★★★★
Adelaide Fringe. Holden Street Theatres. 4 Mar 2023
Having seen Janet Swain’s solo show last week (Delphi Goes Bassooning is a singular triumph) it comes as no surprise that I should follow up with a viewing of her band performance, four women of sequins and sass from the Northern Rivers region of NSW who go by the name of The Loveys.
It is worth noting that the bassoon does make an appearance! There is a fabulous moment when Janet performs a solo, propping her foot up on the fold-back front of stage, flashing legs and channeling the like of Hole’s Courtney Love. Not often noted as an instrument of cabaret performance its place in The Loveys’ line-up appears ridiculously natural alongside the bass guitar (Pamela), percussion (Belinda) and beautiful white ukulele (Jenny). These days there is always a ukulele, though Janet rounds the sound out with keyboard. There is also, of course, a full complement of vocals, subject to a few vagaries and blurts in the sound before being largely sorted.
And the show itself? A loose take on life as a mature woman, seeking love and seeking friends and seeking sex. Three of the four have been divorced or outlived their partners, so rich experiences form part of the between-song patter, and more intimate reflections are used to build the narrative of the songs themselves. Songs of love and loss, all beautifully rendered, some hilariously so.
Spinster Daughter reclaims the term as a positive; Daddy Joined the Circus sees Belinda joining Jenny on the uke for some lovely picking; Sex at 72 has a number of mature women in the audience cackling with recognition. There’s a cover song in there as well; The Loveys pay homage to Sia Furler and the brilliant Chandelier – the song of freedom gets the twin uke attack and some complex vocal harmonics.
It is almost exactly what one might expect from four women (aging up to 72, if you’re asking) and their take on the personal side of life. There is no politics, no particular world-view, it is not that sort of cabaret. But the insights, the humour, the camaraderie are all real and powerful.
Have I Left It Too Late? they opine in one of their songs. Judging by this performance, absolutely not.
Arna Eyers-White
When: Closed
Where: Holden Street Theatres
Bookings: Closed
★★★★1/2
Adelaide Fringe. Grace Emily Hotel. 3 Mar 2023
Ben Roberts, founder of the Ukulele Death Squad, has performed a Fringe Springsteen show previously, pulling songs from various stages of the Boss’s lengthy career, leaving few punters unsatisfied with his choices.
He’s taken a risk this time, performing the entirety of Springsteen’s 1982 Nebraska album on the ukulele. The album itself was a risk; recorded on a four track TEAC in Springsteen’s rented house as a bunch of demos, most of the songs didn’t work for the E-Street band. While the ‘Electric Nebraska Sessions’ are apparently out there, most of those tracks have never seen the light of day. A few, such as Born in the USA, Glory Days and I’m On Fire survived the addition of the band, and went on to 1984’s Born in the USA. For the most part however, the songs were too raw, too personal, and Springsteen and manager Jon Landeau decided to release the demos as the album.
Nebraska appears constantly in critic’s choices, but it never really sold well, didn’t get airplay and, bar for Atlantic City, the songs rarely get an airing. Yet it remains an essential part of Springsteen folklore and, for the tragics (comme moi), a vital component of the lexicon.
There need be no concern here; Roberts has grasped Nebraska with both hands, and held it victoriously aloft. From the start, he takes control of the songs, making them his own, yet never strays from the essence of Springsteen’s intent. Introducing the album, he acknowledges the song writing, the storytelling, and notes the lack of traditional forms: choruses, bridges, the singalong hooks. And death. The album is full of death – of people, of love, of relationships – and a dog.
In introducing each track, Roberts contextualises with a potted social and song history, a bit of opinion, and often shares some of the difficulties he had in getting the songs down. The voice reverb is a tad heavy, which could make the lyrics a bit fuzzy and the uke a little sharp at times, but overall Roberts brings an unmistakeable Springsteen vibe to the room, no mean feat. The audience is deathly quiet as he works his way through this most sombre of set lists. Bass and tambourine percussion come via cannily played foot pedals, and he manages to fill out the sound while giving the songs the space they need.
State Trooper, for example, is about as sparse as they come on Nebraska. Two chords, over and over and over. Roberts adds to it with some stunning fret picking and slide, but allows it to remain the tragic cry for help that it is. Ah, please don’t stop me.
To close the show, Roberts plays his own composition Glass of Water, acknowledging that it’s essentially homage to the style of song writing Springsteen employed on the album: a well told story, no lyrical repeats, no choruses. He takes the opportunity to showcase his uke playing and if you’re still thinking that the uke is about the jangle of Tiny Tim (or worse, Scott Morrison), you need to see this to understand.
Some people were there to hear Springsteen’s Nebraska, others to hear a remarkable uke player; they both came away richer.
Arna Eyers-White
When: 9 and 16 Mara
Where: Grace Emily Hotel
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Adelaide Festival. Kip Williams/Sydney Theatre Company. Her Majesty’s Theatre. 4 Mar 2023
If ever a plot could thicken, it is that of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
It is a dense and convoluted plot of switching identities and drugs.
Australian new-age theatre maestro Kip Williams has taken the now classic 19th Century novella and, following the success of his extraordinary one-actor multi-media stage triumph The Picture of Dorian Gray, delivered The Strange Case as a two-actor, mega-crew, multi-screened artwork this critic dubs a stage “techtacular”.
Not only but also, as is the vogue these days, Williams has “reimagined” the intention of the author and reinterpreted the nature, not of Jekyll and Hyde, but of Jekyll/Hyde’s relationship with his/their London-lawyer friend Gabriel Utterson, who is narrator of this wild and wonderful Gothic story. As Williams extrapolates in his excellent, must-read Director’s Notes, there are some important “binaries” inherent in the Stevenson story. And, indeed, Williams works upon them in this eye-popping, eye-rolling contemporary production.
The two actors, Matthew Backer and Ewan Leslie, are consummate professionals with the sort of exquisite voices one relishes hearing in the theatre. Their skills of articulation are sorely but successfully tested by the rapid-fire delivery required to fit the Stevenson text into the constraints of production time. The audience concentrates madly to keep up.
The show is “techtacular” insofar as it is aesthetically and physically multi-layered; the actors visible, working at their craft onstage, while simultaneously live-videoed by black-clad camera operators moving around them. Their video images are delivered to the audience in black and white on a series of screens above the stage, leaving the colours of the tangible world in a muted miniature perspective below. Indeed, it is fascinating to be able to see those two realities: the filmic scene and behind the scene. It surely is wondrously clever theatre, albeit with perhaps too many screens. How did actors down on the stage climb those vivid non-existent stairs? How come there are more faces on the screens than there are on the actors onstage?
Festival audiences are swarming to witness this emergent “techtacular” theatre.
But what of the content and the intent?
Here, the critic must step back into the original intentions of a Victorian author and ponder the old-school known against the newly-assumed possibilities. It is a ripe field.
The director reiterates the word “binary” in his notes - and the Stevenson concept of Jekyll and Hyde as a schizophrenic, two-in-one, personality-disorder phenomenon sings forth as understood Freudian logic.
But, Williams suggests one can be more than two. Human nature is as chaotic as nature itself and, indeed, people keep huge parts of themselves secret. We all have multiple facets.
So it comes that Dr Jeckyll, under the influence of his chemicals, besports in the dark worlds of sleaze and night life deviation, being not the same straight man that his old friend Utterson has assumed.
And thus, with a splendour of artful inventiveness, does Williams take his audience into an otherworld of drug-fuelled psychotic and carnal passions.
From the crimes of evil Hyde, his theatrical imaginings soar to manic triumph and tragedy, all the while, on many screens, described in machine-gun torrents of dialogue by STC’s brilliant actors. Theirs are bravura performances and then some.
From the classic elegance of filmic monochrome, the rising denouement is something akin to an acid trip and the binaries take flight.
The audience either claps or gapes.
At the end of the night, the audience is satisfied that this had been a festival-worthy experience, but its members wander off contemplating where film ends and theatre begins. It is a challenging melange of genres.
Lights, cameras, action, suspense and sophisticated effects.
This show has the lot.
Samela Harris
When: 4 to 12 Mar
Where: Her Majesty’s Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
Adelaide Festival. Belarus Free Theatre. Dunstan Playhouse. 4 Mar 2023
Anarchic and dangerously accurate. How prescient was Alhierd Bacharevič to write Dogs of Europe in 2017 and for the Belarus Free Theatre to bravely premier their derivative play in the capital Minsk in 2020. In February 2021, the real shooting war began. The Russian attack on Kyiv poured across the Belarusian border. Dogs of Europe is banned in Belarus and its author lives in exile.
Dogs of Europe deals with personal accountability in a dystopian totalitarian state. In only four years, Bacharevič’s vision of an expanded Russian empire aligned with China – set in 2049 - became an immediate post-pandemic threat.
President Lukachenko since 1994 has steadily deteriorated democracy in Belarus and allowed his country to be fully captured in a Russian orbit. Director Nicolai Khalezin and co-director Natalia Kaliada have held political asylum in the UK since 2011. In 2007, the entire company was arrested in the middle of a performance. All the players and creatives cannot return to their homeland. From the stage, they ended the performance displaying a banner of support for Ukraine.
Early in the play, we see typically lackadaisical but patriotic students in 2019 inter their hopes in a time capsule, but thirty years later, a gigantic wall slashes across Europe between the League of European States and a New Reich (expanded Russia). 2049 is a world of political menace and suspicion of Orwellian dimensions.
Dogs of Europe is a complicated three-hour extravaganza charged with absurdity and theatrical symbolism like a Wagnerian opera. It is a physical and audial feast of unending surprises and ideas with an undertone of sly wink-nod humour. How about what looks like a naval officer representing the State when Belarus is land-locked, or a giant ball of books falling like a meteor out of the sky? Exaggerated expressions often break into choral solidarity from composer Sergej Newsky or communal choreography designed by Maria Sazonova. Nicolai Khalezin’s set design is inventively versatile with constant interaction between people, objects and sometimes crazy and discombobulating video imagery. To the Australian audience, even with the benefit of back screen translation, the details are no doubt difficult to follow. However, the company has mastered the visceral language of immediacy. They have conveyed in no uncertain terms how people feel in their environment of dysfunction and mistrust. The empathy is gut-wrenching, especially when one accepts this is happening – right now - in Russia, Belarus and elsewhere - too many elsewheres.
Still, it’s an unrelentingly trenchant and too long. A man runs nude in a circle for the entire intermission and one realises what a tough gig this theatre company must me. Nothing compared to self-banishment from your homeland. Ethereal, soaring, mood-altering vocals, string instruments and sound effects provided onstage by Balaklava Blues at times evoke heart-rending pity.
This is the theatre of hitting back and the company’s commitment to motivate their countrymen and notify the world of the immediate danger is brave and awesomely compelling. Bravo!
David Grybowski
When: 2 to 6 Mar
Where: Dunstan Playhouse – Adelaide Festival Centre
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
★★★1/2
Adelaide Fringe. Nineteen Ten. 4 Mar 2023
007-Licence to Thrill is a sixty minute high energy show of burlesque cabaret performers strutting their stuff to iconic sound tracks from James Bond movies. It’s not a drag show – there is no lip syncing for your life – although some members of the enthusiastic and capacity audience clearly knew most of the songs and mouthed along anyway.
Presented by Skye High Burlesque, a Perth based production company and burlesque school, the antics of the performers have almost nothing to do with James Bond, except that the chosen songs provide a framework around which to choreograph their strip tease routines and for the MC to keep us plied with interesting Bond trivia. Occasionally there is considerable effort to ‘match’ the song to the dance. For example, in their performance of No Time to Die, two dancers – a guy and a girl – are engaged in an erotic and sexy fight that leads to his watery death (yes, there’s a swimming pool!), as a sort of nod to James Bond meeting his end on an old WWII island.
No Time to Die was the only routine that included a male burlesque performer. All the others featured exotically and scantily clad women who celebrated their curves and teased, thrilled, and titillated the mixed audience as they tastefully undressed.
Diamonds are Forever, sung by Shirley Bassey, was performed in a shimmering winged cape that glistened with LED lights and shimmered in sync with Bassey’s powerful tremolo. Writing’s on the Wall was performed as a high-energy fan dance with the performer dancing on the tables amongst the audience. A titanic rendition of You Know My Name from Casino Royale, was belted out live by Adelaide performer Lady Cara.
Skye High Burlesque’s owner and director Delza Skye performed You Only Live Twice and to the theme music from On Her Majesty's Secret Service.
With the benefit of a water curtain, the The World is Not Enough was given an exciting wet treatment, and Goldfinger culminated in the performer pouring a gold coloured syrup all over her glistening body but stopping short of inviting audience members to lick her clean (though some clearly wanted to)!
The show finished with a fiery performance of Another Way To Die from Quantum of Solace. Dressed in bondage style leathers and sporting multiple body piercings and tattoos, the performer kept the audience on the edge of their seats as they were treated to a spirited dance routine that featured fire eating and breathing, and transferring flame over her body. Impressive. Exciting, and all close enough so that you could feel the heat in your loins, literally!
Great fun. Thrilling!
Kym Clayton
When: 4 to 5 Mar
Where: Nineteen Ten
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au