State Theatre Company South Australia. Space Theatre. 30 Jul 2024
With a brave dive into the extremely unlikely, Van Badham may emerge with a smile.
A musical rom-com on stage is a wildly left-field diversion in 2024.
But diversion it is. Thoroughly diverting.
And, this very promising Australian playwright fulfils yet more of her shining promise.
The play describes a blind date at the man’s super-neat city high-rise bachelor apartment. It’s an incompatible match but impelled to continue when the world goes abruptly into “shelter-in-place” lockdown. The clashing pair then face an indefinite time conflicting in confinement. And, tolerance, it seems, is not their thing.
Badham with co-writer Richard Wise, found the rom-com concept from the true story of a hapless couple forced to cohabit from the first great Covid-19 lockdown in China. They married this plot, so to speak, to Arthur Aron’s 36 Questions which purport to deliver intimacy. Thus do our nameless protagonists work their way through the questions as time goes by, gradually revealing more of themselves. There’s plenty of humour in the business of awkwardness and yet more to be found with the cheek-to-jowl rock band neighbours whose apartment window gazes most intimately into the bachelor pad. The juxtaposition of these two worlds is core to a simply stunning, albeit oddly fridge-free set design by Jeremy Allen which comes to delicious light under Gavin Norris’s lighting. The interaction of the neighbours also is key to some giggles, not to mention when, accompanying the two principals, they sing some wickedly perky chorus lines. Not that everything they sing thrills this critic. Richard Wise is responsible for the music and he gives one song during which, with the audience already in a chill breeze of over-airconditioning, one feels as uncomfortably trapped as the do the characters. This is when keyboarder Sam Lau lets loose with the most aggressive and abrasive punk solo this side of Sid Vicious’ grave. Wise’s music otherwise is generally fun and often sensitive with some really elegant arrangements. Not that one goes away humming any of the tunes. It is a long time since a new musical had that effect. Nonetheless, this production is a musical and much of the interaction is broken into song. Therein, with Chaya Ocampo tending to stridency as The Visitor, it is Charles Wu as The Resident who really beguiles. Among other things, his rendition of the song Life Is So Small is deeply moving. His is a lovely performance all round as the diffident bachelor.
Van Badham being Van Badham has allowed a wholesome little political thread to run through the play, nicely enabled by The Visitor bragging the feminist agenda of her degree in gender studies. And, she gives a gentle serve to our generational dependence on internet connectivity, on online shopping addiction, and messaging versus speaking.
There are some jewels dotted throughout the play which shines with the sleek directorial touch of Mitch Butel. Similary, that little band through the window, Lau with James Bannan Jr and Jackson Mack, under Kym Purling’s expert musical direction with Andrew Howard’s sound, sing their own song of nifty production values.
Thus is this topical confection of a modern rom-com musical to be most cheerfully recommended to audiences of all ages.
It’s a bit of a feel-good gem.
Samela Harris
When: 30 Jul to 17 Aug
Where: Space Theatre
Bookings: statetheatrecompany.com.au
Illuminate Adelaide/Insite Arts. Nexus Arts. 11 July 2024
Such a deftly simple idea.
Offer a group of artists across dance, visual arts and performance art a 3.5m round white stage, five video monitors behind them and see what they fill it with, or rather, how they envision filling the earth.
Juha Vanhakartano’s concept is one in which he allowed artists involved to bring whatever ideas and tools needed to execute their visions and remained hands off from there. Vanhakartano worked sculpting the overall concept and video design in partnership with Sound Designer/Operator Sascha Budimski and Lighting Designer/Operator Nic Mollison.
This is where the simple bit ends. Here, it’s all about the framing of images and meaning in action in this tiny stage space. Your eyes and mind are constantly at work devouring and comprehending a lot of phenomenal information.
Across seven sharply different, deeply engaging, through provoking works, Fill The Earth goes places far beyond the physical span of the space works are confined.
Visual Artist Thom Buchanan is already at work as the audience files in, performing Anthropocene Epoch.
Sit down or walk around the artist, as he etches/smudges hard and light charcoal lines into the canvas.
Buchanan is hard at work. His stained feet leave black marks, whirling about the canvas. Monitors show an overhead shot of the work. You see a white ice age world of growing cracks. Yes, this is the world. Before the world.
Yumi Umiumare’s M.M.E – My Mother Earth is the only work restricted to video monitor. The ice cold of the Anthropocene gives way to this eerie bubble shaped figure which proceeds to grow, glow in green, blue and purple to an exactingly tingling soundtrack. Awe is a good word for this piece. Umiumare manages to express the fecund nature of birthing life on bare earth that’s quite transcendent and yet primitive.
Caleena Sansbury and Adrianne Semmens’ Here, Unseen is a delicate, sparse but very rich focus on country, Kuarna Yerta country. Video footage of stick branches fused with the performers begins they piece as the offer a dance that’s very much one love for the ochre lands, the bare vegetation and so importantly as voice overs, older to younger generations chant, “our country holds our stories.” Yet they are immersed in this land, they are certainly here, but unseen.
Paulo Castro and Jo Stone’s O Sabor do meu Pomar of all the works brilliantly pulls off the challenge of framing a work and its intent differently from what is seen from audience view and what is seen in overhead shot video view.
Stone enters the stage. From her dress hem drop around a half dozen red apples. She exits, returning with a radio, a bag. Listens for radio sound. She exits twice, returning each time with a large dead apple tree limb, laying one limb on the stage dais behind her, the other in front.
This a scene of devastated earth. So smashed, unreal it’s enough to attempt sticky taping apples back onto branches to recover a sense of normal Earth. It’s as uncomfortably disconcerting, the sound of tape stretching over an apple and a tree limb as it is to watch. Stone can now lie down and look the sky. Only form overhead view on video, looking down on her and the scene, Earth looks perfect again. It’s a scarily real-time world image to ponder.
Co-director sisters Alison and Bridget Currie’s Sister of Icarus is a dive into art mythology from another angle which takes its cues from three August Rodin sculptures.
Accent is on comfort. Alison Currie and Cazna Brass play with sculptural shape using rocks, cloth a cloth enclosed sculptural form. It all seems so hard for these two to find ‘ease.’ As much as they change positions, change placement of small rocks on their bodies in Rodin imitation, nothing seems quite settled. The piece also suggestively hovers around the idea of an actual sister of Icarus falling down the rocks, not up to the sun as Icarus did. It’s beautiful, taught, lightly tragic demanding work in which being supportive and being ok is the battle.
Stephen Sheehan’s Adam is an existentially whimsical work about a man with a door. What he might find behind the door. Or not. The psychological world made physical with all its little unknown moments as he knocks on the door, peers around it, uses it as shelter from scary things.
Overhead video shots of this man/door journey are fascinating. Is Adam attempting to wall himself in or out of the world?
Lina Limosani’s Mele is totally the modern world. Grey. Angular. Fast. Unforgiving. In dancer Rowan Rossi, she has the perfect talent to execute the most brutal, sharp, savagely exact choreography seen in some time with ripping soundtrack in support. Rossi is mesmerising. He is modern man. Today. Which no one really wants to suffer being.
David O’Brien
When: Closed
Where: Nexus Arts
Bookings: Closed
Laughter Through The Tears Productions. The Space. 3 Jul 2024
Rebecca Meston’s Hits is her Adelaide music industry/culture love letter in a long line of such, across many a decade and form, from film to novel.
Rhiannon (Ren Williams) finds herself with just Mum after Dad, Rod (Eddie Morrison) hits the tour road with his band. Forever. At least she has her beat box, headphones, and love of sappy mainstream 80s tunes to comfort her. It ‘ain’t enough really.
Until the day she leaps off the bus chasing a guy, ending up in a record store owned by a totally cool chick called Suzie (Annabel Matheson) and a world beyond her folks’ sappy tunes, school uniform, bland clothes and uppity peers opens up to her.
Lifeblood of being young; getting into music, finding your therapeutic aural fix when life sucks boosting you again for another day, another battle with the world.
Meston as Director mashes comedic caricatures laced with rather pointed observation of cultural mores of the day, in a sweet and sour nostalgia binge that nonetheless is also a fight between two cultures - mainstream and alternative.
In the midst of this, Rhiannon’s making choices, fending off negative influences within both mainstream and alternative culture. Williams’ superbly balances nostalgic elements of the production with the more caustic, serious undertones of Meston’s writing, as does the entire cast.
Suzie runs her record shop and her customers, her way. Choice of music is imposed on buyers to grow their knowledge, not feed infantile feelings. Quintessential 80s-90s mainstream radio jock DJ Barry (Eddie Morrison) rules the airwaves and listeners in a similar fashion (shocking into life memories of how really, really, really, bad mainstream radio was in the day).
Mother, Linda (Emma Beech) is an 80s magazine style queen who nonetheless is still living in the 70s. Rhiannon’s school peers, Meels, Footsy (Emma Beech) and Bee (Annabel Matheson) are as vacuously 90s bitchy and pretentious as the Vogue magazine they primp over.
It’s a smooth, fluid moving production across a stage set up for a band, utilising put on, pull off chairs, decks and tables.
A mosh pit crew consisting of first year Flinders University Drama Centre students, choreographed by Erin Fowler, add head banging passion and zest to the sophisticated score by Jason Sweeney, deftly hinting at music history of the day’s clashes.
Hits is not a pop show. Certainly not rock and roll high school. It’s a clever look at the way things were and still are today. Same issues, different tunes, different mediums.
David O’Brien
When: 3 to 6 Jul
Where: The Space
Bookings: ticketek.com.au
Madness of Two. The Void. Flinders University Drama Centre. 26 Jun 2024
So much of yesterday’s science fiction has come to pass that it makes one wary of fictional prognostications. Let’s hope that Starweaver does not follow the pattern.
It is scary.
Certainly Jamie Hornsby and Ellen Graham, acknowledged and considerably awarded now as bright lights of promise on the theatre scene, have thrust their Madness of Two company far into the future, to the year 2149, wherein A.I. blurs reality and it takes fearless activists to thwart ghastly capitalist domination. Only those who can afford to do so may view the starry night sky in their nightmare of tomorrow. Heroine of the time is Cato, a genius A.I. engineer who, in ragged traveller clothes, carries hacker technology in an old-school backpack.
The production, in The Void at Flinders Drama Centre, is an intriguing mass of anachronisms, on the whole highly aesthetic with design by the renowned Kathryn Sproul. Indeed, the play is directed by State Theatre’s Shannon Rush and comes in under the wing of the 2024 Stateside season and developed under the Australian Writers' Guild David Williamson Prize along with the State’s InSPACE program. There is a lot of professional clout behind it - and a LOT of the latest technology.
It transforms The Void into a strangely warm womb of a performance space seating just thirty-four. It is both intimate and immediate theatre dominated by a large cyclorama. Thereon is projected a fearful future-world: spacecraft interiors, giant tech corporate factory corridors, open spaces occupied by cloned virtual protestors, a Mars space station, city and sky-scapes, and even the verdant interior of a biosphere. The curve of screen warps proportions and adds to the weird experimental feel of the world out there. The images are huge and sensationally high-res. They’ve used CGI, motion capture, and videogame technology and the creditable credits include Mark Oakley as technical director with Paul Goodman on sound.
The actors onstage interact with the filmed characters and, on occasion, mime movements as if within the locations. This is not always convincing but, when the tech blending works, it produces some quite jaw-dropping moments.
It is really immersive theatre. With the close proximity of the actors and the massive immediacy of the screen images, there are times when one feels enveloped despite the sci-fi absurdity of it all.
The plotline is old-school goodies versus baddies with a healthy anti-corporate-greed political heart. Venal capitalism would have us pay to look at the stars.
Mark Saturno onscreen makes a fabulous champagne-sipping baddie. It’s a lovely performance which threatens to steal the show. However, Ellen Graham is the star of the show as Cato, the valiant genius activist hacker. It is an exhausting role by the time she has finished being brutalised by future rays from a virtual maniac villain and conjuring her brother from a cyber egg thingie. It has been indeed a strong and committed performance. Hornsby, her co-writer of this work, plays Cassius, counsel and fellow hero. His costume is some interesting layered trenchcoat look, half Columbo and half complicit sage. The costumes are puzzling. There are Starweaver mystics in black cloaks like Macbeth’s witches and fellow henchmen in civvies. Clones are in sports attire with boots. Heroic Terra, played by Maeve Hook, is in quasi machine-gun battle gear. Then there is Mark Aspen played by Brett Archer up there on the screen, chic and villainous in a sleek metallic-hued formal suit.
It has taken a large village to create this 90-minute work with full marks to Jason Bevan and the Flinders University Visual Effects and Entertainment Design students.
It is out there and ambitious and dangerously balanced on its dependence on tech reliability. Its preview performance fell foul of a tech issue.
This brave new creation follows Madness of Two’s triumph with the five-star kids’ show Claire Della and the Moon.
What a contrast. What an interesting young company. What on earth or elsewhere will it do next?
Samela Harris
When: 26 Jun to 6 Jul
Where: The Void, Flinders University Drama Centre
Bookings: events.humanitix.com
Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Festival Theatre. 22 Jun 2024
It’s always a big load to carry, being the child of a revered artist when you’re working in the same field. Lisa Simone carries this weight well, perhaps because she doesn’t try to be her mother, Nina Simone. Comparisons are artistically odious, and in this instance, there isn’t much in terms of their vocals to compare them. The timbre and throaty nuances of Nina’s contralto simply aren’t present which makes it simpler to consider Lisa on her own merits, albeit while performing songs that Nina made famous.
Lisa was a latecomer to a singing career, spending 10 or so years in the military, and has enjoyed a very successful career on Broadway (Rent, Aida, The Lion King) and recorded a number of albums. This tour is very much dedicated to her mother’s body of work; Keeper Of The Flame was recorded by Nina in 1967 and is a most appropriate name for the show.
The program began with an extended instrumental number from the 16-piece band, who tested themselves out with various instrumental solos, while still paying very close attention to their chord charts. This made for a bit of a stilted beginning, but it is difficult to have a free-swinging vibe when you’re just not used to playing together.
Simone came on to sing the eponymous opener, and the softly spoken singer quickly won over the audience as she went on to tell anecdotes, jokes and some lengthy stories between songs. All the favourite standards were there: Fine and Mellow, Gal From Joe’s, Pay’em No Mind and audience participation came in Go To Hell, while band members also got to perform a few scheduled solos, a highlight being James Muller’s guitar solo in the blues Do I Move You.
After a brief interval, Lisa was back with a very up-tempo version of Mood Indigo, and then went on to perform some of the greatest songs that form Nina’s legacy. Black Is The Color (of my true love’s hair), My Baby Just Cares For Me, Feelin’ Good and I Put A Spell On You. She then placed her own stamp on the concert by closing with her own Finally Free, really showcasing the voice (and amazing breath control) that has won her accolades and award nominations on Broadway.
This carefully and closely curated show pays homage to the late and great Nina Simone, and at the same time allows Lisa Simone to come out from under that shadow, showing that she is a performer in her own right. It would be great to see her let loose and get a bit of improv happening on stage; for this performance however, the audience was more than happy to listen, sing along at times, and give this talented performer a standing ovation. A good close to a fabulous festival.
Arna Eyers-White
When: 22 Jun
Where: Festival Theatre
Bookings: Closed