★★★
Adelaide Fringe Festival. The Vault at Fool's Paradise. 21 Feb 2025
Elixir Revived is a story of medical mayhem and evil experiments. Our heroes are self-absorbed scientists searching for the ultimate elixir – one that unlocks the secret of life and all the risks and rewards that might go with that. Like much pharmaceutical research their is funded by big companies that are driven by the lure of big bucks, and so our protagonists are forced to experiment on themselves and to take risks.
As they try version after version of the elusive elixir they test their physical prowess to check their progress.
So far so good – the narrative seems as though we will be in for a display of increasingly difficult and fantastic gymnastic manoeuvres, but that doesn’t happen. In fact, what we see is a standard grab bag of circus tricks – nothing new.
Yes, the tricks are done well and with tongue-in-cheek humour, and with commanding strength athletic grace, and the troupe members are buff and fine manly specimens, but there is nothing exceptional going on. The narrative doesn’t really live up to its promise or hold it all together.
A fun show, but not the best comedic circus going around.
Kym Clayton
When: 21 Feb to 23 Mar
Where: The Vault at Fool's Paradise
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
★★★★★
Adelaide Fringe. The Octagon at Gluttony. 21 Feb 2025
Brought to you by SA’s own Gravity & Other Myths, The Mirror is an outstanding show, and demonstrates that circus can be sophisticated and challenging physical theatre.
What does one see when one looks in a mirror? We expect to see a perfect copy of ourselves, but perfection is illusory, and perhaps we really want to see something else - something more flattering, more exciting, or something that challenges what we believe to be true about ourselves.
The Mirror explores all these things through an exquisite display of gymnastic and circus skills which is firmly held together with classy choreography and a razor-sharp narrative that is sometimes sung and sometimes executed with the feel that it is being extemporised, but it’s not.
The whole thing evokes danger. It’s one thing to execute risky routines that feel ‘safe’, because they are performed so well, but its something quite different to inject a real sense of drama and vulnerability. The troupe does this so well, and it is always exciting and on-the-edge-of your-seat stuff. The action is played in variable lighting, which is visually exciting and adds to the sense of danger. (How can they be so accurate in what they do and be safe when surely, they can’t clearly see! But of course, they can. It’s clever illusion.)
A highlight of the generously long 70-minute show is the creation of a human bridge: it’s a display of brute strength, grace, poise and balance, and it evokes whoops and cheers from the audience. Another highlight is a mashup of an almost countless number of songs by a vocalist that cleverly scaffolds various physical routines and is all the while being projected on a screen – it’s one protracted hedonistic selfie, and its oh so entertainingly projected.
This is sophisticated physical theatre, and it comes with a warning – children must be accompanied by an adult. Yes, there’s a reasonably amount of buff flesh, it’s cheeky (pun intended) and provocative, but always tasteful and inoffensive.
This is Fringe at its best!
Kym Clayton
When: 21 Feb to 23 Mar
Where: The Octagon at Gluttony
Bookings: gluttony.net.au
★★★
Adelaide Fringe Festival. The Warehouse Theatre. 22 Feb 2025
I Can Have a Darkside Too is actor/writer/musician/ventriloquist Glenn Wallis’s first solo show as actor/writer. It comes in just under 40 minutes and it is both humorous and disturbing as it explores themes of grief, suicide, mental health, and self-efficacy.
Nate, played by Wallis, is a children’s entertainer who is commissioned by schools to deliver ‘fun’ lessons on stranger danger and the like. But he has personal demons that surface and interfere with his state of mind and how he approaches his work. In fact he’s dangerous. The text delves deeper into Nate’s thought processes and his less than pleasant memories of his childhood and his relationship with his mother who has recently passed away under tragic circumstances. The mirror into Nate’s disturbed psyche is through a sock puppet called Emmett that Nate controls.
Emmett is foul mouthed and brutal in what he says, and he upsets Nate’s equilibrium at every turn, but the audience lap it up. There are plenty of chuckles and the dialogue frequently lands its punches, but there are also many occasions where the gag lines need to be more incisive and even crueller than they are.
Wallis’s physicality is impressive. There is not much of the stage that he doesn’t use and at times the sock puppet seems larger than life and behaves like a rat cunning street fighter. It distracts us from Wallis’s emerging ventriloquist skills.
The show has an impressive soundtrack with various voice overs that Wallis uses to perfection.
This show merits further development and making a return visit to Fringe.
Kym Clayton
When: 22 Feb
Where: The Warehouse Theatre
Bookings: Closed
State Theatre Company South Australia. Dunstan Playhouse. 12 Feb 2025
Oh joy.
What a brilliant start to 2025 in the Adelaide Theatre.
What a wonderful buzz percolating through a departing audience.
Housework is a hit.
Emily Steel shines forth as a bright new playwright with this pertinent play profiling the machinations of Australian politics.
Yes, there’s nothing domestic about this housework. It is House of Parliament.
Steel has slipped beneath our political news cycles and explored the hows and, especially the whys of those seeking careers in politics. To this end, she has created an almost perfect cast of characters who profile the inner sanctum machinations of Canberra. Their careers revolve around a newly elected federal MP and her determination to get her policies moving through the system. Yes, she has a feminist agenda. But let’s not say “feminist”.
Her team seeks for her the support of a senior minister in Canberra and her seasoned Chief of Staff, a tense and cynical, perchance battle-scarred, veteran of those hallowed halls has the connections. There are layers and histories which surge to the surface as part of the learning curve of the super-keen new junior staffer, Kelly. Steel has cleverly potted the dramas and vulnerabilities of the capital's soft underbelly with a delicious wry wit. It is a very funny play. And yet, it does not hold back on the truth-telling. It is a skilful satire on that old Westminster system we hold so dear.
It plays its own pun on its title with the prelude scene of the Sunitra Martinelli as the cleaner giving thorough spit and polish to Ailsa Paterson’s expansive set. This is dominated by a huge revolvable meeting table and backgrounded by a pillar-lined “corridor of power”, down which darting figures may hint at the pressure cooker rush of Parliamentary life. Multi-purpose, effective and, under Nigel Levings' inimitable lighting, it also is of very pleasing aesthetic. It brings another production-values star to this fabulous show.
It was commissioned by the wonderful Mitchel Butel as State Artistic Director. What a sterling stamp he leaves on the quality of modern Australian theatre. As they say in the classics, he can pick’em.
Herein, he lifts playwright Emily Steel into the glow of audience headlights as, perhaps a new David Williamson.
And, with Shannon Rush risen as an enlightened and perceptive director with a thrilling program ahead, he leaves Adelaide so much the better. And Australia.
This play has legs. Its political theme follows the zeitgeist of Utopia with a streak of Clarke and Dawe and Gilles and a dash of Yes Minister.
It is clever, funny and finely wrought. A splendour of box ticking,
It is political without fear or favour.
And, of course, it features not only a deliciously quirky percussive musical embellishment by Andrew Howard, but some award-worthy performances.
The ever-elegant Renato Musolino finds that fine line between complacency and deviousness in the political-power-games powerhouse with his portrayal of “call me Paul” in the Federal Ministry.
There’s wonderful veracity in the scene in which everyone is eating dumplings. Really eating, And Musolino is a cheek-bulging phenomenon. There are many pithy touches to this work.
Susie Youssef plays the new MP, at first galling in her ineptitude and then, as Susie develops the character with her excellent comic timing, she emerges as ever more endearing and credible. It is a nice profile of the novice political animal. Then playing the new MP's career foundation chief of staff, Emily Taheny, gives nothing less than a tour de force performance with some absolutely torrential dialogue delivery. Phew. One was surprised she did not score a burst of spontaneous audience applause on opening night. Then again, Housework features a number of applaud-worthy moments both in performances and message. Franca Lafosse is a heavenly innocent abroad as the junior staffer while Benn Welford presents a rather moving portrayal depicting the actual predicament of those who become political media advisors. Oh yes, Emily Steel has not held back. She’s done her homework in those shadowy back rooms and has thrown a few home truths out into the theatrical limelight.
Hence, the satisfaction at the cultural and intellectual feast of this new theatre work which comes complete with a few wee kickers at the end.
Five stars and then some.
Samela Harris
When: 12 to 22 Feb
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: my.statetheatrecompany.com.au
Pelican Productions. Musical Theatre Camp and Spotlight. Michael Murray Centre for Performing Arts - Westminster School. 18 Jan 2025.
Pelican Productions theatre camps and Spotlight programs are twenty years old already. Time’s speed is scary.
Directors Jen Frith and Kylie Green marvel in their program notes about the latest production named Twenty in honour of this landmark twentieth, saying it is “nothing short of phenomenal” that it all comes together. True.
The scale of Pelican productions is massive. There are so many talented young performers that their shows are divided into four huge casts so that everyone can have a spotlight.
It’s a talent factory on the grand scale and thank heavens that Westminster School has a really big stage and auditorium to accommodate it all - especially, as on this Twentieth anniversary production, an added vast array of alumni swarmed into the theatre and massed on and around the stage. And they were all wonderful. Love was in the air. So much love.
Pelican achieves all this with its Musical Theatre Camps and Spotlight programs, bringing top entertainers and masters of their arts in to train the upcoming entertainers and theatre workers. Hundreds of people.
The wondrous end product is a mass of young performers up there giving their all. Trained to a tee. Beautifully costumed, well miked... Every single one of them is focused on performance and works as if they are the only one on stage.
This 2025 first big show followed the Pelican productions pattern of excerpts from major popular musicals: a bonanza of hits and big cast numbers.
This critic attended the “Broadway” cast’s Saturday-night performance.
There were not many things to criticise. Mainly it was the tendency towards oversinging, which has become endemic in this era of “Everyone’s Got Talent” shows. Hence, singers who sang rather than belted were standout. A few issues with understanding lyrics but, then again, there were some pretty terrible lyrics. Not all musicals are works of art and one now knows that one never wants to see a full performance of The Great Gatsby Musical. Or &Juliet! (Then again, off the subject, keep an eye out for Romeo + Juliet which is really fresh youth version which is currently packing Broadway with teens.)
Pelican's spectaculars always are a bit overwhelming, and it seems unfair to see only a proportion of the talent in just one of the casts. But that’s how it rolls.
From the Broadway cast’s production, there are quite a few names for which to keep a future look-out.
There’s Sebastian Cox, a phenomenal dancer. There’s Lluka Wadey, outstanding from one of six stunners in Six the Musical. There's Gracie Cheung in Beettlejuice. There’s April Sprules as Annie. There’s Belle Letic as Daisy in Gatsby. There’s Casey Mifsud and Aidan Salmon from Book of Mormon which, incidentally, was delivered as a totally breathtaking opener to the show. The overall showstopper was Finn Green with Sit Down You’re Rocking the Boat from Guys and Dolls. He’s a star alumni.
There are the soloists from The Lion King and big tick to the stilt-walking giraffes, albeit the Circle of Life animals were generally a tough call.
Further big ticks to all the techs behind the scenes. Production values were high and the projection sets were extremely effective. Ditto the costumes. Some of the choreography was beyond excellent. The discipline of the performers was copybook. The praise can go on.
Whoever the baritone was who featured in the alumni grand finale was just “wow”. But then again, there was too much to praise. This reviewing job is impossible.
Brava Jen and Kylie. You’re a class act delivering countless class acts.
This state and show biz owes you a lot.
Samela Harris
When: 17 to 19 Jan
Where: Michael Murray CPA
Bookings: Closed