Voyage by dumb type, Melbourne Festival, Oct 18,2006

Voyage by dumb type

Melbourne Festival of Arts

Playhouse, Arts Centre, Wed 18 to Fri 20 October, 2006

Reviewer: Kate Herbert

“Voyage really takes you on a trip,” says a member of the Japanese company, dumb type. This performance does seem to have a great deal in common with LSD trips, perhaps more than with terrestrial journeys.

dumb type is a Japanese avant-garde troupe with its origins in performance art and this is still evident twenty years after its inception. Although its founders chose to comment on socio-political issues, the style and form has become significantly more abstract, non-verbal and conceptual now.

Voyage is fascinating to watch for its technical skill, beautiful imagery and complex technology, but the production lacks heart. There is no emotional connection and an audience struggles to make meaning of its series of disconnected vignettes.

It is also a savage assault on the eardrums. The recurrent, roaring soundscape, reminiscent of a jet engine at ten times normal volume, is unbearably and, frankly, dangerously loud. The sound literally rattles one’s bones.

This noise accompanies the opening scene in which, in near darkness, a frail woman moves like an insect in a slow, sustained dance in front of giant, round inflatables. The scene is disturbingly nightmarish.

A more playful scene follows. Two women, wearing miners’ headlamps, are lost underground. Their journey through darkness is represented in contact movement as they crawl over each other to reach their destination. Their quest is accompanied by the sound of stones being raked into pathways by two men.

A woman searches a map under a flickering light bulb then lies across her desk typing airline departures on an electric typewriter. Flight numbers and destinations are projected on a huge screen.

The more lyrical, often mesmerising scenes involve a young woman lying on a blanket on the gleaming reflective surface of the stage. With each new film projection she appears to be floating in a lapping ocean, a snowy mountain scape, fields of flowers or windblown trees. In a childlike voice she wishes for everything she ever wanted.

Another playful travelling vignette is the dance of the air stewardesses. They create a jolly dance set against a stark silence broken only by the clatter of their high heels.

An astronaut floats amongst clouds, snow travellers roll across an icy landscape and the frail woman returns, flailing gently in a dark and alien environment.

Voyage has much in common with performance art and dance but it is the kind of theatre that makes an audience of the uninitiated feel stupid for not understanding it. Why should they?

By Kate Herbert

Now that Communism is Dead My Life Feels Empty, Oct 14, 2006

 Now that Communism is Dead My Life Feels Empty

by Richard Foreman

Malthouse Theatre

The Tower, Malthouse, Oct 14 to Oct 28, 2006

Reviewer: Kate Herbert

The chaotic nature of Richard Foreman’s script, Now that Communism is Dead My Life Feels Empty, is at its most effective in this production when the acting and direction are at their most controlled. 

When all the elements are out of control, the piece becomes an incomprehensible, loud and punishing theatrical mess.

Yes, Foreman purposely designed his award-winning theatrical form (He dubbed it “Ontonological-Hysteric Theatre”) to reflect the fragmentation of thought and the complex and diverse realities that are presented to us in the world, all of which can be perceived in different ways.

However, because there is no narrative and no consistent characterisation we, the inveterate meaning-makers, struggle to attend to the entire show. It becomes mentally exhausting so we abandon all hope of drawing its threads into a whole. My neighbour simply went to sleep.

Max Lyandvert, known best as a composer, not only directed and composed the soundscape, but he designed the set. He heightens the on stage chaos with random sounds of dogs barking, machine guns, white noise and voice overs. The constantly changing set of chairs, boxes, white paper and small scaffold towers is accentuated by Luiz Pampholha’s (OK) severe and dramatic lighting.

The play is described as a satire but a great deal of comedy in the script that is missed by Lyandvert. Fred (Benjamin Winspear) and Freddie’s (Gibson Nolte) interaction resembles the absurdist comedy of Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon and other clown duos. However, the jokes fly by unacknowledged or inadequately explored and the grotesque comedy sometimes becomes simply ugly.

The actors work very hard in this play. Their work is often stylised and contained but becomes more hysterical as the play continues, but there is too much shouting and the thumping of their running feet on the floor of  The Tower becomes annoying.

There are resonances of the chaos that followed the Fall of Communism, of the McCarthy trials and of revolution. The most sustained image, unfortunately, is of a blow-up sex doll that becomes a real woman (Rebecca Smee). She is disturbingly described as a dog, kept in a box, chained, gagged and bandaged, mysteriously appearing and disappearing, silent and servile.

Given that Foreman is a much-awarded writer in both the US and France, perhaps there is more theatrical merit in this play than is apparent in this production.

By Kate Herbert

Tragedia Endogonidia: BR. #04 Brussels, Melbourne Festiva,l Oct 12.2006

Tragedia Endogonidia: BR. #04 Brussels
Societas Raffaello Sanzio by Romeo Castellucci

Melbourne Festival of Arts

  Merlyn Theatre, Malthouse, Thurs to Sun until Oct 15

Reviewer: Kate Herbert

There are always conflicting views on contemporary theatre but there is no doubt that Tragedia Endogonidia is compelling, disturbing and possibly confusing for some.

Societas Raffaello Sanzio perform non-linear narrative without classical characterisation or dialogue.

Director, Romeo Castellucci, creates challenging, often confronting theatre that investigates concepts rather than stories.

This episode, BR. #04 Brussels, is perhaps more horror than tragedy. Its violence reflects atrocities witnessed in war or sadistic human rights abuses more than it does the ancient Greek notion of tragedy.

We have a visceral response to the all-too-realistic, savage beating by two police officers of a nearly naked young man. The horrific quality is heightened by the unemotional attitude of the officers and the chilly theatricality of their pouring a bottle of blood over him before reducing him to a bloody pulp.

There is virtually no dialogue apart form a mumbled prayer from the battered man as he struggles inside a plastic garbage bag.

The vulnerability of humanity is distilled in the stark, cold, white marble space, reminiscent of an enormous, bathroom or torture chamber. A tiny baby, lying alone on a blanket looking bright, perfect and adorable, is a counterpoint to the barbarity of the beatings.

An ancient, wispy-bearded man tremulously searches the clinical room - for an escape route or perhaps for meaning? He dresses in priestly robes then in a police uniform. Perhaps we are seeing the aged future of the violent officer.

A cleaner, who appears unaware that she is on stage, slowly and quietly mops the tiles. Both she and we, the audience are the objective observers.

The Angel of Death is a masked child and two Edwardian women seem to be part of the dying man’s delusional dreamscape.

There is also grotesque comic imagery: the old man wears a bikini, a policeman strips to his underwear, a woman in an Edwardian gown extracts her tooth with string, the old man disappears into his mattress.

The punishing soundscape (Scott Gibbons) intensifies the sense of actual and impending danger with the persistent roar of a hurricane. As we watch, we reflect on violence, tragedy, humanity, despair, grief and death.

The show closes with incomprehensible movie credits: life is fleeting, just like a film. But it is the squirming, bloodied body of the beaten man that is seared on the memory.

Tragedia Endogonidia manages to somehow be both meditative and distressing.

By Kate Herbert

Apple + Charlie: the story, Oct 11, 2006

Apple + Charlie: the story

by Nadine Cameron, Music and lyrics by Nadine Cameron and Cam MacIntosh

Melburne Fringe Festival
Wesley Anne, 250 High St Northcote, until Oct 14, 2006

Reviewer: Kate Herbert

The Fringe Festival provides an arena for artists to experiment in a public. Great works can be created on the smell of an oily rag.

Despite the best-laid plans (and other platitudes) and some musical talent, Apple + Charlie just does not cut it as music theatre. Nadine Cameron and Cam MacIntosh wrote plenty of songs - perhaps too many - but the show has significant flaws.

Everybody on stage busts their chops to make a show but only the musicians demonstrate any technique. Despite common assumptions, being able to walk and talk does not make one an actor.

Cameron’s script is about a couple called Apple (yes, the fruit) and Charlie. They are in love, break up, get lonely and reunite. All this is apt material for a musical but the execution lacks skill.

The script is shaky, ignoring basic elements of theatrical form and style, music theatre conventions, narrative structure, characterisation, dramatic tension, staging and directorial method. Apologies to all the cast and creative team who obviously worked hard, but this show needs some assistance for a rewrite, recast and re-direction.

The numerous short songs range from rock to ballad but the two tunes at the very end are more memorable than others. The problem is that, unlike a rock gig, in a musical the lyrics need to be audible and comprehensible because they advance the story and develop character and relationship.

Bridie Lunney, a visual artist, makes a valiant effort as Apple but the dialogue limits any characterisation. Jimmy Stewart, singer from alt-country band, Clinkerfield, is more comfortable belting out a number than with dialogue.

There are too many characters, the focus too often shifting away from central characters, Apple and Charlie. Awkward scene changes are frequent and unnecessary. The stage is crowded with so many people coming on and off it is impossible to develop the narrative. There is an S and M couple, a performance poet and a mad mate but the “dream demons” with their fat devil tails, were really the last straw.

Incorporating film footage is very popular but it needs to be integrated into the form and the mix of voice and instruments is crucial.

Apple + Charlie is a valiant effort that just doesn’t work as theatre - yet.

By Kate Herbert

Controlled Crying by Ron Elisha, Oct, 7 2006

Controlled Crying by Ron Elisha

Chapel off Chapel, October 7 to 29, 2006

Reviewer: Kate Herbert

Parenting never ends, as witnessed in Ron Elisha’s play, Controlled Crying.

With increasing discomfort, we watch Libby (Margot Knight) and Oscar (Paul English) struggle to cope with the changing demands and increasing pressures upon them as their daughter, Millie, grows from infancy to adulthood.

Elisha’s dialogue is often hilarious. It shifts from witty repartee, gags and jibes to poignant, although sometimes less successful, arguments and self-doubting monologues.

Director, Ailsa Piper, necessarily keeps the focus on the couple’s relationship and on the humour of their interactions.

Knight plays Libby as a maddening, highly-strung, worrywart who constantly tips the equilibrium of the relationship with her frantic behaviour, criticism and unnecessary fears.

As the badgered Oscar, English is restrained and keen to please. We can see the cogs turning as he tries in vain to understand his wife’s hysterical ranting.

The entire play takes place in the couple’s bedroom over thirty years. The difficulties of parenthood are only beginning when the play opens with the two perched anxiously on their bed, checking a stop watch and listening to their new baby’s wrenching sobs from the other room. They are unsuccessfully practising “controlled crying”, a process familiar to sleep-deprived new parents.

Millie remains an off-stage character although we come to know her intimately. She is an only child with a few problems: bedwetting, unpopularity and mediocre academic performance. She experiments with dope as a teenager, chooses her boyfriends, and perhaps even her husband, unwisely.

We sympathise as the parents panic about Millie’s first day of kinder, agonise over sending their confirmed bed-wetter on a school camp and over her insignificant role in The Wizard of Oz.

Each new period of Millie’s young life initiates a brand new series of anxieties for her beleaguered and self-flagellating parents.

What is evident is that the pair concentrates so much energy on Millie that they almost miss their entire relationship with each other. By the time Millie is married and Oscar retired at 60, Libby and Oscar are at each other’s throats, unwilling to recognise their patterns of evasion and neurosis. Oscar is gone before they have had a life together.

Some of the final less humorous scenes are a little laboured and the frequent changes of bed linen to indicate time passing are totally unnecessary and annoying. However, Controlled Crying is entertaining identification theatre for anyone with growing or grown kids.

By Kate Herbert

The Best of Frank by Tom Burlinson, Crown Casino, Oct 5, 2006

 The Best of Frank by Tom Burlinson

The Palms, Crown Casino, Melbourne, Oct 5 to 15, 2006

Reviewer: Kate Herbert

Frank Sinatra was a musical legend and Tom Burlinson is committed to keeping his heritage alive in his tribute shows. This second production, The Best of Frank, boasts nearly thirty songs that made Frankie’s inimitable voice famous.

Burlinson’s melodic and warm voice bears an uncanny resemblance to Old Blue Eyes, particularly in the lower register. With Musical Director, Michael Harrison, he recreates original arrangements by the likes of Nelson Riddle and Billie May with great finesse and velvet smooth delivery, embracing the syncopation and jazz turns with ease. The seemingly effortless tone and quality masks some complex vocal acrobatics.

Tom prowls across the stage in front of a tight Swing band led by Harrison on piano. The brass section is phenomenal and the rhythm boys drive the beat. The solos on trumpet, saxophone flute and trombone had the crowd cheering.

Burlinson’s links between songs are factoids about different periods of Sinatra’s career and the origins of songs, arrangements and snippets of gossip about love, marriage, albums and concerts. His patter lacks imagination; perhaps he needs someone write some snappy Frank-like jokes for him.

The first half lacks some sparkle but the second act flies us to the moon. In Act One we hear Come Fly With Me, Where or When, I Won’t Dance and two medleys of love tunes and languid ballads. Burlinson cruises comfortably through the audience during Witchcraft and performs Sinatra’s most requested number, I’ve Got You Under My Skin followed by Lady is a Tramp. He finishes the act with Cole Porter’s beautiful Night and Day.

After interval, the show takes off with Burlinson looking more confident in his relationship with both audience and band. Pennies From Heaven and Fly Me to the Moon are followed by a medley of 60s ballads including Shadow of Your Smile and a moving version of This Time.

He goes up tempo again with Luck Be A Lady, appropriate in a casino, My Kind of Town, Sunny, That’s Life and then wows the crowd with Mack the Knife. Of course, a Sinatra show would not be complete without My Way and a big finale of New York, New York.

Burlinson and his band hit their straps in the later part of the show making The Best of Frank a fitting tribute to one of the greatest entertainers of the 20^th century. As Frank said, “May you live to be 150 and may the last voice you hear be mine.”

By Kate Herbert

Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Sept 7, 2006

 Hedwig and the Angry Inch
By Text John Cameron Mitchell Music & Lyrics by Stephen Trask

Athenaeum Theatre 1

Sept 7 to  17, 2006

Tues to Thurs 8pm, Fri & Sat 7.30pm & 10.30pm Sun 5pm

Reviewer: Kate Herbert

Hedwig and the Angry Inch is both a gut-busting rock show and a journey of self-discovery. The star of the story, played by the androgenous Iota, is Hedwig, the transexual drag queen previously known as Hansel Schmidt.

Hedwig grew up in East Berlin with a po-faced German mother and an absent father. By his teen years he was seduced by a wholesome American GI, who insisted Hansel have a sex change so they could marry and move to the US.

But the plan goes horribly wrong when the operation leaves Hedwig with only an angry inch of his manhood intact and no female genitalia to replace it, neither man nor woman.

The stage show is a rock concert with really raunchy songs sung by the extraordinarily talented Iota. His voice is huge, his performance bold and his portrayal of the damaged and furious Hedwig is, by turn, hilarious and poignant, vulnerable and outrageous. It is Glam Rock that harks back to the 80s.

John Cameron Mitchell, who wrote and performed the role, and his musical collaborator, Stephen Trask, were nominated for awards galore for Mitchell’s performance, the script and music.

The live band, led by Musical Director, Tina Harris fills the Athenaeum with a series of hot songs. Iota is joined on stage by an underused Blazey Best, playing Yitzak, Hedwig’s beleaguered husband.

Iota’s voice is explosive and versatile. He can belt out a rock number as well as a power ballad. He opens the show with Tear Me Down, a song about both the Berlin Wall and Hedwig’s own shattered ego.

He follows with the slower, Origin of Love, in which Hedwig dreams of his other half, the potential lover who will complete him. In The Angry Inch, Iota drives home a beefy rock tune.

Hedwig was soundly dumped by her own creation, Johnny Gnosis, a teenager who made it big as a rock star by singing all of Hedwig’s songs. Johnny, Hedwig believed, was her destiny, the one to complete her.

But the simple philosophical resolution to the story is that Hedwig strips off her platinum wig, her trashy dress and boots and false eyelashes to be revealed and reborn as the boy he was, in the likeness of Johnny Gnosis. He sings Wicked Little Town and Midnight Radio. Let’s not be too sentimental about this, but Hedwig has come home and found herself – her own true love.

By Kate Herbert

The Last Five Years by Jason Robert Brown, Sept 6, 2006

The Last Five Years  

by Jason Robert Brown

Melbourne Music Theatre

 Chapel off Chapel, September 6 to 17, 2006

 8pm Wed to Sat, 5pm Sun

Reviewer: Kate Herbert on Sept 6

Jason Robert Brown’s two-person musical, The Last Five Years, is a poignant experience for anyone who has been touched by the sad ending of a loving marriage. It really brings a tear to the eye.

Jamie Wellerstein, played with passion by Matt Hetherington, is a 23-year old novelist who aspires to greatness and picks up a young lovely wife, an agent, a publisher and a writer’s award all in the matter of five years. He is vibrant, ambitious, egocentric and relentlessly positive – right up until the death knell of his marriage can be heard.

Laura Fitzpatrick is sweet-voiced and charming as the under-confident and under-achieving Cathy. In the first of their five years together, she is filled with hope for her future as an actor and her relationship with Jamie. Slowly, her sense of failure rises and her competition for Jamie’s attention shatters her.

Is it any wonder Brown’s ex-wife threatened to sue him for revealing their troubled marriage?

Director, Peter Fitzpatrick, keeps the scenes moving, concentrating on the emotional layering and the counterpoint of their two experiences. The live band, under Vicki Jacobs, is raunchy and skilful.

Apart from having a marvellous score and singable tunes, the show has a strikingly original structure. While Jamie’s story goes forward in time from their first meeting, Cathy travels in reverse from the lonely, painful ending back to their bright-eyed beginning.  

This shape generates fascinating collisions. While Jamie naively sings he will defy his Jewish mother by loving a “Shiksa Goddess”, Cathy sits alone in their apartment singing I’m Still Hurting. When Jamie reaches the end of their rocky ride, packs his bags and sings I Could Never Rescue You, Cathy, with girlish romantic hope, waves goodbye for the first time to the young man she loves. It is heart wrenching.

The only moment when they communicate directly is at their joyful marriage, sweetly singing the duet, The Next Ten Minutes about spending a lifetime together.

Hetherington’s voice is versatile and rousing; he can belt a funky number such as Moving Too Fast or croon the sad ballad If I Didn’t Believe in You. He is engaging and he gives us insight into the life of the successful young writer.

Laura Fitzpatrick’s bright and warm voice brings naivete and delicacy to Cathy, fitting for this child-woman who cannot understand the demise of her marriage.

By Kate Herbert

Mum’s the Word 2: Teenagers, Aug 31, 2006

Mum’s the Word 2: Teenagers

Mum’s the Word Collective

 Comedy Theatre, Melbourne, from Aug 30 (no closing date)

Tues 6.30pm, Wed to at 8pm, Wed 1pm, Sat 2pm, Sun 4pm

Reviewer: Kate Herbert

Identification theatre is the only way to describe Mum’s The Word 1 and 2 and to explain their success. 

The majority of the population either has, had, or will have teenage offspring and the rest knows someone who has them. The audience laughs and groans in unison at the familiarity of the horror stories about teens.

We sympathise with parents dealing with rudeness, drinking, drugs, sibling rivalry, lying and sneaking – you name it, teens do it and parents suffer it.

For this reason, all sorts of flaws in the structure, writing and direction of the show are ignored. There is limited physicalisation of the mainly monologue based stories. The show is like a washing line upon which loosely connected stories are threaded.

What makes this production is the exceptional cast. The five engaging and funny women (Marg Downey, Rebecca Gibney, Jane Hall, Colette Mann, Louise Siversen) hurl themselves bodily into the characters written by and based on the lives of the Canadian team.

Siversen’s is both sympathetic and hilarious, playing the mother who contemplates having an affair and a range of wacky character that highlight her versatility.

Mann, in her inimitable cheeky comic style, plays the naïve mum who hopes her daughter is celibate but gets about in sexy Madam Lash gear for dad.

Hall plays the mum who fears her daughter will turn into herself at age 12. Her scene buying her child her first bra is charming.

There are some more serious issues raised about parenting. Downey is convincing as the demure mum who faces the challenge of breast cancer and Gibney’s character battles to manage a drunken, out of control son.

As a group, the five manage to make goofy choreography and costumes look hilarious in Don’t You Wish Your Girlfriend was Hot Like Me and Here Comes Menopause.

The stories are about the little successes and bigger failures of parenting, the pressure on relationships, the loss of identity of mothers and the constant abuse parents face at the hands of the monsters that have replaced their sweet little kids.

Much of the writing is predictable and sometimes pedestrian and the staging in unimaginative but this cast makes the show entertaining. If they cut half an hour out of the show, it could be a stronger piece.

By Kate Herbert

The Wages of Spin by Version 1.0, Aug 30, 2006

The Wages of Spin by Version 1.0

North Melbourne Town Hall

Aug 30 to September 9, 2006

Wed to Sat 8pm, sat 4pm, Sun 3pm,

Reviewer: Kate Herbert on Aug 30

The Wages of Spin, a documentary-style political theatre production by Version 1.0, is a complex and acerbic analysis of Australia’s participation in the War in Iraq.

The production is a hybrid of theatre and visual media, using both live performance and video to replicate the mass of news information and its manipulation at the hands of both politicians and television journalism. Much of the dialogue is from verbatim transcripts from interviews with politicians and other commentators.

We hear re-voiced snatches of Howard and Bush’s election victory speeches, excerpts from public documents, senate committee proceedings and opinion pieces. The play revisits the futile search for weapons of mass destruction, the AWB wheat for weapons scandal, the failure of the occupation to bring peace and Private Jake Kovko’s death.

We experience information overload, just as the on-screen, vox-pop interviewees report. We are overwhelsmed by a seemingly endless scrolling list of casualties in Iraq, Iraqi civilians outnumbering military almost twenty to one.

In this mock television studio, we watch a reporter read a timeline of Australia’s involvement in the war. Interspersed with invasion details are those of Delta Goodrem’s love life and health, highlighting the awful irony of our obsession with celebrities that eclipses the death and destruction in a war zone.

Every image is layered. In the opening scene, we witness the confronting image of a hooded prisoner walking across a bed of nails. Slowly, we realise his dialogue is that of Senator Robert Hill evading questions about whether Australians were involved in “interrogations’ in Iraq.

The production crew (Ingrid Siversen, Katy Green, Dan Pardy) accompany

three performers (David Williams, Kim Vercoe, Stephen Kinder) on stage. All are dressed in army fatigues. The war permeates everything.

Williams’ direction has a swift energy. The three performers present the material and characters with a wry, often grim humour and capture the confusion of the electronic media without losing the clarity of their investigation.

The complexity of the issues is intensified by the manic action on the floor. Video artist, Sean Bacon, with a bank of monitors and mixers, edits video footage before our eyes. The set is scooted around the stage, cameras appear from nowhere, images appear on a giant screen or smaller monitors. Our every move is being documented.

The Wages of Spin is fine and challenging entertainment.

By Kate Herbert

Yanagai! Yanagai! MWT, Aug 22, 2006

Yanagai! Yanagai!
by Andrea James, Melbourne Workers Theatre

 North Melbourne Town Hall 

Aug 22-26. Portland Aug 29, Shepparton Aug 31, Echuca Sept 1, Upwey Sept 8, 2006

Reviewer: Kate Herbert on Aug 22, 2006

Yanagai, in the Yorta Yorta language of the Murray River (Dhungula) region, means “Go away!” One can presume it was frequently used when the white squatter, Sir Edward Curr, arrived in the region in 1841.

Since 1860, the Yorta Yorta people have continued to fight in courts for land rights for their tribal lands in the Murray region. Consistently, their claims were denied, most recently in 2003 in the Hight Court. It took nineteen seconds, says the play, to deny thousands of years of history.

At present a claim is being prepared for the United Nations Human Rights Commission.

The play depicts 150 years of failed claims, degeneration of the land through farming and drought, maltreatment of the Yorta Yorta by the white justice and welfare systems, families separated and tribal sites ignored.

Despite these negative issues the play, written and directed by Andrea James, is entertaining with a definite edge of hope.

Such a play serves the educational purpose of reminding us of issues surrounding aboriginal land claims so we can choose to forgive some of its artistic limitations.

James’ script draws together the stories of Uncle Albert (Tony Briggs/bryan Andy OK), the spirit called Munarra (Lisa Maza), Edward Curr (David Adamson) and the High Court hearing in 2003.

The most affecting and effective thread is Uncle Albert’s story that reveals his passion for his country. Briggs plays old Albert sympathetically. We are moved by memories of his “stolen” childhood, of his little sister, Amy’s (Lou Bennett) drowning when she tried to escape the welfare and we are entertained by his enduring obsession with catching the giant Murray cod.

Witnessing Albert facing the High Court highlights the judicial rigidity and lack of understanding of the values of the Yorta Yorta.

Curr is depicted two-dimensionally as a cold, cruel white invader. Little is learned of him because he is merely a symbol for colonial abuse of power.

The spirit, Munarra and her canine protectors (Bennett and Andy) provide some insight into the creation story of the Dhungula River but the portrayal of the tale looks too much like a children’s play.

Philip Lethlean’s lighting, with Adrienne Chisholm’s design that was inspired by Lin Onus’s artwork, create a soothing world of river and trees.

The staging and direction lack physicality and imagination but the production is thought-provoking and urges action.

By Kate Herbert

The Boy From Oz, with Hugh Jackman, Aug 11, 2006

 The Boy From Oz
Music & Lyrics by Peter Allen, Book by Nick Enright  
Rod Laver Arena until Aug 11 to 13, 2006

Reviewer: Kate Herbert

Hugh Jackman is so deliciously charming he is almost edible. Even playing Peter Allen, the King (and Queen) of Camp, he is the sexiest creature south of Mars.

He pranced and minced on stage and, when he peeled off his sequined shirt, he triggered squeals of delight from a phalanx of women. They dived over seats to touch him as he cavorted in the aisles.

Jackman has that indefinable quality that makes a star. In addition to his remarkable stage presence and vivid characterisation of Peter Allen, he has a strong and passionate singing voice and impeccable comic delivery.

He deserved his 2004 Tony for this role and, when he does his ironic screen test as James Bond, the audience clearly thought he should have the role. Talk about versatile: from Las Vegas camp to sex symbol spy.

The original production, with a clever book by Nick Enright, adhered to a narrative. This arena production incorporates segments with Jackman addressing the audience directly, dancing and flirting with a couple of men in the crowd, doing topical stand up about Mel Gibson, Leighton Hewitt and even giving us the footy scores.

Accompanying Jackman is a glittering chorus in wild costumes by Roger Kirk. Jackman sports a parade of outfits in sequins, lame and other shiny stuff. The finale, I Go to Rio, includes an array of giant martini glasses, pineapple headdresses, feathers and flesh to put Mardi Gras to shame.

Chrissy Amphlett, as Judy Garland, captures the tremulous, tottering star in her final days singing, All I Wanted Was The Dream. Wendy Toohey bears an uncanny resemblance to Liza Minnelli capturing the Minnelli’s spirit in the Bob Fosse inspired Cabaret scene.

Colleen Hewett’s powerful, husky voice was profoundly moving in Don’t Cry Out Loud and Murray Bartlett’s rendition of I Honestly Love You is heart-wrenchingly beautiful.

Director, Kenny’ Ortega’s eclectic choreography with Kelley Abbey fills the stage with colour and the onstage band is tight and versatile.

The show depicts the light and shade of Allen’s life. We see the child’s budding showmanship, his rise to stardom, marriage, divorce, the death of his partner and his father’s suicide. But, throughout, Allen’s music plays a leading role. The crowd adored the patriotic I Still Call Australia Home and Jackman’s encore of Once Before I Go was a fitting farewell.

All hail Hugh!

By Kate Herbert

The Tempest, Bell Shakespeare, Aug 8, 06

The  Tempest by William Shakespeare

Bell Shakespeare

Playhouse, Victorian Arts Centre, Aug 8 to Aug 19, 2006

6.30pm Mon, 7.30pm Tues to Sat

Reviewer: Kate Herbert on Aug 8, 2006

The Tempest, Shakespeare’s final play, can be problematic to stage. It mixes genres, incorporating elements of comedy, romances and his political plays.

It begins with Prospero’s (John Bell) plan for revenge, a history of royal usurpation, a shipwreck, a plot to assassinate the King, another to kill Prospero, the rightful Duke of Milan who now reigns over a deserted island. It ends with reunion, reinstatement and a marriage. In between are slapstick, drunkenness, magic, romance, music, a banquet and a masque.

Peter Evans’ production is set on a confined stage resembling a room wallpapered with images of a densely wooded forest (Robert Kemp). It opens with an effective storm scene on Alonso (Paul Bertram), the King of Naples’ ship. As the ship sinks, the passengers shout in panic through high portholes.

The forest creates depth and the contracted stage space reflects the confines of the island. However, the actors still rattle about uncomfortably in the small space. Many scenes are performed in a deliberately static, stand and deliver style, particularly those between the royal party.

Alonso’s grief leaves him almost inanimate, Sebastian (Andrew McDonnell) and Antonio’s (David Whitney) murderous subterfuge is tepid and Gonzalo’s (Ron Haddrick) concern sounds like preaching.

The interpretation lacks the magic and illusion intrinsic to the play. The production lacks resonance and imagination and Shakespeare’s rich dialogue often has no dynamic energy.

The scenes between the drunken Stephano, (Tony Taylor), the jester, Trinculo, (James Wardlaw) and Caliban, Prospero‘s slave (Nathan Lovejoy) begin with energy but the comic business becomes repetitive. Lovejoy, playing Caliban as a scruffy, awkward adolescent with a Mohawk, has little of the grotesque or dangerous.

The strongest scenes are those with Prospero and his daughter, Miranda (Freya Stafford). Bell brings Shakespeare’s text to life, balancing gravitas and humour in Prospero, giving him a fragile humanity that counterpoints his power. Stafford gives Miranda life with a delicate childlikeness.

Less successful are the scenes between Miranda and Ferdinand (Stephen Phillips) perhaps because Phillips is often left gaping at magical illusions wrought for Ferdinand’s benefit.

Which brings us to the magic of the island. Saskia Smith, as Ariel, Prospero’s airy spirit slave who awaits his freedom, is certainly ethereal in appearance and much of Ariels’ magical quality relies on her singing. 

But the illusions are invisible, the music (Basil Hogios) a little too stereotypically spooky and the stage too domestic to transport us into the world of the magical isle.

By Kate Herbert

Not Like Beckett by Michael Watts, Aug 2, 2006

Malthouse Theatre 
Beckett Theatre, Malthouse

Tues & Wed 7pm, Thurs 1pm & 8.30pm, Fri 8.30pm, Sat 2pm & 7.30pm

Aug 2 to 20, 2006

Reviewer: Kate Herbert

Not Like Beckett, written by Michael Watts, is a little like Beckett – Samuel Beckett, that is. It deals with the absurdities of the human condition, an individual’s existential crisis, with isolation and despair. It also steeps these darker issues in a soup of slapstick and vaudeville – just like Beckett.

Watts’ script begins quite tamely then, in the hands of the versatile and eccentric Russell Dykstra, escalates into a cacophonous, outrageous and often hilarious ride.

Dykstra, wearing white face like Roy Rene as Mo, plays Wally Walloon Beckett. Wally declares he is a rabbit – and a stand-up comedian. Here begins the absurdity. This well-bred rabbit sports a rabbit-hunter’s metal leg-trap and is now trapped on a mountaintop surveying the beauty of his family’s adopted land. He calls for his beloved wife, a native bilby called Boo Boo, but she is nowhere to be found.

In his pain and delirium, Wally relates his history and flashes back to his lonely childhood, his discovery that he was funny, his heady days as a comic telling rabbit jokes and his marriage out of the rabbit family to the lowly bilby.

Just as we start to feel the play has nothing more to say, the show takes a startling leap. Wally appears in an outsize bunny-suit, in black face with a very good aboriginal accent and shocks us with a stand-up routine built on violent and racist gags about bilbies.

Suddenly, we are in the world of power and abuse and it becomes clear that this play is taking a turn for the grotesque and the political. We have an allegory about the invasion of Australia by Europeans and the subjugation of the aborigines.

An artist will try anything for his art, a comic will demean anything for a laugh and a colonist will invade anything for power and territory.

Dystra’s great clown skill is the highlight of the latter half of the play. He gags, dances, sings, gambols about on the Yellow Peril look alike and entertains us with his antics.

Anna Cordingley’s design, based on a replica of Ron Robertson Swann’s sculpture, Vault, (Yellow Peril) is an angular rabbit warren that provides hiding holes and many levels from which Dystra performs his vaudevillian routines.

Director, Michael Kantor, allows Dykstra his head and the second half rocks along at a cracking pace.

Not Like Beckett leaves one appalled by the things at which we can laugh.

By Kate Herbert

Oedipus, Eagles Nest Theatre, ,July 25, 2006

 Oedipus, 

Adapted from Sophocles by Robert Reid

Eagles Nest Theatre

Trades Hall: July 25-29. Williamstown Mechanics Institute: Aug 1-5, 2006

Alternates with Hamlet until Aug 5, 2006

Reviewer: Kate Herbert

Be prepared for an Oedipus that Sophocles did not write in this hybrid script adapted by Robert Reid. 

The production interpolates snatches of Sophocles’ monologues, dialogues and choruses with invented or borrowed text and a grab bag of styles including slapstick, surrealism, murder mystery and vaudeville.

The Oedipus Complex, as the modern world knows it, is introduced by the character of Sigmund Freud (Phil Roberts) who strolls on occasionally to shed psychoanalytical light on the King of Thebes who unwittingly killed his father then married his mother.

Then we have visits from Sherlock Holmes (Phil Zachariah), chewing a pipe and snorting cocaine, who comments on the complexities of the mystery. I don’t know why.

Some of these additions to the original text do work. Freud and Holmes are more successful than the stylistic changes to the Chorus mainly because the two older actors playing them bring some technical skill to their portrayal.

The idea of a chirping, female cabaret ensemble as the Chorus could work but this group of four young women sporting false beards and moustaches and wearing showgirl fishnets, lacks the requisite vocal and acting technique to carry the vaudeville style or to express the resonance of the text.

Sometimes the insertion of contemporary and popular culture references add a layer but generally they are more annoying that insightful.

The scenes that do resonate are those involving a sassy Felicity Steel as Jocasta and playful Trevor Vaughan as Oedipus. Vaughan, although his voice was often rasping (a cold? Too many shows?) finds an intelligent balance between the classical text and the contemporary style.

Director, Robert Reid, effectively layers Steel’s acrobatic skills over Jocasta’s dialogue to create sensual images and evocative poses.

The eclectic stylistic mix includes the use of a giant head puppet to represent Teiresias, the soothsayer, while the Chorus intoned his prophesies. This has some theatrical potential but the stage is so busy and the puppet head so precarious that it is difficult to listen to the text.

The simple design by Michael Roper provides an abstract red canopy for the action and Anita King’s costumes establish a cabaret atmosphere.

This production is more confusing than enlightening about Oedipus but it certainly breaks the boundaries of expectations of the play.

By Kate Herbert

Three Oaks by Monica Raszewski, July 26, 2006

Three Oaks by Monica Raszewski

La Mama, Carlton,  July 26 to Aug 13, 2006

Reviewer: Kate Herbert

It is refreshing to see a production illuminate a story with inventive theatrical conventions rather than drown it in irrelevant imagery. Director, Kimberley Grigg, brings imagination and skill to Three Oaks, by Monica Raszewski.

The audience is seated on opposite sides of the space. The air is redolent with the scent of pine needles, bringing to life the Polish forest of the characters’ childhood.

Actors play accordions and violin on stage, evoking location, period, atmosphere and emotion. The rhythms of the play are subtle and the acting fluid and skilful. Grigg interprets the script seamlessly.

Raszewski weaves layers of a family story, memories of a father, letters and paintings, with Polish folk tales and history.

After the death of her father, Janek (Adam Pierzchalski OK), Margaret (Janine Watson), an artist, wants to retrieve some relics of his life in order to write a book. Janek, a Polish migrant, married to Krystyna (Natalia Novikova), left the family when Margaret and sister, Alex (Emily Taylor), were children. He made a new home with his Australian lover, Alice (Fiona Macys).

Marc Raszewski’s design is compelling. Pierced by a pole are three slabs of a tree standing on the bed of pine needles. Ladders rise out of the pine floor, titling at precarious angles, representing the oak forest, creating an obstacle course for the family and providing seats in scenes.

We are agitated and moved by Margaret’s desperation to know her father after his death when she so diligently avoided him before he died. She hunts for a painting she believes her father did for her but finds only a few letters, some paintings, a battered notebook, a recipe and some photos.

Memories of her childhood collide with the present. We witness the alienation of mother and father, the confusion of the sisters, their resistance to father’s lover, the ordinariness of mother cooking and their Polish children’s songs.

Actors shift effortlessly in the space just as ghostly memories filter in and out of Margaret’s thoughts.

The play is about memory and a search for the truth. How do we reconstruct a person’s life and character from fragments and memory?

Scenes around the fractured tree trunk resonate with the Polish heritage of characters and writer. Images of an old woman trapped in a tree and of Russian Kommisars torturing people intersect the tale of the two children lost in the woods.

Three Oaks is an evocative and theatrically satisfying production.

By Kate Herbert