Marie Clark Musical Theatre. The Goodwood Institute. 26 Oct 2019
One does not share director Lauren Scarfe’s (director), Katie Packer’s (musical director) or Vanessa Redmond’s (choreographer) enthusiasm for Mary Rodgers’s Once Upon A Mattress. And yes, Mary is the daughter of Richard Rodgers, who partnered with Oscar Hammerstein II to create the wonders known as Oklahoma!, South Pacific, The King and I, and The Sound of Music. Alas, Mary Rodgers’s adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale, The Princess And The Pea, is not up to those standards - it was her first full-length musical composed at the age of 28.
Rodgers, lyricist Marshall Barer and the book team of Jay Thompson, Dean Fuller and the same Barer failed to bridge the original fairy tale to adult entertainment – it remains a pantomime in the musical form with its overly simple plot, few thought-provoking embellishments, and little sophistication. Spamalot it ain’t. Or even Camelot. Director Lauren Scarfe writes “it really holds up in the age of feminism,” due, presumably, to the strong lead comic role of the princess-to-be. Funny business aside, it’s a rather simple, straightforward story of a dysfunctional royal family with an overprotective mother thwarting her son, the prince, from marrying to keep him in her clutches of co-dependence. Her method is to have potential princesses undergo humiliating tests that can’t be passed. It ain’t Annie Get Your Gun either and not one’s idea of feminism.
The creative leadership team tries to make the most of the material but frankly there isn’t much to work with and the production never really takes off. However, 21-year-old Emily-Jo Davidson does shine brightly in the aforementioned lead comic role. Her scene of repeatedly lifting heavy weights between belts of booze was a hoot. Indeed, this role was created by Carol Burnett in her Broadway debut, and Emily-Jo’s performance reminds one of America’s greatest comic actresses, Lucille Ball. Still developing, Davidson needs to broaden her comic schtick. There were many fine voices in the cast (eg Brooke Washusen and Davidson) and Katie Packer’s orchestra was on song. Most performers failed to escape orbiting their stereotypical characters. Often the follow spot and its target were not co-spatial leaving visual focus elsewhere.
If only I had a pea under my seat to keep me from the threshold of Noddy Land.
David Grybowski
When: 26 Oct to 2 Nov
Where: The Goodwood Institute
Bookings: marieclark.asn.au
Tracey Crisp. Bakehouse Theatre. 25 Oct 2019
“The paradox of the universal being entirely personal”, writes director Maggie Wood in the program notes for Tracey Crisp’s The Forgettory; succinctly, those words sum up this charmer of a one-hander.
Tracey Crisp’s sobriquet is "the vegetarian librarian”. She is a performer known for her stories of gentle self-deprecation. She’s whimsical, witty, perceptive, and erudite and she has a glorious way with words.
This little show finds its audience among older women for whom love and grief and loss of memory are heartland issues.
The little Studio Theatre at the Bakehouse is transformed into a snug librarian’s nest for the show. There is an oversized bookcase with oversized books, a cosy carpet, a comfy chair, a cardboard box, and some very sympathetic and well-wrought lighting.
Crisp introduces her contemporary world, a 44th floor apartment in scorching, impersonal Abu Dhabi where she has to have her husband’s sanction to get a permit to have wine, the wine which gives her sanity and time to reflect in this insomniac other life so far from where her most poignant memories have been made.
She takes the audience on a gentle tour of family and memories, most movingly in the last section when she sits and knits in the chair, talking at the bedside of her failing father. And she brings old sharp memory to meet new fragmented memory; an impasse; a ubiquitous generational tragedy.
Director Maggie Wood has generated an astute sense of place and time in this production, simply by having Crisp stand or sit or move one step here and one step there. It’s artful, subtle, and effective.
And the audience sits silently rapt in someone else’s stories which, in so many ways, are also their own. Birth, sleeplessness, grief, dementia. And, as Crisp delivers her beautifully-crafted tales, speaking clearly, calmly and without casual abbreviation, they may be shedding an empathetic tear or two.
Samela Harris
When: 23 to 26 Oct
Where: Bakehouse Theatre
Bookings: bakehousetheatre.com
OzAsia Festival. Festival Theatre. 25 Oct 2019
Breathtaking in its scale, this mighty Taiwanese production is one of the cornerstones of the OzAsia Festival. Once again, one cannot help but marvel at the cultural richness this festival brings to town or to celebrate the sight of theatres bursting at the seams with our Asian community.
Playwright and director Stan Lai is a superstar of Chinese-language theatre and this production from the Performance Workshop shines a light on just why this is so. In The Village, he has taken a broad brush to paint the history of Taiwan, not only the politics of post Kuomintang defeat but the lives in exile of Chiang Kai-Shek’s people in Formosa, which became Taiwan. Stan Lai depicts three culturally diverse exiled families in what was to become the village of Chiayi. They speak different tongues and eat different foods but, as time goes by, customs become shared and a new sense of community is established. As years go by, new generations and different values emerge until, after 50 years, the family members have become part of a diaspora and the little village just a relic of the past.
The village set sprawls across the Festival Theatre stage, the once-temporary nature of the three houses suggested by a skeletal structural framework, domestica existing on raised floors with interior furnishings changing over the generations. From time to time the whole structure swings on the revolve to give a different perspective. And, there are countless peripheral scenes played out here and there with a sequence of narrators’ spotlit to one side keeping the families and their time frames in context. Two large subtitle screens flank the stage.
It is quite a tall order to keep track of both the action onstage and the translated dialogue and occasional timelines.
Technically, it is a thrilling production. Sound and lighting are absolutely top notch. The musical score is interesting, a lot of it western pop as time goes on. The style of acting at first takes a spirit of traditional Chinese opera, voices raised, lots of overacting and comic ham. As time goes on, the cast members adapt the style to the evolving periods until they develop a sleek dramatic universality which depicts the present.
The three-hour epic deals with family and human issues which are common to us all: life, death, loss, humiliation, kindness, snobbery and good food. We come to know and love the family members and to grieve for many of their predicaments. We share laughter at foibles and particularly at the graffiti on their public loo. It is a very big picture full of small details.
The cast is immense by modern theatre standards, many of them segueing from character to character to expand the sense of population and generational dynamics. There are standout performances, Hsiao Ai heartbreakingly among them as Ruyun and Liu Liang-Tso heroically so as General Wu. Also strong and pleasing are Chu Chung-Heng, Teng Chen-Huei, Feng Yi-Kang, Sung Shao-Ching and Ling Li-Ching. And then there is Liang Hao-Lan, so elegant in her stately gait as Granny Lu. Many more stand out in the intergenerational swings and roundabouts of this theatrical thrill.
Bravo OzAsia! And, thanks.
Samela Harris
When: 25 to 26 Oct
Where: Festival Theatre
Bookings: bass.net.au
House of Sand, Rumpus Theatre. 23 Oct 2019
In calm waters, drifting gently around at anchor, Jules and Tom while away the hours. They have something to resolve. It is not quite clear what.
They have an established relationship. Like siblings, they have ritual games. They have whiskey, champagne, mandarins and Kwells. Day turns into night and then on to day. Kobe Donaldson's lighting changes of dusk and dawn are gorgeous on the sleek white stage against a nice rippling water background projection. He depicts time which is passing swiftly. To begin with.
The play's opening has a feeling of beauty and serenity. The boat’s shape is loosely suggested by the layout of various props. Tom is idly plucking tunes on his guitar; Jules is intent on her sketch pad. When the characters begin to speak it is lively small talk, streams of consciousness, word and sound games. They are interesting individuals and between playwright Sarah Hamilton’s script and Charley Sanders’ direction, there is an artful sense of privacy in the little boat world and, with it, a sense of intimacy and even voyeurism for the audience.
There are some brilliant moments, especially when the pair zoom around on casters to simulate swimming in the sea. It is joyful and very effective and just one of the elements which works superbly in this theatre artwork.
After a while, the lighting dims to uncertain muted hues and time becomes murky as the mood changes in the boat. There are stresses and long, long periods of silence. And into the dim hours on the water, time starts to stand still. Too still. The momentum slackens and there is the sense that the boat is going nowhere and nor is the play. Here is where the rewrite or the blue pencil should come in. The script and the two splendid actors, Max Garcia-Underwood and Amy Victoria Brooks, reclaim the tension and the play reaches an interesting, if slightly puzzling denouement.
It is clear that Sarah Hamilton is a writer of great promise.
And, there is the Charley Sanders factor. The zing and zeal of this spirited theatre-maker continues to breathe life onto the Adelaide stage.
The new theatre venue, Rumpus, is a magical community achievement. It is a wild and roomy warehouse world amid the factory chimneys of Bowden. It is spruced up and fresh and fun, abeit on warm nights audiences may be advised to take a fan into the theatre itself.
And if the The Split opening night audience is anything to go by, there is a glamorous independent theatre demographic hungry for challenge and intrigue in the theatre. Certainly, they were enthusiastically appreciative of the austerity and the experimental nature of this particular new theatre work.
Samela Harris
When: 22 Oct to 3 Nov
Where: Rumpus, The Old 505 Theatre, 100 Sixth Street Bowden.
Bookings: trybooking.com
Nitin Sawhney. OzAsia Festival. Festival Theatre. 18 Oct 2019
Nitin Sawhney is surely some kind of Renaissance musician. His career as producer, composer, DJ, and multi-instrumentalist has produced 20 albums, and 60 film scores, including the recent Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle. He has collaborated with Paul
McCartney, Sting, Anoushka Shankar, Jeff Beck, Annie Lennox, Andy Serkis, Akram Khan, and the London Symphony Orchestra. He has curated festivals and lectured in universities. He has performed regularly in Australia- at the Melbourne Festival and at WOMADelaide, as a DJ and musical director in 2011. Over twenty years he has been every kind of success.
His breakthrough moment was his third album for Outcaste Records, Beyond Skin. For the liner notes he wrote – “I believe in Hindu philosophy/I am not religious/I am a pacifist/I am a British Asian”.
With even more emphasis he adds – “My identity and my history are defined only by myself – beyond politics, beyond nationality, beyond religion and beyond skin.”
It is striking to read now, amidst the often bitterly contested debates of current identity politics, such implacable sentiments from 1999, at the edge of a new millennium, rejecting ideas of caste and clan, and the fetters of primitive belief. All good reasons to return to the album and perform it renewed and re-energised, twenty years later, in the midst of migration persecution, Brexit end-times and pan-national Trumpery.
On stage at the Festival Theatre, in one of only three performances this time in Australia, Nitin Sawhney is relaxed, urbane and disarmingly understated. Greeting the audience the moment he steps out he immediately introduces his band. There are just five of them – Sawhney and tabla player Aref Durvesh from the original Beyond Skin project, and three young women: violinist Anna Phoebe McElligott and vocalists Nicki Wells and Eva Stone.
They settle in to Sunset from Sawhney’s 2001 album, Prophecy. Sawhney on Spanish guitar and Durvesh, layering rhythms on drums, are like bookends either side of the stage while McElligott’s starts her swooping violin and Wells and Stone begin unfurling Nitin’s signature ethereal vocals - drawn from Indian classical traditions, but reminiscent also of the abstract explorations of Dido and even Sigur Ros.
Along with a Paco Pena composition, played with dazzling, flamenco clarity by Sawhney, other items from the Prophecy album follow – Moonrise, and with Sawhney at the piano, his tribute to Nelson Mandela - Breathing Light, which includes the quote from Mandela’s book: “We are free to be freed”.
After this interlude, Sawhney is ready to introduce the centrepiece for the evening, a complete performance of Beyond Skin in all its twelve components. He describes what a personal project the album was- recording his parents’ recollections of their migration experiences from India to the UK, gathering tracks from various vocalists such as Sanchita Farruque, and musicians from the Rizwan Muazzam Qawwali group (nephews of the late legend Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan), sampling BBC news broadcasts about India’s controversial nuclear weapons testing, and putting them all, as he says jokingly, into my “Kenwood mixer”.
The opening song, Broken Skin, begins with the words of the Indian Prime Minister announcing a successful nuclear test, anathema to Hindu philosophy and Sawhney’s own declared pacifism, and segues into the Farruque vocals – now capably managed by Vicki Wells and Eva Stone in a kind of Indian Soul with a tight backbeat from Durvesh and sinuous violin riffs from Anna Phoebe McElligott.
It is a strong, vibrant sound from the band, simpler than the richly overdubbed album, more urgent and immediate, yet incorporating the loops and disturbing political quotes which inflect and disrupt the swooning repetitions of Nitin’s compositions. Letting Go, the album’s second track is even more beguiling, with its Dido/Sister Bliss/Rollo echoes of English pastoral even as the lyrics demand breaking from traditions and habits to find a more principled future.
Homelands is a good example of Sawhney’s bold eclecticism. Opening with the Sufi chant from Rizwan and Muazzam, it moves via flamenco to Portuguese fado to emphasise the variety and range of “home”. In performance, Wells and Stone cover the considerable demands of these vocal styles with admirable panache.
For the lyrics to The Pilgrim, Sawhney looks to the rapper, Hussain Yoosuf himself to deliver the cascading words- “Life is like a puzzle not pieced yet…”. Not in person, but fed through the sound desk with a driving beat from Aref Durvesh.
The various shifts of mood between tracks work even better in performance. From the pianistic ebb and flow of Tides to the keening vocals in Nadia the compositions reveal their richness and harmonic pleasure.
In Immigrant and Nostalgia, Sawhney moves especially close to home with the intro recording of his father’s recollection of an embassy visit in India prior to migrating to England:
“They showed us Kew Gardens pictures and pictures of the various parts of England. That it is all that beautiful and everything is just right. And that’s why we just applied for the voucher…”
Sawhney is almost tearful as he describes his late father’s optimism and sense of adventure, a voice we now hear on an Australian stage. The ironies of the present day hostility to migration, and indifference to refugee displacement, were not lost on the Adelaide audience, nor would they have been at the Royal Albert Hall in London when this live version of Beyond Skin premiered only weeks ago.
Each item adds to the musical and thematic texture of this rewarding meditation – the kathak rhythms of Serpents and the sinuous vocals (Nicki Wells and Zoe Stone again proving extraordinarily versatile) in Anthem Without Nation. Concluding the song cycle is Beyond Skin, featuring the sample of broadcaster Edward Murrow reading the ominous words of the atom bomb scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer quoting from the Bhagavad Gita – “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
For encores Nitin Sawhney and his excellent group perform Dead Man from his Philtre album and, in duet with Aref Durvesh, with Prophecy a sitar-sounding guitar instrumental he has played in many places – Nelson Mandela’s garden, in South America, and on the beaches of Arnhem Land. It is a splendidly celebratory note on which to close.
When: 18 Oct
Where: Festival Theatre
Bookings: Closed