin the emotional layering of potentially moving scenes in which the surface of passion and madness is only skimmed.

 

KATE HERBERT

 

Pericles, Bell Shakespear, 4 June 1995

by William Shakespeare

By Bell Shakespeare Company

At Athenaeum Theatre 1, Melbourne, until June 10, 1995

Reviewed by kate Herbert around 4 June, 1995, for The Melbourne Times

 

Pericles was one of the 17th centuries most popular plays, but it fell out of favour later. John Bell captures its entertainment potential and bawdiness in this rollicking production which has a coherent vision and tight physical direction.

 

The story tumbles on like waves echoing the inclement sea, and Neptune's fury which propels the series of events.  It concentrates on narrative not character. Theories that Shakespeares wrote Act One at an early age or that he didn't write it at all, could explain the flaws in the text: too-obvious dialogue and lack of subtlety in the verse in the early scenes.

 

It feels like the precursor to The Tempest with the silliness of Twelfth Night, too. It is really entertaining and quite light until the emotional reunion scene.

 

Whatever the reason, the text remains a bit flabby. It is not quite a history, nor a tragedy happy ending) nor a comedy (too much pain). It is, rather, a romantic saga, a quest, a hero's journey as Pericles escapes evil, seeks mentors, searches for spiritual fulfilment and love which is very popular in cinema these days (Star Wars, Raiders,). Tragedy is a good man facing disaster at the hands of the gods.

 

Bell takes advantage of the comic potential in the text, making it accessible and funny in the most unexpected places. The tacky, "Persian" brothel utilises very funny caricatures. There is great generosity in the ensemble work and performances are generally very strong, particularly from Vic Rooney (Narrator), Duncan Wass (Helicanos) and Lucy Bell as Pericles daughter, Marina.

 

Jeremy Sims is magnetic, passionate and unpredictable as Pericles. As the young man, he is light and joyful, but he is potent as the grieving, near-catatonic older king, bearing the weight of a life gone awry. His reunion with his lost daughter is a delicate and moving scene with great control and no melodrama.

 

The most telling moment was the satisfied audience's sigh of approval as the Narrator says, "Here our play has ending."

 

KATE HERBERT

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Oh My God I'm Black! June 4 1995

 

by Mary-Anne Sam

By Melbourne Workers' Theatre

At Budinski's Wed-Sat 8pm until June 10, 1995

Reviewed by Kate Herbert around June 4, 1995 for The Melbourne Times

 

We eavesdrop happily on other people's lives because others' loves are interesting and we are, by nature, sticky-beaks. Oh My God I'm Black! is a biographical narration with songs performed by Mary-Anne Sam and her life has been a doozy. I mean, tough!

 

Sam is one of two children of a Torres Strait Island woman and a white Melbourne lad who nicked off early in Sam's life and was eventually discovered to have three families. Sam gives us snatches of her life from early childhood, the death of her mother, homelessness, life and death with her white Nana, school, love, the Aboriginal network. And the moment when she recognises in the mirror "Oh my God, I'm black!"

 

Her love of singing is her major link with her dead mother and songs, mostly American or Carribean-influenced, pepper her personal story. The story is interesting but the script screams for a tough dramaturgical hand. It flits from moment to moment without any focus or dramatic content.

 

Theatre needs a dramatic structure to give dynamic energy to a life. The issues of belonging, acceptance, family and colour are complex and a clearer focus on specific moments might have served this piece better.

 

A solo show is a tough call demanding of the performer a strong stage presence and theatrical range. This piece was more effective when it physicalised scenes and attempted to bring secondary characters to life.

 

 Otherwise it remained too static with Sam attached to the microphone. It swerves too close to melodrama and indulgence with too obvious songs selected for their relevance.

 

 

 

Twelfth Night, Bell Shakespeare, 4 June 1995

 

 by William Shakespeare.

By Bell Shakespeare Company

At Athenaeum Theatre until May 27, 1995

Reviewed by Kate Herbert around 4 June 1995 for The Melbourne Times

 

In addition to wanton revelries, melancholy is undoubtedly a component of Twelfth Night It dominates David Fenton's production for Bell Shakespeare. The dark brooding of the grief-stricken Olivia (Jennifer Kent) spills over in large splashes into Feste, the jester (Darren Gilshenan) whose "Hey Ho, the wind and the rain" and final song are profoundly bleak.

 

There is little of the usual revelry of Twelfth Night carnival celebrations. Even Andrew Aguecheek (Sean O'Shea) and Sir Toby Belch (Vic Rooney) are somewhat restrained in their witty repartee and Belch almost victimises his compadre in drunkenness. O'Shea plays an hilariously goofy Sir Andrew and the two gambol about playfully but there is an over-weaning sadness in them which is moving but not wholly successful.

 

Darren Gilshenan as Feste is an intense, intelligent, taunting fool who watches the whole debacle with a modern cynical eye. With his red lame' vest and languidly sexy style, he is a Johnny Lonely cabaret singer with a bitter wisdom.

 

John Bell plays the smug, dull civil-servant-ish Malvolio in an inspired piece of campery. His performance is, as ever, the most complete and satisfying. Lucy Bell is vivacious and energetic as Viola and as her twin, Jeremy Sims was a terrific cameo.

 

The backdrop of an outsize face of Botticelli's Venus is an interesting representation of love and idealism. The second darker version symbolises the degradation of romanticism but is somehow more intrusive than effective.

 

There is some problem with the coherence of the whole of the production. There being no overall vision or concept.  The modernisation is fine but it lacks clarity or overview. The characters work as individuals and particular performances work as cameos but they seem to all be in isolation.  It is valiant effort to alter the dynamic of a usually light play, but unfortunately there is little sense of ensemble work.

 

KATE HERBERT

 

305 wd

Dead White Males by David Williamson, MTC/STC, 4 June 1995

 

Dead White Males by David Williamson

By MTC / STC

At Playhouse, Melbourne Arts Centre until July 8, 1995

Reviewed by Kate Herbert round June 4, 1995 for The Melbourne Times

 

David Williamson's brand of social satire sits adjacent to Frontline and Fast Forward. Dead White Males is a marriage of literary theory and sketch comedy.

 

From the outset Williamson is determined to prove his particular premise that humans do not need ideologies to live.  This is obvious because all the visible ideologues are complete dickheads, albeit very funny dickheads.

 

The literary theory professor, played with uncannily accurate smarmery by John Howard, is a post-structuralist, feminist, multiculturalist philanderer who despises the strictures of Liberal Humanism. This smug hippie manipulates his students, demanding tacitly that they toe his particular "ism" line and seducing them if they successfully mirror him: absolute narcissism.

 

The malleable undergraduate mind of Angela (the dynamic Michelle Doake) undergoes a great transformation as she realises that people's lives are more fluid and less doctrinaire than theory.

 

Wayne Harrison's direction is crisp and intelligent. The production gallops along and is really very funny if you can tolerate your sacred cows being dashed to the ground.

 

Now everybody gets an hilarious, metaphorical bashing in this play but radical feminists fair worst. Most characters remain fairly two-dimensional with the only truly sympathetic character being Angela's warm, slightly badgered, almost "reconstructed male" dad, played by an adorable Henry Szeps.

 

The women are unremittingly oppressive, shallow harridans. Even pithy, racist Grandpa (the exceptional Simon Chilvers) gets a soft and squishy scene. And Shakespeare, the most prominent "dead white male" writer in the western world, is played as a charming fellow, well-met by Patrick Dickson.

 

There is a sort of glib arrogance about everybody. The rather didactic argument about male/female differences is divvied up between characters but there seems to be a single narrative voice. The often-academic language may alienate some people but there are enough gags and wacky characters to satisfy everybody.

 

KATE HERBERT

300wd

An Inspector Calls by J B Priestley, April-May 1995

 At The Comedy Theatre 

Tues- Sat 8pm Until May 20, 1995

Reviewer: Kate Herbert for The Melbourne Times. Reviewed late April 1995

 

The most extraordinary thing about J B Priestley's An Inspector Calls is director Stephen Daldry's inspired staging. An elevated doll's house, home of the nasty, superior Birling family, teeters on stilts above a blasted war-time London streetscape.

 

 In the first scene our view is restricted. We peer through windows just as do the working class on the street.  Even the staircase is disconnected from the outside world. The building and the family appear inaccessible, impenetrable and invincible from their privileged upper- class position.

 

Not so. An inspector arrives to bring them to task about the suicide of a working-class girl they have all known in some capacity. He blows their world and their house wide open to his piercing eye and the torrential rain which pours onto the stage.

 

The script written in 1946 and set in 1912, is a humanist / socialist commentary on the invidious class system of Edwardian Britain and it remains pertinent today. Daldry's production for the National Theatre has revamped it for the London, New York, Tokyo and Australian stage.

 

There are moments of Brechtian political diatribe such as Inspector Goole's departing speech and director Stephen Daldry has accentuated the alienation through stark lighting effects, addressing the audience directly and by adding roving, inquisitive children and a silent majority of adult observers.

 

The maid, (Georgina Beer) who is unheard and invisible for most of the script, remains on stage constantly, tipping rubbish, carrying chairs, even rolling out a red carpet for the terrifying matriarch, Mrs. Birling, (Helen Lindsay) all as a reminder of the class distinction.

 

Barry Foster as the Inspector / Confessor gives an impeccable performance, both passionate and vigorous. The other performances are all exceptional as the characters face their judgement day in a crumbling world under a drenched sky.

 

Buy Kate Herbert

Nil, Cat and Buried, Stephen Sewell, 28 April 1995

 

Nil, Cat and Buried by Stephen Sewell

At La Mama at Courthouse until May 13, 1995

Reviewed by Kate Herbert around 28 April 1995 for The Melbourne Times

 

There are two stars in Nil, Cat and Buried by Stephen Sewell: David Pledger's crisp, vigorous direction is the first and he is evidently also responsible for suggesting to Stephen Sewell that he combine three short pieces into this one script.

 

Pledger has developed a powerful kinetic style which relies heavily on the ensemble. As in his Taking of Tiger Mountain, he has created an economical and often witty physical language of repeated gesture and movement which is concentrated in the three-person chorus. (Danielle Long, Paul Bongiovanni, Greg Ulfan) who comment, quip, mimic and abuse.

 

They make broad, simple statements which translate as a chorus of breakdown underlying the fraught and often violent communication of a man and woman (Leon Teague, Tamara Saulwick) dealing with being stranded in an isolated house together as their relationship collapses.

 

Shane Feeny-Connor is the second star. His intense and strange persona as Cat is riveting. His presence draws the eye and his words shock, lull and reverberate in the unadorned Courthouse space. Sewell's words in his hands are like poison darts, his imagery of "the unnameable horror" of which we are all capable, is relentless.  His extraordinarily powerful role as Mal Hennessy in Janus was no fluke.

 

The whole piece leaves one shell-shocked. I was less concerned with the content and the actual words, which are pungent but not particularly new, than with the mode of delivery. The actors confront and challenge us directly. Feeny-Connor climbs onto the scaffold seating and gets right in your face. It is a very fine exercise in style executed with great finesse by Pledger and his cast.

 By Kate Herbert

Rigoletto, Verdi, Australian Opera, 24 April 1995

 

By Giuseppe Verdi

By Australian Opera (Now Opera Australia)

At State Theatre, at  Melbourne Arts Centre

On May 4, 6, 9, 13, 16 1995. Followed by Peter Grimes

 This review published in The Melbourne Times in April 1995.  KH

Giuseppe Verdi's Rigoletto is an operatic novelty, having a baritone as the title role. Of course, he is a hunchback with a sharp tongue and no friends who loses his daughter, Gilda, to his Duke's lusty tastes while the Duke - the tenor - is the romantic lead who gets the girl, in fact all the girls and lives to get some more.

 

Director Elijah Moshinsky's production is reminiscent of Mussolini's vengeful Italy with Michael Yeargan's designs of opulent palazzi and back street bars in conjunction with some colourful choreography for a sycophantic male chorus. The Victorian State Orchestra is conducted with flair by Richard Gill.

 

Gregory Tomlinson's flavoursome, muscular tenor gives the ideal passionate tone to the promiscuous Duke. His stage presence was relaxed, credible and pretty damned sexy and his "La donna e' mobile" exhilarating.

 

Rosamund Illing's bell-like, crystal soprano is perfect for the ingenue Gilda and gives a light joyousness to "Caro nome." Bass baritone Arend Baumann's Mafioso-like Sparafucile has a wicked, lackadaisical quality, particularly in Act Three.

 

Accolades go to Barry Anderson as the jester, Rigoletto. His warm, velvet baritone captures both the jovial and despairing, the teasing and pain. His aria "Cortigiana, vil razza damnata" after Gilda's rape, is ripe with pathos and his duets with Illing were inspiring and well-matched. In fact, Rigoletto is unusual in being intentionally composed by Verdi as virtually a string of duets rather than virtuoso arias.

 

The drama hurtles toward its magnificently tragic third act, fulfilling "La Maledizione" (Curse) laid upon Rigoletto by  Monterone. All Rigoletto's sardonic humour has vanished, replaced by vengeance and shame. This act is perfectly constructed dramatically, musically and vocally.  It finishes poignantly, without finale, on Rigoletto's lone despairing cry, "La Maledizione.

 

See it and weep.

 

KATE HERBERT

Turandot, Pucccini, Australian Opera, 19 April 1995

 

By Giiacomo Puccini by Australian Opera.

At State Theatre until May 10, 1995

This review was published in The Melbourne Times in April 1995

 

Turandot, the icy Chinese Princess and first self-declared Radical Celibate, has vowed to take her revenge on all men for the abduction, millennia earlier, of her beautiful ancestor. A grudge grandissimo!

 

The story of Turandot, Puccini's final masterpiece, is man's perennial pursuit of the inaccessible, resistant beauty. Unfinished at the time of his death in 1924, the opera was adapted from the fairy tale by 18th century playwright, Carlo Gozzi.

 

Puccini's score is both playful and regal. It shifts from heraldic trumpetry and weighty drama of impending execution to the delicate emotional unrequited love aria of Liu'. Carlo Felice Cillario conducts the VSO with grandeur, ease and fluidity.

 

Ruth Falcon in the title role has a powerful and imposing voice in its upper register but rather stilted acting. As her masochistic suitor, Calaf, Kenneth Collins's tenor is warm and rich but perhaps not sufficiently full-blooded for this demanding role.

 

It has always been a mystery to me why Calaf marries the nasty baggage, Turandot, instead of the loving, loyal and passionate Liu' but he didn't have the mesmerising Arax Mansourian singing Liu'. In addition to having a haunting, delicate and perfectly controlled voice, she is an exceptional beauty.

 

John Pringle, Graeme Ewer and Christopher Dawes (Ping, Pang , Pong) cleverly walked the edge of comic-dramatic and Donald Shanks as Calaf's father has a voice with great heart.

 

John Montgomery's lighting enhances Graham Murphy's dramatic staging and carefully composed stage picture. An uncluttered stage accommodates the enormous, rippling chorus but fills the upper reaches with Kristian Fredrikson's emblematic design of Chinese filagree dragons, Peking Opera masks and a huge, symbolic moon.

 

The Emperor (Robert Gard) appears as a spectacular 10 metre mountain swathed in golden ottoman. Turandot emerges from beneath his robes, equally impressive and lofty, her initial massive height highlighting her later disempowerment at the hands of Calaf.

 

This really is a lavish production well worth seeing.

 

KATE HERBERT

Julius Caesar, , Australian Opera (Opera Australia), April 1995

 State Theatre, Arts Centre Melbourne

Closed April 10, 1995

Followed by Turandot and Rigoletto

until May 1995

Reviewer: Kate Herbert for The Melbourne Times. Reviewed in April, 1995

 

Julius Caesar is epic entertainment. It has one of history's great love stories: Cleopatra and Caesar, (to be topped only by Cleo’s next great love), a series of exceptional arias designed to showcase the eight principals' vocal gymnastics, and an extraordinary design.

 

Its story is both moral and hedonistic and has more action than the usual, late baroque "opera seria". Handel's orchestration is more restricted more than modern opera scores so that a single flute or bassoon over the strings is striking. It resonates with what we recognise of Handel's religious music. The Victorian State Orchestra is impeccably conducted by Graham Abbott and includes an instrument called a "Theorbo". Heard of it?

 

Francisco Negrin's spectacular direction is riddled with fascinating paradox. The set is minimalistic yet enormous, colourless and vivid, it dwarfs the actors and emphasises them, the battle fields are peopled with superb dancers, its potentate is a countertenor.

 

The design is magnificent with echoes of Egyptian hieroglyphics, weaponry, statues, temples and palaces. It has the dark brooding quality of stone surfaces with flashes of a single colour shattering the monotone. It all works to create an hypnotic, ageless atmosphere which hovers in space and time.

 

Yvonne Kenny's effortless, warm honey voice with its humming-bird tones, lingers in the air. Graham Pushee's phenomenal countertenor is at once delicate and powerful. He is comfortable on stage and manages to be both cheeky and stately.

 

The other principals are all fine voices. Rosemary Gunn (Cornelia) has a rich mezzo and Stephen Bennett (Achilla) a resonant baritone. Rodney Gilchrist (Nerino) must be unique in being both a countertenor and a dancer. Solo violinist Tony Gault makes a perky appearance on stage as Cleopatra's musician.

 

The A.O. looks like having a string of hits this season.

 

Kate Herbert

Melbourne Comedy Festvial short reviews, April 1995

 5 short reviews of some of my favoruite shows in 1995 Melbiurene Comedy Festival.  KH

Curtains by Lano & Woodley

At Athenaeum Theatre 2. Tues-Sat 8.45pm & Sun 5pm until April 23, 1995

Lano and Woodley do my favourite brand of slapstick: dangerous and hilarious. I laughed till I wept. Frank (dare-devil with rubber bones) and Colin ( bent-est straight man ever), do totally sshtooopid knockabout, unforgivably silly songs and ad-lib with ingenuous and wicked charm.

Big, unadulterated "Haa! Haa!"

 

Totally Wicked by Flying Fruit Flie

Big Top City Square 3. Tues -Sat 7.30pm  matinees 2pm (Check days). Until April 2, 1995

Fruit Flies show, Totally Wicked, is full of cute and very skilful kids from Albury who are so totally unaffected and un-wicked it's adorable. Take the family and thank God it's not your kid up there without a net!

It is more "Ooh! Aah!" than "Ha! Ha!"

 

Decadence, by Steven Berkoff

 Reception Room Melbourne Town Hall Tues-Sun 9.30 pm, Sat & Sun also 5pm (No show April 8), 1995

 

Decadence is everything its name prophesies and more. Berkoff's lewd, erotic and outrageously funny verse play, is a scarifying indictment of London's Sloane Rangers and the obscenity of over-indulgence in sex, food, alcohol and violence. Rhyss Muldoon and Alison Whyte are masters of the complex text, giving it a vigorous physicality and impeccable comic timing. The sex romp during the Fox Hunt and the ensuing Tequila drinking rave are stupendous.

Both "Mmmm! Mmm!" and "Ha! Ha!"

 

Judith Lucy in King of the Road

At Lower Melbourne Town Hall Tue, Wed, Thurs, Sun 8.30pm, Fri & Sat 10pm

 until April 22, 1995

Judith Lucy’s new show, King of the Road, still has the hilarious laconic laid-back style we know and love but it also has a new level of theatricality. Accompanied by a very silly selection of slides, she spills her guts with poignant, truthful and funny and appalling tales of bonking and drinking her way unsuccessfully across several continents. A big "Ha! Ha!" and some "Oh, my God!'s".

 

Glynn Nicholas in Crossing the Line

At Comedy Theatre Tues-Sun 9pm Mon April 10 9.30pm  (no show Sun April 9 or Fri 14)

until April 22, 1995

The Rebetes , Antipodes Festival, 29 March 1995

Written by Rhondda Johnson

At Beckett Theatre, Malthouse

March 29 -April 15 1995

Antipodes Festival, Melbourne

This review was published in The Melbourne Times after 29 March 1995. KH

 

In the Greek cafe featured in The Rebetes there are plenty of drug references, a hookah and lots of joints on stage, enough ouzo and cigarettes to sink a migrant ship.

 

The Antipodes Festival annually celebrates Greek culture but Rhondda Johnson's play for the festival celebrates specifically the Rebetika blues music and its associated drug, alcohol and liberation culture.

 

It is a fairly accurate representation of a very ugly side of the Greek migrant culture and its sadness, bitterness, conservatism. In short, it shows us the Blues. The scene is uncannily like peeking through a window of a cafe in Sydney Road but this time we see the men playing cards, drinking, dancing, singing and reminiscing as well as harassing any woman courageous enough to walk within coo-ee.

 

Kate the Celt (Helen Rollinson) takes a job in the cafe as a "hostess'. She ends up leaving her gambling loser of an Aussie husband (Steve Adams) and becomes immersed in the Greek culture warts and all.

 

There are some entertaining moments in this production, but they become very lean after three long hours. The script is well-observed with a few good gags but is repetitious and unnecessarily long. The direction is clunky and the style shifts from almost TV-style naturalism to abstract flashbacks with no clear distinctions made.

 

The Rebetika music was at times an integral part of the piece at others it was a thin cover for yawning gaps and interminable scene changes.

 

The cast ranged from good amateurs to quite strong performers who eventually, are struggling to keep the audience's attention. Helen Rollinson was energetic as Kate, the ring-in Aussie sheila, and Jason Raftopoulos, as her young second generation lover, gave a very credible performance. Steven Grapsis was terrifyingly believable as the sleazebag, Apostoli.

 

KATE HERBERT

Jump! Crying in Public Places, March 1995

At Napier St Theatre, Sth Melbourne

Tues -Sat 9.30 pm until April 2, 1995

Reviewer: Kate Herbert. Reviewed in March 1995.

Watching Crying in Public Places is like observing four women in their living room, playing, arguing, telling stories.

 

Watching Jump! has the wicked feeling of eavesdropping on four friends playing, arguing, telling stories. Occasionally they catch you at the keyhole.

 

Crying in Public Places (Anni Davy, Maud Davy, Karen Hadfield and Jane Bayly) have a cheeky, warm, natural style that makes me want to rush up and hug them all. Their melange of original a capella songs, body percussion, movement and yarn-spinning, has a fluid quality. The dynamic of Jump! is almost tidal. It seems to capture the wave motion of a life.

 

"Am I brave enough to jump?" they sing in their last song. Throughout the piece, they jump both literally and metaphorically. The fear of leaping from a cliff equates with that of hurling oneself into a new experience. Anni wants a dog, Jane is pregnant (really!), Maud celebrates being saved from marriage in the Mid-West.

 

The passion and guts and ease of this performance resides in the genuine bond between the women and the stories being more fact than fiction. Anni Davy's plaintiff cry as she lies curled on the floor, "Maudie, I can't feel my fingers", echoes her own fall during a circus trick three years ago.

 

Jump! resonates with the great leap forward which is our life, but it also teases us with tiny details, observations of our strange, self-absorbed and quirky world views. It's comedy is surprising and observational. "Where the fuck is my future?" quips Maud Davy as she peers under our seats.

 

Jumping is "the tragic imperative". Each little observation adds up to an indefinable and charming representation of the joy and pain of jumping.

 

KATE HERBERT

La Traviata, By Australian Opera, 18 March 1995

 

By Giuseppe Verdi

At State Theatre, Melbourne Arts Centre

On March 18, 21, 24, 28, 31, April 8, 19, 22 1995

 

Sex, love, death and fabulous tunes; Giuseppe Verdi's La Traviata has the lot and Elijah Moshinsky's production for the Australian Opera is lavish and enthralling. Our excellent State Orchestra is conducted expertly and tastefully by Carlo Felice Cillario.

 

This tragic-romantic tale is based on Alexandre Dumas' Lady of the Camellias and translates loosely as The Corrupted One.

 

In case you don't know the plot: beautiful but ailing floosy, Violetta, rages with the fast-set in decadent late-19th century Paris, falls in love with rich boy Alfredo and gives him up at his Papa's request only to be reunited with him on her consumptive deathbed where she has found peace and religion.

 

Gillian Sullivan sings Violetta impeccably, giving the role, both vocally and in performance, a dynamic range which balances the feisty courtesan with the fading beauty. Her dying aria was heart-wrenchingly beautiful and her duets with both Alfredo and his father were charming and the aria "Fors e' Lui" at the end of Act One was a virtuoso demonstration of her coloratura.

 

Tenor, Jorge Lopez-Yanez has a fine vocal quality and plays the love-sick Alfredo less as the ardent lover than as a callow and enchanted youth. Barry Anderson velvety baritone has the requisite strength for Alfredo's worldly and patriarchal Papa, although he concentrates on the voice in isolation from the performance and the stage relationships.

 

La Traviata is spectacle. The set design by Michael Yeargan echoes both the extravagance of the Parisian demi-monde and its high-class poverty. While Violetta's apartment in Act Three is grandly spartan in its simplicity, Flora's salon in the second act is gaspingly beautiful with its rich colours, Moorish style and darkly gypsy overtones. The lavish interiors force the crowd scenes forward so that the impression of a lurid, cramped and clamouring hot-bed of iniquity is palpable.

 

Kate Herbert

 

Assassins, MTC, 17 March 1995

 

 Music & Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim & Book by John Weidman

By Melbourne Theatre Company

At Fairfax Studio, Melbourne Arts Centre, until April 1, 1995

This review was published in The Melbourne Times after 17 March 1995. KH

 

Stephen Sondheim cannot write a bad musical; nor can he compose an ordinary melody nor construct a banal lyric. He deals exclusively in challenging ideas. Look at Sweeney Todd, A Little Night Music, and now, Assassins, which takes a pot shot at the men and women who have tried and / or succeeded in assassinating a U.S. president.

 

Roger Hodgman's MTC production is hilarious and challenging entertainment. The style is Brechtian, almost vaudeville. Sondheim calls it ‘revue’. The four-piece band was exceptional and Tony Tripp's shooting gallery design extremely evocative.

 

Presidential assassinations may seem a bizarre choice for a comic musical and, when it opened during the Gulf War, Assassins was criticised for trivialising the subject. In the flesh, it is a passionate piece; passionate about the deaths (everybody remembers where they were when Kennedy was shot) and deeply emotional about the pathetic lives of the killers and their warped motives.

 

The lyrics by Sondheim and book (by John Weidman) are an indictment of the unrealistic expectations raised by US hegemony that every boy can be President; "You can climb to any height." These assassins represent the outsiders, the losers. "We're the ones who can't get into the ballpark."

 

The cast was strong in both voice and performance. All were impeccably, some uncannily, cast by Hodgman.  Bruce Myles as Samuel Byck gives a beautifully textured performance with detailed and deeply touching monologues and John O'May as Lincoln 's assassin, with his rich and resonant voice, is a charismatic presence in the intimate space of the Fairfax.

 

This is a beauty. Seeit!

The Supper, Stable Productions, 26 Feb 1995

 

Written by Peter Sichrovsky

By Stable Productions

At Beckett Theatre, Malthouse Melbourne until March 18 1995

This review was published in The Melbourne Times after 26 Feb 1995. KH

 

The Supper may be a play about the children of Jews and Nazis in Austria, but it does, surprisingly, have quite a few laughs to temper the traumatic recollections.

 

Erika (Julie Nihill) is daughter to a Nazi. Robert, (David Roberts) her husband-to-be and father of her baby, is son of concentration camp survivors. Having refused to meet during the four years of Erika and Robert's relationship, both paretal couples are coming for an obviously doomed dinner.

 

Sichrovsky's script is dense with ideas and the dialogue is fraught with traumatic references to the holocaust and the emotional games played by the couple. It is essentially an argument in which the two confront their differences instead of ignoring them.

 

This drama of words with a dark and strange comic edge, is not quite resolved by either of the two alternative endings. It does, however, weave into the preparations for "the arrival" (Act One) and into the "aftermath" (Act Two), an interesting debate on the risky issue of cross-cultural marriage and releasing past pain. It takes a circuitous path through persecution complex and victim mentality, reconciliation and revenge.  This reverberates incessantly in their relationship which almost recreates oppressive Nazi versus oppressed Jew.

 

The argument is powerful but somehow hamstrung by Erika being so dislikeable in her bitter, incoherent and, finally, violently abusive behaviour. It appears, at the very end, that their appalling behaviour may even be a regular pattern.

 

KATE HERBERT

 

Arcadia by Tom Stoppard, MTC, Feb 1995

By Melbourne Theatre Company

At The Playhouse, Arts Centre Melbourne until 25 March, 1995

Reviewer: Kate Herbert for The Melbourne Times. Reviewed late Feb 1995

 

We make of history what suits our politics and philosophy, even an earthly paradise – Arcady. Tom Stoppard's play, Arcadia, is impeccably crafted, perfectly structured, intelligent, witty and challenging. I cannot fault script, Simon Phillips production nor any individual performance.

 

In inimitable Stoppard fashion, Arcadia unravels a superb biographical-historical plot not unrelated to A.S. Byatt's novel, Possession.

 

He interweaves an aristocratic family of the late 18th century Romantic period of literature, painting, gardens and classical mathematics with the 20th century's literary criticism, computer technology and chaos theory.  The result is a mind-bending intersection of worlds charged with sex and conflict.

 

Two modern literary academics from polarised schools of academia meet at Sidley Hall. Lewis Fiander plays conservative, priggish snob, Bernard Nightingale in pursuit of Lord Byron while Helen Morse is the cool feminist, Hannah Jarvis, hunting for the more obscure Hermit of Sidley Hall.

 

History always eludes us. It is unscientific, as are natural phenomena and human nature. We cannot quantify it. The unpredictability is the rule, unlike quantum physics and relativity.

 

Under the mathematical tutelage of Byron's friend, Septimus Hodge (stylish, wickedly rakish Peter O'Brien), an inspired 18th century teenager (zesty Sarah Walker) stumbles upon a pre-computer version of Chaos Theory. Meanwhile various sexual liaisons are being played out and the 20th century theorists struggle to piece the jigsaw together.

 

In this story, as says twitty aristocrat Chloe (hilarious Sally Cooper) sex is the variable, the interferon. All the 20th century theory falls apart without knowledge of the personal details to which we are privy in the Romantic era flashbacks.

 

The play captures the "decline from thinking to feeling" which was the social norm after the Age of Reason. The Romantics created their own chaos as have the Chaos Theorists today. We discover that "everything you thought you knew, was wrong" both in life and in the drama.

 

The play is moving, passionate, analytical and inspired. It forces an audience to think, judge and feel. I could give you no greater recommendation.

 

KATE HERBERT

 

The Taking of Tiger Mountain by Strategy, NYID, 22 Feb 1995

 

By Not Yet It's Difficult- part of  series

At Theatreworks Wed - Sun until Feb 26, 1995

This review was published in The Melbourne Times after 22 Feb 1995. KH

 

The Taking of Tiger Mountain by Strategy did not give us a chair. It shuffled us around the open Theatreworks space and we figured out where to sit on the floor for the best vantage point. This challenges the audience / performer relationship which needs a bit of rattling every now and then.

 

Director, David Pledger, is accessible in the space, talking to us, instructing. He is almost reading program notes at the beginning about the physical, mobile and participatory nature of the show and the Peking Opera tale which is the basis for this adaptation.  Meanwhile, the performers enact a series of exercises in Chinese mode.

 

The consciously self-conscious opening sequences give way to a more coherent and substantial dramatic form in the second half of this one-hour performance. (It is not a play.) The actors own commentaries are interpolated between fragments of the Tiger Mountain story with its Maoist propaganda.

 

Actors give a treatise on American Imperialism, the regimentation of classical ballet, gymnastic and military training, the repetitive process of which causes rigidity of thought. All these references, plus the witty representation of the Tiger Mountain battle, indirectly criticise the Maoist ideology, its violence and its propaganda machine. Taped snippets of the Chairman Mao exercises reverberate over the final scene, suggesting an insidious presence.

 

The vignettes from the deconstructed narrative are the strongest components of the production. Maud Davey, as always, is magnetic as a grieving mother, a chanting military leader, an interrogator. Kha Viet Tran's superbly controlled physicality and natural presence make him charismatic on stage. His Maoist soldier single-handedly attacking Tiger Mountain and its insurgents was a highlight.

 

Of course having no seating makes it, by force, theatre for the young, nimble and energetic. You wouldn't want to be disabled, old, sick or have a bad back - but it's only an hour.

 

KATE HERBERT