Galleon Theatre Company. Marion Cultural Centre. 11 May 2019
Galleon's Moving Mountains is reliable farce. It delivers on the laughs and there is much coming and going through doors. In the hands of director Erik Strauts, and his cast of players, it makes for a very enjoyable evening out at the theatre.
Charlie Fuller is all about moving mountains; particularly when it comes to the ladies in his retirement village. Charlie has “arrangements” with many of the women, and a reputation to boot, but when this friend-with-benefits falls in love, everything starts to unravel. Andrew Clark’s Charlie is charming and affable. The show hinges on his performance, and Clark carries the cast of crazy characters through the highs and lows with impressive energy. Lindy LeCornu and Kathy Strauts as Charlie’s lovers Gwen and Harriet, don’t get a lot of opportunity for character development but they absolutely bring the laughs.
When Charlie’s daughter Elaine, played by Sharon Pitardi, shows up the stakes are really raised. The paternal relationship between Pitardi and Clark is initially hard to buy as the two seem closer in age than father and daughter. However their performance overcomes this quickly.
Elaine is eagerly followed by her hotfooted wannabe lover Robert, who is also her and her husbands stock broker – with a wife of his own! Theirs is all the worst aspects of relationships set in stark contrast with the burgeoning love of Charlie’s life. Josh Van’t Padje embodies Robert with a nerdy energy that fits, but feels a tad desperate in the shadow of Pitardi’s constant rejection.
But it is when Polly Adamson moves into the village that Charlie becomes besotted. Robert is her son and, in a sly move on his part, he aims to see more of Elaine whilst visiting his own dear mother. Polly is a shy widower, and Charlie sees his opportunity to “move her mountains” and gets straight to work. Shelley Hampton delivers the naïve Polly at first with timidity, but she soon comes out of her shell.
One might think this farce replete but enter Adrian Heness as Marc, Polly’s young nephew, and sparks really fly. Marc is in love with an evasive woman and seeks Charlie’s help to successfully court her. Charlie’s advice is, of course, sage and (spoiler alert) when her discovers that the object of Marc’s affection is his own, Polly, the wheels completely fall off. Heness’s Marc is honest and one never fails to believe he is captivated by the much older Polly.
The whole cast come and go from Charlie’s apartment – well designed by Brittany Daw and lit by Luke Budgen – in a cavalcade of emotion and the result is laugh-out-loud fun. Worth a look.
Paul Rodda
When: 9 to 18 May
Where: Marion Cultural Centre
Bookings: galleon.org.au
The Metropolitan Musical Theatre Co. Arts Theatre. 9 May 2019
Long live The Met.
The popularity of Miss Saigon has always been somewhat mystifying since it is musically tough and tedious and the story line of love and loss in war-ravaged 1970s Vietnam is downright heartbreaking.
If there is a secret to its success, The Met tapped right into it with stunning singers, orchestra, costumes and effects.
This is a potent production.
The principal, Kim, the displaced Vietnamese bar girl is played by Filippina songstress Elena Amano who, like a classic operatic diva, brings forth a striking might and beauty of voice along with a daunting vocal range. She carries emotion and character to the fore and the audience swiftly accepts and loves her in the role, just as the director knew they would.
Around her, assembled by director Ben Saunders and his team, is a large and talented cast of impressive singers enhanced by good production values. They give Miss Saigon’s epic songs with their repetitive Claude-Michel Schonberg music a layer of professional sheen which musical director Jillian Gulliver polishes nicely with the 15-piece orchestra.
On first night, there were just a few early sound-balance issues, one with the microphone of Jarred Frost, playing the American Marine Chris Scott. He is a rich tenor and a simpatico actor. Miss Saigon was not the only one who fell in love with him.
And, all around him is a wealth of expert support. Omkar Nagesh is one of those rare performers with “presence”. He moves with exceptional grace and, as The Engineer, he lights up the stage, funny, outlandish, appalling, loving, opportunistic, and utterly focused. It is a great character role and he devours it with relish.
Tom Dubois as the compassionate solider, John, brings the house down with his passionate baritone Bui Doi solo. What a voice. And then there is Jemma McCulloch, as Ellen, the hapless American wife. Her glorious voice has a professional polish matched only by the heart-rending dignity of her characterisation.
There is a strong Asian presence in this production, bringing with it some beautiful moments. Shane Huang plays Thuy, the villager matched from childhood to wed Kim. Huang delivers a performance powered by emotional understanding as he pleads and bullies for his betrothed. Contrastingly and bringing joy and exuberant litheness wherever she goes is Maria Gabriela Maglahus as the vivacious GiGi.
Of course, there has to be a child in this tale of the post-war children of Vietnam and the son born to Kim after her great love affair with GI Scott was well embodied on opening night by little Rafael Blanca.
The ensemble work, both male and female, is strong, with choreography by Selena Britz and there are scenes of vivid colour and movement as well as drama and choral aesthetic. The famous helicopter scene is very cleverly achieved and is met with spontaneous applause by the audience.
Indeed, with not a glimmer of the fiscal freedoms of the Cameron Mackintosh mega-production machine which brought Miss Saigon to the fore as a respected reflection of the political and human miseries of the Vietnam war, The Met has done it proud.
Samela Harris
When: 9 to 18 May
Where: Arts Theatre
Bookings: metmusicals.com.au
Independent Theatre. Goodwood Institute. 3 May 2019
It is live theatre, but it feels like a black and white movie.
So effective, evocative, so noir, noir, noir.
And there, on stage at the Goodwood Institute, in their hats and gabardine raincoats, come the characters of Dashiell Hammett’s 1929 San Francisco world. There stars private eye Sam Spade, old-school gumshoes, gorgeous redheads and nefarious villains. And tales of treachery, deceit, bribery, double-crossing and underworld conspiracy. In this case, it’s all in the quest for the mysterious statue of a black bird.
Rob Croser is an old hand at turning out classy productions with artful Croser/Roach sets and fabulous lighting. In this case, his skilled production values shine forth, most especially in Bob Weatherley’s five-star lighting plot. But there are so many touches: the art deco motif on the apartment door, the stained glass window projections, the double-sided desk which at one moment is a private eye’s office and the next has pivoted into posh governmental decor, the double-sided doors where one sees protagonists waiting in the dark hallways. The scenes change with quiet swishes of well-oiled mobility in the darkness. Since The Maltese Falcon was most famously known as a film, Rob Croser has given his adaptation a filmic pace with many quick scene changes.
The old-school detectives are scruffy and stoic, a lovely partnership of David Roach and John Oster. Oster is a character actor and a half and peoples the stage deliciously in assorted guises. There are some lovely performances. Madeleine Herd, with her lovely voice and long red tresses, gives all the elements of seductive artfulness and cunning as the alluring villainess while Stuart Pearce uses his imposing form and a very distinguished voice to bring into fine life the notorious underworld figure of Casper Gutman. Of strident voice and indeterminate accent is Andre Vafiadis, hamming it up to give the plot its dash of Peter Lorre madness while Will Cox becomes hunched and deeply threatening in the role of the henchman thug, Wilmer. Emma Bleby is downright nice as Spade's downright nice office offsider and Ashley Merriel fills the other female roles in the conspiratorial shadows. Oddly, the costuming for the female characters is somewhere the other side of weird, reflecting no particular period and absolutely no respect for the female form. Memorably awful is the best description. The men, on the other hand, are suave or scruffy and of the period with Patrick Marlin in the lead, slick-haired and handsome albeit gobbling his massive load of dialogue with machine-gun speed. Strangely, his Sam Spade skips the old Humphrey Bogart laid-back sexiness. This Spade feels just a bit psychotic with his abrupt shouting fits and temper tantrums.
One wouldn’t want to be on the wrong side of him.
Samela Harris
When: 26 Apr to 4 May
Where: Goodwood Institute
Bookings: trybooking.com
State Theatre Company of SA. Dunstan Playhouse. 2 May 2019
A snapshot of Australia’s literary past is most glorious and laudable grist for the national theatre mill.
Thus does a new generation meet George Johnston, distinguished war correspondent and author of My Brother Jack and his writer wife, Charmian Clift. They were renowned in the 1950s and 60s for abandoning journalism and Australia and retreating to the Greek Islands to pursue the great sun-drenched ex-pat dream, an exotic escape wherein writers could live from the proceeds of their works. To a fair extent, they succeeded. Johnston’s seminal Australian novel, My Brother Jack, was written there. But there were considerable costs to achieving the literary dream.
This play by Sue Smith explores this wonderful, meaty tale of expat Australiana.
It sings with gestalt. Visually, thematically and in mood, it makes a potent and memorable impact.
Firstly, for this Queensland/SATC production, there is the set. And what a set. It is somewhere near to perfection. Designer Vilma Mattila fills the stage with a sweep of whitewashed wall and one vast curve of stairs. An arched door, a window, a string of garlic and dammit, we are in Hydra. Just like that. You can almost taste the retsina. Chairs and tables, desks, and even a boat are carried on and off this set as the play’s action moves from island tavernas to domestica to creative frenzy.
The characters have descended upon the island, triumphant and liberated, among friends old and new in an exuberance of bohemia. As one raised within the bohemian milieu, one was a bit askance at the depiction of the “bohemians” as name-dropping showoffs. The Australian Bohemian intelligentsia may have been flamboyant but it never struck one as pretentious. One supposes this exaggeration is a device to impress upon the new generations the identities of the arts luminaries of the time: Sartre, de Beauvoir, et al.
Prominent on the scene with Johnston and Clift are the characters Mark and Ursula who are identified by the narrator as Sid Nolan and Cynthia Reed. One assumes their names are veiled to mask the fact that Sid and Cyn only stayed for one season and that the writers’ Hydra world was peopled by a succession of talented notable friends and visitors. Nonetheless, the characters seem decisively drawn, albeit Cynthia seems by far closer to the bone of truth than the Sid interpretation. Indeed, Cynthia/Ursula is a marvellous performance by Tiffany Lyndall-Knight and she brings home many of the idiosyncrasies reputed of Nolan’s brittle and protective wife. Vic/Sid is depicted by Hugh Parker as a more muted character. He captures Nolan’s neatness but makes him dramatically more Ocker than one recalls; one doubts he would ever say “Urs and me are learning”. He was a well-read and well-spoken man.
There are other imperfections and anachronisms which seem to have escaped director Sam Strong’s attention. Typing, for instance. It is hard for anyone today to type the way the newspaper people of yore pounded their machines and these actors are almost but not quite there. Heaven knows how we slammed out copy, but it required strength and rhythm, lacking here amid a scatter of verbal asides and an absence of slamming carriage returns.
Similarly, the smoking: these characters of media yore were furiously heavy smokers, but no one typed with a cigarette between their fingers. It knocked the burning head into the keyboard, ruining both the smoke and the machine. Typing was done with the fag either dangling in the mouth or in the ashtray beside the machine.
Perhaps it is not too late to correct this.
Also, women never walked around brushing their full skirts with lighted ciggies held beside the hip. Even drunk. This was not a thing.
But, one has to be grateful that the chronic smoking of the period is powerfully represented in this history play, and also the boozing. Johnston and Clift were alcoholics and they lived in a world where assorted powerful drugs were common and available. Certainly, as the play evolves, the punishment of their lifestyle becomes more heartbreakingly evident and Smith has captured well the ravages of the years on both principal characters. She also paints interestingly the way in which Clift was both thwarted and energised in her literary partnership with her husband. It was a tortuous relationship and deeply fascinating.
Anna McGahan plays Clift, taking her from heedless pregnant joie de vivre to worn and weary survivor of a mighty literary battleground. Not always clear to the ear, she brings soul to the performance and leaves the audience wondering what the fates might have been had things been different.
Bryan Proberts is just the right sort of craggy man to play one of Australia’s most voluble craggy characters. It is a fearless performance, wracked with coughing and moody unpleasantness. One does not like him, but one feels his pain and also immense relief at his success.
Kevin Spink comes and goes as the whole word of outsiders: Greek and French, villager and artist. He peoples the stage very pleasantly.
Quentin Grant’s soundscape is mystifying. It feels culturally adrift and extraneous.
The story’s larger picture is threaded into explanatory shape by the couple’s poet son, Martin, who is given a gentle, simpatico ever-presence by Nathan O’Keefe. That these writers also have children and a family life seems unlikely from their self-preoccupied lifestyles. The play’s scant attention to them deepens the audience’s emotional experience, giving a strong feeling of the potency of the bombastic love affair of Johnston and Clift.
Hence, despite coming to grief on some nuances of history, this critic who could almost say she “was there”, rejoices in this new work and that it celebrates our literary history, both in journalism and fiction. Hooray.
Samela Harris
When: 2 to 19 May
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: bass.net.au
Festival Theatre. 7 Apr 2019
Many are the levels on which one gives thanks to Disney.
In an era when vapid YouTubers are overloading the entertainment zeitgeist, Disney stands up for quality, expertise, technological innovation, imagination, and cultural tradition. It depends on its mountain of money because touring productions of this scale are prodigiously extravagant. The flying magic carpet alone is an unimaginably expensive device, a squillion dollars’ worth of sophistication just to realise a few minutes of timeless fantasy. It is jaw-droppingly wondrous. Like most of the show.
And so it comes to pass that an 18th century fairy story from the Arabian Nights flows forth into a new generation. It is old culture cutting the edge of contemporary technology, a magical story delivered through technical wizardry.
The Adelaide season features an Australian cast which not only has the consummate talent for the power-packed production, but the fitness and discipline to keep the action up, up, up. It’s a fast show – rarely is the stage not swarming with cleverly choreographed activity. Much of it is as surprising and delightful as it is skilful; Aladdin scampering across the city rooftops, for instance – the city turrets rise and fall as he goes.
As for Aladdin's magic cave, what a shimmering golden spectacle. It is blindingly beautiful. The audience draws collective breath in joyful awe.
And when the big tap number emerges, well, there are faces grinning from ear to ear throughout the auditorium.
The show has lots of everything for everyone, albeit the music depends just on a couple of major numbers. Graeme Isaako and Shubshri Kandiah pair nicely as Aladdin and the lovely Princess Jasmine and theirs is the sweetest of sweet duets upon the magic carpet as it glides aloft in the night sky. It is unforgettable and a fantastical reverie.
One can believe the genie as played by Gareth Jacobs has been bottled up for aeons when he erupts from the lamp in a madness of highly-skilled, high energy which he sustains, seeming inexhaustibly, along with enough ham to feed the homeless. He and the dancing ensemble leave one quite breathless simply watching their stamina and precision.
While this gorgeous confection of a blockbuster show is diverting the attention of the young from their fixation with social media, the producers have injected a hint of that other modern world in the depiction of the harem girls. They flit and flirt and pose as if they have come straight out of Instagram. Indeed, the female content of Aladdin must have been quite an issue for the producers since the original story has the beautiful princess simply marrying the handsome go-getter urchin who becomes sultan by dint of his gender. In today’s version, the princess is more emancipated and the Sultan is forced to compromise tradition and create a law in which a woman becomes equal and will rule the land together with her new husband.
And thus is Disney keeping the old dreams alive for a new generation.
Samela Harris
When: 7 Apr to 9 Jun
Where: Festival Theatre
Bookings: bass.net.au