Theatre Republic in association with Adelaide Festival Centre. Space Theatre. 17 Nov 2021
I was listening to RN Breakfast in early 1999. Anthony LaPaglia had just won the Tony best actor award for his Eddy in Arthur Miller’s A View From The Bridge. Fran Kelly asked what it was like to have instant stardom, and he said, “Are you kidding? I’ve been in New York pounding shoe leather since the early ‘80s! And it was bloody tough trying to crack it, I’ll tell’ya!”
How Not To Make It In America is based on Adelaidean playwright Emily Steel’s very own experience trying to crack it. She didn’t crack it (“happier here with you guys,” she says) but she has written a cracker one-person one-hour play on the trials and tribulations of Big Apple survival in the toughest show business in the world, and tells her tale through her character, the hapless Matt. James Smith’s Matt is a marvel of theatrical engineering and engagement. Steel chops up time and space and Smith surpasses the challenge of turning 28 characters into meaty chunks of New York personae – the casting directors, the guys at the DVD shop, the street food vendors, the crappy drug-hazed housemates who offer him a couch for US$80 a week. Within this narrative complexity that has one guessing what’s next or even what is, director Corey McMahon, Steele and Smith put you on the streets of NY – you can smell hot dogs and B.O. and simultaneously marvel at Smith’s virtuosity with accents and emotion. Bravo! Smith’s Matt is such a sweet guy, so normal yet so driven and desperate, you want to reach out, give him a hug, and then slap him to say, “STOP!” Former international shoestring travelers, low on dough making a phone card call to Oz to say you’re OK when you’re not, may get weak kneed with familiarity.
Meg Wilson’s set is a deliciously disorientating three-dimensional kinetic kaleidoscope of Chris Petridis’s abstracted images of New York. Sometimes Matt is in front of the curve, sometimes he is engulfed by it. You may not realise the subtle emotional manipulation of Jason Sweeney’s compositions and soundscape until they turn it off, a signature of superior enhancement.
This all-Adelaide creative team lead by director Corey McMahon has manifested a highly entertaining and poignant insight into a young person’s dream, and you are right in there with him, trying to make it before it breaks you.
Be numbered amongst the first by seeing this world premiere. No doubt it will be performed in many languages around the world for years to come - while we all have the dream, we don’t all take the risk, and that’s what we love about Matt (and Emily, too!) Bravo!
David Grybowski
When: 17 to 20 Nov
Where: Space Theatre
Bookings: ticketek.com.au
State Theatre Company South Australia. Dunstan Playhouse. 16 Nov 2021
Eureka Day is glittering comedy theatre gold! Born in Berkeley in 2018, the play is now making its Australian debut under the lively direction of Rosalba Clemente who was artistic director of our State Theatre 2000-04 and along the way has garnered credits and awards for performance, playwrighting directing and theatrical skills training. All that experience is on display here.
Californian playwright Jonathan Spector presciently picked the theme of our time pre-Covid. Today’s (17/11/21) headline editorial in The Advertiser is entitled, “School vax mandate will protect kids.” But what if everyone on the Eureka Day School committee doesn’t agree?
The farcical school committee sits in juxtaposition with the learning-toys and tiny chairs of the private grade school’s playroom in designer Meg Wilson’s wonderfully rendered oak-beamed open space. Spector has great fun poking a stick at neo-liberal overkill by even driving that dribble up a notch. Discussing a school form, words and phrases like “contextulate”, “negation of people’s experience”, and “transracial adoptee” abound. Apologies and insincere openness mask insecurity and hidden agendas. It is hilarious, but wait, there’s more!
The vax-for-the-mumps issue is put to an online meeting. While the committee carries on, the real focus centres on a projection of the online comment stream, wonderfully devised by AV design and content artist Chris Petridis. The cacophony of the committee combined with the increasing rancor, anger and abuse in the comments results in a continuous peel of audience laughter the likes of which I have never witnessed in theatre. Double bravo!
Director Rosalba Clemente brings together an exceptional cast of mature and new talent. The inspired indelible mark she leaves on them all is a comical over-exaggeration of body movement and gesticulation coupled with new age signatures of camaraderie and faux bonhomie. Caroline Craig, Matt Hyde, Juanita Navas-Nguyen, Glynn Nicholas and Sara Zwangobani all shine in ensemble and have their star turn. Bravo! Adding to the shine are Meg Wilson’s colourful costumes of Californian cool.
The riotous first act is followed in Act II by rather more serious business around the issues. People hold genuine beliefs that they feel are immutable and science, emotion and memory are a potent cocktail for dramatic conflict – in real life. And here, the gamut is investigated in this real life-like setting with pathos.
While the zaniness is exemplary of northern Californian conditions, the issues are everywhere. Double Bravo! A play of our time not to be missed.
David Grybowski
When: 12 to 27 Nov
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: ticketek.com.au
Dunstan Playhouse. State Theatre Company SA. 16 Nov 21
If we needed a covid tonic, here it is: gusts of glorious laughter as the battle between vaxxers and anti-vaxxers unfolds in an alternative community school in Berkeley, California.
State Theatre’s programming of Jonathan Spector’s Eureka Day was an act of perhaps unprecedented prescience since the play was slotted into the 2021 season long before the pandemic immersed us. It is not about Covid but about a school board’s response to an official medical edict when a case of mumps breaks out among the students.
The school board is a politically correct feast of ethnic diversity and is, oh, so ardently woke. Indeed, it is contemplating ever more specific racial sensitivities such as “inter-racial adoptee”.
Californians always did take self-righteous alternative nuttiness to the passionate extremes of irrationalism and Spector has written their desperate neediness into a swiftly-flying narrative which opens with ruthless parody and, after some genuinely thought-provoking revelations, arrives at a denouement of comfortable irony. It is a lovely exposition of oppositional logical processes, albeit over-peppered with unfinished sentences which hang in the air.
The play is set in a primary school library, well observed by designer Meg Wilson to feature all the clichéd refinements down to those impossible bean bags. The board meets there in well-spaced chairs, occasionally sharing scones which can only be served on environmentally correct plates.
Don is the senior, the facilitator, the chair, the socks-and-sandals softie who likes to close meetings with meaningful readings of esoterica from Rumi. Glynn Nicholas embodies this man with absolute perception and impeccable comic timing. It is as if he was always meant to play the part which even encompasses a soupçon of mime, expertly reminding audiences of whence came this fine stage presence.
Don is very much under the thumb of domineering, manipulative, and highly strung Suzanne, a stereotypical “Karen" of insistent alternative beliefs. Caroline Craig makes a meal of this character, sometimes so frenetic that it is exhausting to behold. Yet, in a solitary pause in her annoying hyperactivity, she presents an expression of such profound vulnerability and defeat that it may never leave the mind’s eye of this audience member. That is acting.
In contrast is single mum Meiko, played by Juanita Navas-Nguyen, is quietly inscrutable as she sits knitting. She has secrets to keep but when her time comes, she is a powerhouse of agendas. Matt Hyde plays Eli, ever with a somewhat dazed look in his eyes, either because he is a two-timing hypocrite or because he is riding high on the zeitgeist of wokeness. Even in tragedy, he is somewhat unpleasant but apparently very rich.
Into this group comes the new board member, Carina, an African American lesbian mum with a special needs child. She would be perfect for the board’s diversity, except that she reveals herself to be rational. Sara Zwangobani is pitch-perfect in this role. She is a joy to watch, nuanced in character interpretation and, of course, on the side of the angels when it comes to an informed and mask-wearing State Theatre audience.
The high spot of this work is very high indeed. As Don takes to the Internet to confer with the school community on the issue of vaccine mandates, a dropdown screen plays out the text conversations and comments of the participants which soon become a deluge of wacko anti-vax theorists versus exasperated dissenters. It is one long, heavenly, and much-needed belly laugh.
Thus, with a fabulous cast in the hands of Rosalba Clemente, plus slickly professional lighting from Mark Shelton, fine audio-visuals from Chris Petridis, not to mention well -coached American accents, this production with its serendipitously pertinent subject matter, is a top notch hit show for State.
Applause. Applause.
Samela Harris
When: 12 to 27 Nov
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: ticketek.com.au
State Opera South Australia. Her Majesty’s Theatre. 11 Nov 2021
Australian Lindy Hume’s impressive opera and festival directing career has her directing three operas this year in three countries, and this one is a huge celebration of invention, colour, comedy and music. The overture alone will captivate the least of the opera-goers among you with its medley of famous melodies. Conductor Graham Abbott explains that after signing a contract to deliver an operatic score in three weeks in the run-up before Christmas, Rossini recycled some previous material to save time. Legend has it that the composer wrote this, his 17th of 39 works for the stage, in 13 days that December in 1815. This production was created in 2016 for the 200th anniversary of opening night in Rome.
The overture is followed by the equally familiar self-introduction of the barber spruiking himself as the social facilitator of Seville. The designers have Morgan Pearse exhibit the off-beat swagger and self-importance - complete with makeup and costume - of Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean. His sonorous baritone voice navigates the rippling syllabic challenges with astonishing aplomb. Bravo!
If you haven’t been to opera for a while, the days of the non-dieting diva standing statically still like a statue while hitting the high Cs are over. A great operatic voice only just gets you in the door now. Operatic performers are triple threats highly skilled in movement and acting as well. And this we see in abundance in the performance of Katie Stenzel as Rossini’s Rosina. Along with John Longmuir’s Count Almaviva, they are the couple madly in lust. Their gropes at the fortepiano, with faces and bodies wishing for more, all tensely taking place literally behind the back of her guardian, Dr Bartolo, is very amusing and a highlight. Bravo!
The set is as coloratura as Stenzel’s soprano voice. Designer Tracy Grant Lord and lighting designer Matthew Marshall saturate the set with doors and windows, and colour and costumes. Bravo! Associate choreographer Carol Wellman Kelly and director Lindy Hume also keep the eyes interested by mobilising every nuance with complementary and/or farcical business and anachronistic delights. There are a lot of repetitive bars that stretch the story to nearly the three-hour mark, so you have to do something. And of course, there is the heard-but-not-seen Adelaide Symphony Orchestra which sometimes is ungratefully assumed to be a given for their consistent quality. While all these assets were a delight, an hour less would have been fine, but tradition still means something. Go Figaro.
David Grybowski
When: 11 to 20 Nov
Where: Her Majesty’s Theatre
Bookings: stateopera.com.au
Joh Hartog Productions in association with Bakehouse Theatre. Bakehouse Theatre. 29 Oct 2021
What a very clever confection of a lateral-thinker’s play. It’s a wild Irish gamble which comes off as a triumph. No wonder it won an Olivier Award during its four-year London run.
Written by Belfast-born playwright Marie Jones, Stones in his Pockets depicts a couple of impoverished Irish yokels working as extras on a Hollywood movie being shot on location on their home turf. Jones’s script demands of the two actors playing these roles that they embody the Hollywood film star, the film crew, and several of their fellow locals. Thus, being a massive quick-character-change challenge, it depends on the astute casting of two strong and versatile actors. These director Joh Hartog has found in Brendan Cooney and Scott Nell.
They are onstage for two 50-minute acts in which, in a torrent of quick and often funny dialogue, they zap to and from fifteen diverse characters with assorted accents. It is exhausting just to think about it and even more so to watch, in utter amazement, as the actors actually do it - and well.
Phrases such as “tour de force” and “bravura performance” spring to mind. Then again, one can’t help thinking “ham” and “over-the-top” when it comes to some of the characters in the mix. It is all these things and also something of an actor’s masterclass, directed, as it is, by a noted drama lecturer.
For a play which is fundamentally oddball and satirical, it has a sad thread of suicide. The stones in his pockets refers to a local lad who drowns himself by weighting his pockets with stones. The where’s and whys of this would be plot-spoilers but it is so artfully embraced in the overall storyline that the work retains an upbeat spirit - and the audience leaves the theatre smiling. After all, everyone knows how pretentious film people can be and how they think the world revolves around what they are doing and what it costs. And, everyone can think of vapid Hollywood prima donnas. It’s wholesome to laugh about them and to explore the odd world of hapless extras.
There’s time for a titter about accents, too. Cooney and Nell have to turn on regional Irish accents, non-regional accents, American accents, English accents, and even how-to-do accents. If one thinks for a moment that they don’t have their accents quite right, it’s such a wild melange and quick-change party that one stops caring. Token character changes are executed by putting on and taking off caps, reversing them, popping on headphones, a scarf around the neck, all at lightning speed.
Fortunately the actors have the professional acuity of veteran lighting guru Steven Dean to have the lights playing in perfect co-ordination with their quick changes along with designer Tammy Boden’s clever costumes with their braces and big pockets. All this as well as the extremely agreeable and deceptively simple set convincing one that there is lots of room on the Bakehouse stage and that there are even green fields.
It’s all very nicely done. It’s a fast-and-furious quirky play featuring two of the most fearless, fit, and able actors in town. Unforgettable will be Brendan Cooney’s gorgeous physicality as a huge, beefy security guy.
Catch it if you can.
Samela Harris
When: 29 Oct to 6 Nov
Where: Bakehouse Theatre
Bookings: bakehousetheatre.com