Will Tredinnick. Holden Street Theatres – The Arch, and Live From Tandanya – Tandanya Arts Cafe. 19 Feb 2019
This fabulous show starts off in the pink. We are invited to be a fly on the wall for the Grand Re-opening of a run-down restaurant restored with flamingo wallpaper and pink costuming. A nervous and most improbable waiter readies the table utilising silent movie slapstick-style physical comedy complete with tinkering soundtrack. With change of pace and a couple more eccentric characters, devisor, director and performer Will Tredinnick runs amok in a hilarious study of acutely excruciating embarrassment and trepidation – an Epicurean enigma of epic proportions . Constantly turning the tables on the audience, no caper is too ridiculous. Actions are timed beautifully with lights and sound operation to enhance the unease.
Tredinnick, on this night, is ably augmented by an audience member, and one can only hope that in your attendance - as attend you must – you have it as good. Will is a NIDA Emerging Artist award winner and cooked up this, his first show, nearly all by himself. A little half-baked, but so what. Bravo for bravado!
David Grybowski
4 stars
When: 15 to 24 February
Where: Holden Street Theatres – The Arch, and Live From Tandanya – Tandanya Arts Cafe
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Hey Boss. Holden Street Theatres – The Studio, and Stirling Fringe – The Parlour. 20 Feb 2019
I have seen Melbourne comedian/actor/writer Damian Callinan in two previous shows of his own creation – The Wine Bluffs and Damian Callinan in The Lost WWI Diary; they were both terrific. The Merger began life in 2010 and is through the posts for six in becoming a motion picture in 2018 with Callinan in a starring role in his own screenplay.
Appearing first as the coach of the disastrous footy team of a clapped-out timber town called Bodgy Creek, giving the audience a half time pep talk, Callinan garners information from the audience that gets shelved for later hilarity. We learn that although the Roosters won six premierships, but none since 1994, they have excelled in winning environmental awards and in new age education. But that doesn’t win footy games. Faced with annihilation and a merger with their rivals, they bring in government subsidy and new players through a refugee rural re-settlement program. The food improves, a minaret is added to the scoreboard, and prayer rooms compete with the pubs. A most pertinent and heart-warming tale of a different kind of merger.
Callinan’s clever writing is deliciously indirect in getting to the point of each scene. It rambles about until an ‘Aha!’ moment. His comic timing is precise, facial expressions uncanny and the detail funny, funny, funny. Humorous voice characterizations and body language distinguish a plethora of personae. The satire on small town-ness is side-splitting but by third quarter time in the story, when the refugees arrive, there is also significant emotional substance. In the fourth quarter, one was all of laughing at the antics, cheering on the refugee project, moved by the poignancy of the grateful new immigrants, and weeping over the setbacks, sometimes all at the same time. Oh, what a world we could have!
Do the Roosters win the Grand Final? Go see for yourself. Double bravo for writing and performing!
David Grybowski
5 stars
When: 16 Feb to 3 Mar
Where: Holden Street Theatres – The Studio, and Stirling Fringe – The Parlour
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Presented by Familia de la Noche and Joanne Hartstone. Noel Lothian Hall, Botanic Gardens. 18 Feb 2019
Just for the sheer fun of reimagining classic literature, this Welsh theatre company with an Italian name has transformed Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver into a woman, Elizabeth Gulliver. She’s a journalist. Well, she becomes one rather arduously in trying to publish the tales of her wild adventures in Lilliput and Brobdingnag. She has to lie about her sex and call herself Lemuel, because misogynistic newspaper editors in 18th Century Fleet Street were not about to employ women as journalists. When she eventually lands a job, her career success is short-lived and she ends up with a sideways promotion in the form of an impossible assignment to report on the talking horses of Houyhnhmns.
Familia de la Noche presents this story via a puppet-mistress with lots of bizarre puppets and props, a wildly perilous and unmanageable set, and two extremely good actors.
It is all decidedly silly and, at times, hair-raising. There is a narrator, a slightly diffident fellow who has come across Gulliver’s diary and says he wants to know the whole story.
He is portrayed by Keill Smith-Bynoe who goes on to depict a vast cast of assorted characters from a bird to a giant queen to a string of newspaper editors. Within the Swift spirit of Gulliver’s Travels, the characters are nicely satirical and Smith-Bynoe leaps from accent to accent and voice to voice in a positive showcase of versatility. The audience adores him.
Guilliver is embodied as a very well-spoken 30-year-old English woman by Becca Cox. It is an exhausting, strenuous role but Cox does not flag despite being crushed into a cage or her hair flying in fright, and her spirited presence and high energy give the production a delicious zesty zaniness.
It’s lots of good fun with a lovely literary bent.
Samela Harris
4 Stars
When: 18 Feb to 3 Mar
Where: Noel Lothian Hall, Botanic Gardens
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Adelaide Fringe. Presented by Jimmy Jewell and Joanne Hartstone. Noel Lothian Hall, Botanic Gardens. 18 Feb 2019
Marlene lives again, or so one begins to think as one watches Peter Groom.
He has to be seen to be believed. Sublime is not an exaggeration for his performance in the Adelaide Fringe.
Groom is an English performer who has taken drag to a breathtaking theatrical high.
He steps onstage, tall and slender in slingback stilettos and an elegant golden sheath of evening dress on which delicate sparkling icicles shimmer as he moves. He does not resemble Dietrich. He “becomes” Dietrich. From beneath heavy lashes, he makes bold and sultry eye contact with his audience. Dietrich’s particular set of the mouth, that softly definite German accent, that slight thrust of the tongue; He has mastered every nuance.
The show is subtitled “Natural Duty” because Dietrich’s strong Teutonic sense of duty is thematic to it. It is a bio show in which Dietrich talks of her memories and her views, sometimes as links between songs and sometimes in response to the persistent questioning of an invisible journalist. The quizzical outsider is a clever device because it allows a range of emotional responses: feisty, indignant, and impatient; reactions not easily accommodated in a standard monologue. Thus is Groom’s Dietrich show a well-constructed theatre piece as well as a showcase for the impeccable impersonation.
The narrative begins with young Lena’s audition for The Blue Angel, the film which skyrocketed her to fame. She sings You're the Cream in my Coffee myriad times, Groom using the incident with a touch of humour to establish early the self-assured commanding core of his subject. He goes on to sing a repertoire of renowned Dietrich songs: Look Me Over Closely, Lily Marlene, Boys in the Back Room, and Falling in Love Again; imbuing each song with the languid come-on, the big tease, the double entendre characteristic of her seductive style. His every movement is carefully considered, slow, proud, graceful, sensual. Timing, timing, timing. Poise, poise, poise. Marlene would be honoured. Even more so were she to know of the political and personal qualities emphasised in this portrayal: her time as a Captain in the US armed forces, behind the lines in WWII wearing rough army drill instead of silken fashions; her uncompromising ethics; her fastidiousness; and her contempt for method acting.
This is a show as rich in knowledge and understanding as it is in uncanny talent. Groom makes no real attempt to feminise his voice. Marlene was a bisexual woman with limited vocal range. He taps right into the soul of her singing. And he taps into the soul of the audience, too. This hardened critic twice succumbed to tears, so beautifully heartfelt and percipient was his connection to her.
This is not just virtuoso performance, it is genius.
Samela Harris
5 stars
When: 18 Feb to 12 Mar
Where: Noel Lothian Hall, Botanic Gardens and Stirling Fringe, Stirling and Mt Barker
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Presented by The Adelaide Show Podcast. Historian Hotel. 17 Feb 2019
Sometimes, life is better away from the unearthly crowd. Coromandel Place could not be more out-of-the-way really, being noted only for a deeply bohemian artists’ collective and the charming little Historian Hotel. But this is the alley where the cats are at play: Two Cats on a Hot Fringe Roof. And since they started playing, the Historian Hotel’s rafters have been rocking and the walls reverberating with laughter.
The Two Cats are desperately, wickedly, absurdly funny.
Now this is not your run-of-the-mill Fringe comedy show. It is decidedly Adelaide-insider humour. It suits the older crowd although it is emphatically PG.
It’s a double act stand-up comedy show about the early days of live TV shows, particularly those for children. Hence, the funny bones it tickles are those who can remember going to bed with Fat Cat. Indeed, Fat Cat is its star. Ralf Hadzic was one of those brave performers who steamed for years inside the Fat Cat suit. And while Fat Cat didn’t talk back in the day, he’s sure talking now. It’s an anthropomorphic expose. Hadzic has stories to tell, children. Talking of which, Steve Davis performs in Playschool attire since he is one of the world’s great students of the dramatic art of Playschool. He has experimented with its styles and philosophies and is now the great Playschool method actor; in real life, if one is to believe his schtick. Well, it must be seen to be believed. Similarly his Mr. Squiggle. Oh, my. It is rib-ache funny.
Secret ingredient to the excellence of this production is slick professional direction by Glynn Nicholas, another Adelaide legend with strong links to the old children’s TV days. It’s quite a team. While it seems superficially all very in-group and casual, it’s a tight show with lovely comic timing.
So there we have it, off-Broadway, so to speak, an Adelaide Fringe jewel, with very nice pub dinner deals into the bargain.
This is for you, boomers.
Be quick. It’s a short season.
Samela Harris
4 Stars
When: 17 to 27 Feb
Where: Historian Hotel
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
EDITORS NOTE: Samela Harris is partnered with Steve Davis in his capacity as an Adelaide Theatre critic. They do reviews together on Peter Goers’ SMART ARTS Radio 891 Sunday morning radio program.