OzAsia Festival. Festival Theatre. 18 Oct 2019
Never has there been a sight like it in the Festival Theatre - a sea of bobbing hijabs. Siti Nurhaliza is a star with a massive following throughout Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia. She has six million followers on Instagram alone and awards beyond measure. Hence, adoring young female fans had swarmed to the OzAsia Festival for her one-night-only appearance, not only from Adelaide but packs of them from Melbourne and Sydney, too. The Centre was a-buzz with the effusive crowds, even providing a prayer room for pre-concert worship.
The auditorium was adorned with huge pinup images of Siti and the stage was ready with the band and backup singers in place when the star made her entrance. It was met with a cacophony. Elevated iPhones shone forth, recording the thrill of the moment. No one minded the lights or even the no-photos warning signs. This was a Siti thing and this mass of exuberant humanity was on the same page. As Siti began to sing, so did they, softly and lovingly. They knew her every word. She’d leave the end of song lines for them to complete. A love fest was underway.
Siti is as beautiful as she is talented. She wears her hijab as a stunning fashion item atop glittering long gowns. Islamic glamour can be utterly gorgeous. Religious codes seem to be entirely respected amid the showmanship of Siti’s concerts. But it is an emancipated Islam in this generation of young music lovers from our neighbouring countries. And music is the great bonding uplift of the world.
Siti chatted merrily with the audience, mostly in Bahasa Malaysia. She spoke of music as the food of love and of the pleasure, with her husband and young daughter, of exploring Adelaide and what language fun they had been having with her name which the Aussies think of as “city”. In her own tongue “city" could end less lyrically in translation as “kampung”. She loved Adelaide and was blown away by the new hospital.
She sang a series of her best-known pop songs. She’s been writing songs since she was 16. She is now 40 with a history of hits and even an entire album of songs in English. She sang some of those, too. Her dance troupe came and went behind her, exquisitely choreographed and with a physical discipline which suggested that had come from a classical training. If Siti changed costume three times, the dancers did it ten or more and at the end of the show displaying a shimmering blitz of traditional Malay ceremonial attire.
Siti Nurhaliza sings in tones pure and potent, her vocal range effortlessly vast. They call her Asia’s Celine Dion, but one would argue that her timbre has a mellow superiority to that of the Canadian. Some say she sounds like honey; if so, only like the rich power of Manuka. She is a smooth professional at the peak of a sensational career. She is she. No one else.
To some of her songs, cries rang out from the audience “cinta” - beautiful. “Indah” also “beautiful”. And many times “we love you Siti”.
Before the show was over, she had the audience up and dancing, young and old, Malaysians and Aussies as one.
It was a beautiful thing. It was a special and privileged OzAsia experience.
And now, thanks to OzAsia, Siti Nurhaliza has a new fan base in Adelaide. Yes, we love you, too, Siti.
Samela Harris
When: 18 Oct
Where: Festival Theatre
Bookings: Closed
OzAsia Festival. Nexus. 18 Oct 2019
As a new work based on the story of this city’s founding planner, OzAsia’s production, Light, has been highly anticipated and a pre-booked sell-out.
It tells not only of our own Colonel William Light but of his father, Francis Light, the man attributed as founder of Penang, or at least the man who claimed the island for the British. Both Lights have complex histories much of which is familiar to the people of Adelaide. So, Australian writer/director Thomas Henning has bitten off a huge chunk of well-examined culture which, in this production produced and designed by Malaysia’s TerryandTheCuz, has had to be culled into two hours of performance.
An eager audience crammed into bleachers in the cramped Nexus space for the production’s opening night which, they were told, was to be more of a tech run since the sets had been delayed by customs and were newly-arrived.
Interesting sets they are. For the Francis Light narrative, they are dark-floored and austere with a strange shallow grave-like pit in the centre. Dates and places are identified as flash cards on a pinboard. Linked by Gavin Yap as narrator, facts are delivered as a hot peppering of information, guns and opium, colonial imperialism, racism, and sexism. Martin Blum plays Light as a fairly low-class English adventurer against Junji Delfino as his Penang wife, Martina Rozells, a woman who was purported to be of aristocratic blood but whose true ethnicity was mysterious. She is depicted as proud and elegant by Junji Delfino, a truly splendid actress whose presence onstage in various characters throughout the two bio-tales is quite magnetic. As her story tails off, she’s seen in widow’s weeds and the floor rises up in dramatic denouement. It’s not a happy story, but the company gives the whole show a smattering of somewhat incongruous levity with revue-like punchlines and some zany anachronisms.
William Light’s story is not a happy one, either. Gavin Yap plays him as a handsome loser, blighted by opposition and health. At times, his despair and frustration is heartbreaking, and well contrived by Yap.
Delfino embodies his wives and the fascinating Maria Gandy, his stalwart partner and companion in Adelaide. Blum struts and manipulates in the spirit of the other so-called founding fathers of this city.
Here, the stage is bright and white. A TV monitor plays newscasts on one side and a Light watercolour landscape features on the other. There is a desk and the floor is adorned with neat stacks of loose papers, symbolising Light’s plans. But it is the bleak little bed with its white sheets which sings the song of poor Light who, rather oddly, is costumed in white underwear throughout.
Again, the company has devised a striking climax to the play. No spoilers except to say that playwright Thomas Henning’s research uncovered reports of Maria Gandy’s last years with an entourage of arrogant spitting dwarves and one contemplates that this strange piece of history is worthy of a whole new work.
Henning’s premise in this double-barrelled work is that history is malleable, always partially recalled in different ways through different eyes. Hence, he offers a scattergun of known facts and an imagining of underscoring impressions and influences.
If one is looking for a history text book, one will not find it here. What one does find is an off-centre sketchpad of black and white, light and dark human dramas.
It is more a piece of art than conventional theatre. And, as one processes its emotions and imagery, it stands up as a defiantly original and provocative creation; just the sort of thing that festivals should be about.
Samela Harris
When: 18 and 19 Oct
Where: Nexus
Bookings: bass.net.au
STARC Productions. Bakehouse Theatre. 11 Oct 2019
As two middle-aged and unbeautiful people, Stefanie Rossi and Marc Clement start off with the challenge of playing up and ugly. They are both unconventional enough in good looks to swing it - just. They have designed the set aptly with a vaguely vulgar bedroom and adjoining kitchen a la New York efficiency. They have their ‘Noo Yawk’ accents, oh so emphatically exact.
So where’s the rub in this production directed by Tony Knight as is the tradition in this three-person company? Perhaps it is that Rossi and Clement are actors for whom intimacy comes naturally. As they work through the developments and setbacks of the couple in this 1980s romantic comedy by Terrance McNally, there is a streak of archness, as if they have to try to be strangers. Rossi depicts the awkwardness of the middle-aged waitress with a lot of fussing and flicking of the famous Rossi locks and incessant fretful costume-primping. Less may be more.
As Frankie, she is testing the waters of potential romance with Johnny, the short order cook she’s fancied for some time across the counter. He is looking desperately for love and a soul mate, grasping at background co-incidences to underscore his hopes and grasping at Frankie’s body with scary desperation. Clement has him seeming really give-him-an-inch-and-he’ll-take-a-mile creepy and one wishes, as Frankie tries to make him leave her apartment, that he would actually go. He’s like a drunken error to be sorely regretted in the morning and never seen again. Please.
The sex scenes are well-handled, an interesting balance between lust and repulsion.
In ambivalent desperation, Frankie tries to trust the groping neediness of Johnny. Therein, the play is something of a sad lesson for one and all. And, as a comedy, it is gruellingly sad.
There is optimism as the two lonely people in the big city look out the window at the break of dawn, but the audience is left to ponder their future.
Samela Harris
When: 11 to 19 Oct
Where: Bakehouse Theatre
Bookings: bakehousetheatre.com
State Theatre Company of SA. Dunstan Playhouse. 4 Oct 2019
Three cheers for revivals. For those of us who missed a winner, they deliver a rare chance to catch up and, in this case, have a night rippling with laughter.
Patrick Barlow’s spoofed-up re-interpretation of the Hitchcock 1935 movie, itself derived from a novel by John Buchan, is an exercise in the magic of vaudevillian theatrical silliness. It delivers the script of the old black and white movie thriller The 39 Steps pretty much word-for-word, but wraps it in classic comic shtick. Only Nathan Page stays in character as the endlessly-fleeing hero, Richard Hannay, wrongly accused of murder. The other three actors leap from role to role in a positively acrobatic display of costume and accent changes amid Ailsa Paterson’s wildly perilous set of crates and tea chests, ladders and flying windows. It’s all fast and furious, with more corn than a box of Kellogg’s.
And, in its over-the-top retro comedy, it is fresh and surprising, especially for a generation for whom both Hitchcock and the genre of vaudeville are unfamiliar.
This show originally was performed in 2016 as directed by Jon Halpin. State’s popular 2019 associate director Corey McMahon has taken the reins for this incarnation and guided it with a sure hand into the realms of gasps and belly laughs.
Rightly, McMahon gives masses of praise to original creatives, composer Stuart Day and lighting designer Gavin Norris and it must be noted that Paterson as costume designer hit the nail on the head with the seemingly endless array of quick-change costumes for the panoply of characters.
It is a strenuous show for the actors in those roles. Nathan Page keeps the ever-suffering good-guy facade in play as the innocent man dodging spies and cops as he tries get The 39 Steps message through to the villain in Scotland. As the murdered spy and also the girl from the train who ends up handcuffed to our hero, Anna Steen has icy Hitchcockian glamour and a lithe talent for physical comedy. She turns up in assorted other guises as the play rockets through its two acts. But it is the comedy duo of Tim Overton and Charles Mayer who swarm over the stage in lightning changes and many-accented madness. Their skills are breathtaking and their energy levels exhausting simply to behold.
The 39 Steps is a fairly absurd old spy thriller plot and sending it up was ever a terrific idea. Hence the success of its reiteration as a sell-out show. Grab a ticket quickly before they’re all gone.
Samela Harris
When: 4 to 12 Oct
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: bass.net.au
State Opera of South Australia. State Opera Studio. 4 Oct 2019
Madeline Lee is the third in the State Opera of SA’s Lost Operas of Oz series. The other two were Boojum! and Christina’s World.
Madeline Lee was composed by John Haddock to a libretto written in collaboration with Michael Campbell. Its première was in 2004 at the Sydney Opera House by the Australian Opera. It has not been restaged since, which is almost unbelievable because it is so very good, and much kudos goes to the State Opera of SA for resurrecting it.
The opera’s plot is inspired by real events: the disappearance without trace over Libya of an American airforce B24 bomber in 1943 while on its first combat mission during World War II, and its subsequent accidental discovery some fifteen years later. Unlike in the opera, none of the crew of the B24 survive. In the opera, one crew member (the Major) survives – under reprehensible circumstances – and he ultimately finds the wreck some years in the future and his suppressed memories and deep feelings of guilt resurface.
The cast comprises eight male roles – predominantly baritones and dramatic tenors – and the harmonies and general tone of the opera are robust and macho. Because of the male vocal compass and the nature of the story line, the arias and ensemble pieces are intense and rarely cheery. In fact the whole thing is an emotional roller coaster which is deeply affecting. It is the sort of opera that must be seen and only hearing it without the visuals would be so much less satisfying.
Candice MacAllister’s set is simple: a vast stage covered in sand with a small amount of skeletal scaffolding that suggests the wreckage of a plane. Her costuming effectively invokes the destitute and hopeless plight of the lost airmen and the energy sapping heat of the dessert sun. Expertly lit by Nigel Levings, the visuals are all that is needed – there is nothing to distract from the unfolding psychological narrative and it works very well.
There is no orchestra in this production. Rather a spectacular reduction for two grand pianos provides a compelling accompaniment consummately performed by Michael Ierace and no less than John Haddock himself. The opera is almost two hours long, so both pianists have to work very hard, as does the conductor Warwick Stengårds. Haddock’s score is dramatic, and the libretto is unaffected yet visceral.
In the main, the vocal lines are not relaxed, with many ‘uncomfortable’ intervals to navigate and frequent intense fortes. It is not easy to listen to at times – there are no real hummable melodies that linger in one’s mind – but it is compelling and frequently has one on the edge of one’s chair, and this is due to the quality of the cast.
The standout performance is by Warwick Fyfe in the role of the Major. His training in Wagnerian technique was frequently called upon as he dominates the aural soundscape with his passion and consummate acting skills. The audience felt his pain and torment. Nicholas Cannon, Pelahm Andrews, Eddie Muliaumaseali’i and Robert Macfarlane played the lost airmen. It was fascinating to observe their disintegration from vital soldiers in dire circumstances to despairing and broken men who longed for but feared their terrible lonely deaths in the unforgiving Libyan dessert. Muliaumaseali’I in particular handled the vocal line with ease and his gentle vibrato and warm tone allowed him to be clearly understood at all times. The cast was capably rounded out by Thomas Millhouse, Joshua Row and Robert England.
State Opera can be justly proud of this production. This reviewer wouldn’t rush out to buy a recording of Madeline Lee but would certainly go and see another live production of it. It is dramatic stuff!
Kym Clayton
When: 4 to 5 Oct
Where: State Opera Studio
Bookings: bass.net.au