★★★
Adelaide Fringe Festival. Fulham Community Centre. 13 Mar 2021
Scott Russell Hill is a local psychic, author and now a writer and director of sketches and vignettes. His Adelaide Short Play Festival is just that – a fun collection of quite short sketches that tackle a broad range of familiar issues of interest to youth and is performed by an ensemble of fourteen enthusiastic young actors (late teens, early twenties).
The topics covered include everything from loneliness, being dumped, sexuality and diversity, ostracism, grief and loss, bullying, self-esteem, and … penis size! Some of the sketches are better written than others, particularly those where there is a robust story line and no dependence on cliché or vulgar humour for impact.
Caiden Crafts and Josh Williams both give sensitive performances in their depiction of a gay couple grappling with commitment and unrequited love in the face of ostracism by church and family. This sketch has the potential for development, as does the touching scene in which a young boy (Louis Wiles) is confiding in his dead brother (Michael McDonald) whom he misses very much.
James Lea and Crafts play against each other in an almost slapstick scene set in a cinema where Lea attempts to entrap Crafts in a desperate attempt to find a friend. It is almost touching, but is diminished by the, well, toilet humour. Lea’s costume is hilariously outrageous, and appropriately matches his characterisation.
Allisa Stapleton plays diverse roles, including a waitress with attitude whom you never wish to encounter, and a blasé mourner at a funeral who is more concerned about her fading love life than the deceased (played with stoic stasis and ashen face by Oggy Trisic!).
Kurt Benton and Alana Tedesco play two young lovers who have fallen out and who are reacting badly. Benton delivers simmering but unrealised toxic masculinity that is transcended by sensitivity, and ultimately acceptance.
Ricky-Jai Revilla plays the role of a desperate try-hard who busts his moves on the dance floor trying to get the girl, played enticingly by Jordan Lambropoulos, but with no success. His performance is fun, and the closing Love is in the Air disco dance number gives him another opportunity to demonstrate his obvious dance skills along with Benton who also impresses.
The highlight of the show is the scene about a break-up between a psychic boyfriend (played by Jason Sardinha) and his cruel-mouthed and insensitive girlfriend (Amy Donohue) who eventually gets her comeuppance that he predicts!) The text is clever and witty, and the acting is en pointe, particularly from Sardinha who does not force the humour, which is usually the best for a comedic role. Great support is provided by Sarah North who keeps her ulterior motives well hidden!
This show serves an enthusiastic cast and some good writing performed in a no-fuss environment. A recipe for Fringe success.
Kym Clayton
When: 12 to 14, 19, 20 Mar
Where: Fulham Community Centre
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
★★★
Derek Tickner. The Griffins Hotel – The Sky Room. 12 Mar 2021
Each year that Eric Tinker does a Fringe show - this is his third – it gets better and better. Take for example, his decision this year to have guest artists. Brilliant!
Tinker’s own modus operandi is to smash together a few chords with a tale or double entrendre. He is neither your typical “How ya doin’ ” comic or strumming minstrel of amusing lyricism but some kind of home brew of originality. His observations on ontology are laughable, for sure. Tinker’s trademark guitar, tall stature, sout heast Asian shirts and baritone burble make him utterly distinguishable from everybody else doing comedy.
Tinker’s first guest from The Tangerines was chanteuse Rowey G. Her guitar playing style can best be described as caressing, and her voice is ethereal. One pleasantly drifted off with the fairies. Bravo! Next, Michael Connell is a sweet soul and juggles balls and jokes with aplomb. His contribution is a pleasant sampler of his Fringe show, Juggling vs Magic, in which magician Scott Stunz and he compete to be King of the Kids to avoid getting slimed as the loser. Through the year, he cheers up the kiddies at the hospital. The third guest, Courteny Lee, appeared in the now closed Fringe show called 500 Nights of Winter. She has a sort of folksy country style and her gentle voice contrasts with startlingly graphic goings on in her humorous lyrics.
Tinker’s performance ambitions are running ahead of his material and referring to his songs on a music-stand pulls focus away from the audience, and while he builds a great rapport with his audience, not all is forgiven. He should finish ‘em and learn ‘em.
Nonetheless, Tinker & guests mishmash is a delightful hour of entertainment and exchange with very friendly and genuine artists.
David Grybowski
When: 11 to 13 Mar
Where: The Griffins Hotel – The Sky Room
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
★★★
Adelaide Fringe. Naughty Noodle Co. 12 Mar 2021
True Fringe is alive and well online.
This confection called Slipstream from the Central Coast of NSW takes one back to the daring darling days of stream-of-consciousness, out-there, fanciful alternative performance art. Naughty Noodle presents three performers doing three fairly extended idiosyncratic presentations which absolutely drip with creative juices. It's an experimental-storytelling fusion of art forms. Their themes are time, magic, genetics, and cellular memory. The earnestness and sincerity of the performers is almost overwhelming. Their reach for lyrical originality is deeply touching. And, they are definitely not without bundles of talent.
They have done the bravest and kindest of all Covid-era things, which is to mount an on-stage production for online viewing at home.
The 50-minute show opens with some interesting dance work around a clever, stretchy spiderweb after which one Neville Williams Boney, a Wiraduri man, demonstrates the complexity of Aboriginal kinship lines using milk crates and bunting tape as illustration. He moves with the power and grace of a dancer and tells his story in clear, careful, and artful fragments. He is immensely likeable. Of the three pieces, his has highest traction for further development, which, one might hope, could feature rather more interesting music. While the nature soundscape is pleasing, his musical beat becomes densely, almost intolerably, repetitive.
Miss Tree arrives upon the stage with a keyboard. She is “a gender non-binary drag witch”. She wears a very long blue wig which seems hard to manage as does the gorgeous costume which she has to hitch constantly. These are small distractions to some wonderfully esoteric lyrics which she delivers in a very beautiful androgynous voice. Indeed, she is very beautiful, blue lips and all. Another interesting song is performed with guitar. Both are long, just a tad too long. But Miss Tree is someone to watch.
Completing the Naughty Noodle trio is the performer with the name to end all stage names: Glitta Supernova. Glitta performs bare breasted in an exotic costume of swinging hoops and, of all things, the Baby Elephant Walk is her principal dance music. She shimmies and bends and whirls and the colours projected on her and the curtain behind undulate and wave and it’s visually lots of fun. Again, it is a long solo piece. The monologue tells strands of family tales, relatives, sex clowns, and oh such bad women.
This sort of performance art is not everyone’s cup of tea. Brevity is not its forte. But, if one has any sense of original Fringe tradition, of the unknown companies stretching their wings and trying something new and out-there, this gender-fluid mob is today’s incarnation.
Samela Harris
When: Available Online
Where: Online
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
★★★★★
Adelaide Fringe. Johanna Allen. The Chamber at The Queens. 12 Mar 2021
She’s the classically-trained soprano from Henley Beach. That’s how Johanna Allen likes to describe herself. It’s a modest, self-effacing throw-away which is utterly endearing to Adelaide audiences. As is Allen.
She has worked this town for decades now bringing us into the palm of her beautifully begloved hand.
She has honed her craft diligently. She has honed her cabaret style and learnt just how to balance patter with song.
And, of course, there’s the voice.
Johanna Allen has a rich, complex singing voice. Not only does she have an enviable range but a particular timbre which adds to the pleasure she bestows upon the ear. And, while she easily can soar to glass-breaking operatic notes, she doesn’t need to over-diva. She’s got other goods in the performance repository. Comedy, for instance.
Hence her Euromash concert is something of a wild ride in which the rolling idiosyncrasies of Latin languages are affectionately satirised and in which European cultures are fulsomely embraced. There’re hot blooded tango, sensual love songs and oh, not-so-veiled Weill violence. Indeed, albeit decidedly epic, Allen’s Mack the Knife is a daring adventure into dramatic licence. Perchance there has never been any performance of this much-sung song quite like it, with pianist Mark Ferguson almost inside the piano tweaking ominous noises, and strings maestro Julian Ferraretto eliciting eerie notes from his saw, Allen whistles, breathes, and whispers eking out the Brecht’s lyrics, under a strangely blooded mottled spotlight
Allen has theatrical wherewithal as well as the musical wherewithal. Hence she plays all the moods and then some. She plays vamp and comedienne, tragedian, and pop princess. Cherry chapsticks will never seem the same again.
She does Leonard Cohen’s Dance 'til the End of Love bringing it to an insanely swift crescendo. She does Rosemary Clooney’s gorgeous Mambo Italiano gorgeously. And, ah, Piaf’s L'hymne a l’amore. Ah.
Of course, she is one of the proper old-school pros who dresses superbly for performance and with her mane of chocolate hair and her intricate almost flamenco style frock with its clever partial see-through skirt, she looks divine. Also, her two creamily professional accompanists not only are almost locked-soul with her performance but also it is downright touching in 2021 to see a pianist with the showbiz finesse to wear a tie to work.
Euromash smashes it.
Samela Harris
When: 12 to 14 Mar
Where: The Chamber at The Queens
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
★★★★
Palmerston Projects Pty Ltd. Star Theatres – Theatre One. 12 Mar 2021
Shame on you if you never heard of Sir George Hubert Wilkins. He was one of the world’s greatest explorers, a pioneer pilot of air exploration, the first to travel under polar ice in a submarine, way ahead of his time on global meteorology, a keen recorder of scientific data, and as the title suggests, a moving image and still photographer, particularly of the polar icescape, Aborigines and Innuits, and the Western Front. He should have died many times over. Like Forrest Gump, he seemed to be at the right place at the right time for great events. Wilkins was on the 1921/22 Shackleton-Rowett Expedition to the Southern Ocean on which Shackleton died, and he photographed King George V knighting Sir John Monash on the battlefield. Monash said of him, “[Wilkins] was a highly accomplished and absolutely fearless combat photographer. What happened to him is a story of epic proportions. Wounded many times ... he always came through. At times he brought in the wounded, at other times he supplied vital intelligence of enemy activity he observed. At one point he even rallied troops as a combat officer ... His record was unique." More often, he was creating the great events with many world firsts. And he was born near Hallett in 1888, the last of 13 children, on a property on the wrong side of the Goyder Line. His birth house is still there, recently restored by aviator Dick Smith, and a great visit.
Adelaide’s Peter Maddern is a Wilkins tragic - as many people familiar with his story are - and he lovingly spent two-and-a-half years researching and creating this documentary comprising stills of Wilkins in action but mostly Wilkins’s own film and still photography. He takes us chronologically and faithfully along on Wilkins’s adventures including the Caribbean, war zones, Arctic and Antarctic ice and aviation, Stalinist starvation in Russia, and a 1923/24 survey for the British Museum of bird life in northern Australia. Regarding the latter, his intimacy with the Aborigines and criticism of Australian authorities for their plight and for environmental degradation earned him the disapprobation that has thwarted his recognition in this country, even though the US Navy thought so highly of him that they scattered his ashes at the North Pole, and returned to do the same for his wife a few years later.
Maddern self-admits that he is not a professional documentary film-maker but this is a bloody excellent effort, utilising the Ken Burns effect, his own narration, background scores and voiceovers of Wilkins’s quotes (although his Wilkins voice is decidedly too immature).
Don’t let the weird poster picture of a seaplane superimposed on Wilkins’s face put you off. This is a great film for the fans and the buffs of great biography. Bravo!
David Grybowski
When: 12 to 21 Mar
Where: Star Theatres – Star Theatre One
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au