Festival Theatre. 23 Aug 2018
It felt like an earthquake, so great was the cacophonous thrill of acclaim which met the opening night performance of Priscilla Queen of the Desert.
It felt like the standing ovation to end all standing ovations.
The rafters were rocking.
It was an audience so rewarded with joy and excellence that it was desperate to give back, to let the production know that it was profoundly, almost unbearably happy.
Ah, the beauty of live theatre. Love in the room. That magical connection between stage and auditorium.
Priscilla has been around for years on screen and on stage.
Triumphantly, it has toured and been produced all around the world and then some. This critic first saw it performed by the Zach Theatre company in our Sister City, Austin, Texas.
But, here and now, in Adelaide, in this latest incarnation, in the enlightened era of LGBTIQI gay marriages, Ru Paul and mainstream drag shows, it has danced itself into some zenith of the sublime. It is a treat. A significant treat.
All the ingredients are there. It is funny, physical, naughty, pithy, poignant, loud and beautiful. It is glitter and glam and feathers and sequins. It is macho and feminine. It is satire and social history. Oh, and it is voices, all sorts of voices across a vast swathe of pop music. There aren’t enough superlatives to cover the power and pleasure of it all.
'Tis the musical to end all juke box musicals, so impeccably has it been staged, so sleek is its technology and so accomplished are its performers.
Only a few elements remind one of its vintage. No one dances, let alone climbs atop Uluru these days. But the underbelly of homophobia sadly has not vanished from the world. Those scenes remain pertinent, just like the brave resilience of the gay community.
Priscilla is not just a song and dance extravaganza. Its story line of three drag queens on a road trip from Sydney to the Alice to do a show and enable one of them to meet his young son was always nicely devised to explore and explain the lives and loves of those in the drag world, the fun and the pathos, and the purity of acceptance which exists when there is no agenda.
It’s a dear, heart-warming story by Stephan Elliott and Allan Scott. Everyone loves the three main characters - Tick in drag form known as the outrageous Mitzi Matosis, is on the quest to meet his son. With him is his edgy, faggy young friend Felicia, who symbolises the new-wave of the drag world, and Bernadette, the ageing transgender former star from the old days of Les Girls.
The costumes, the wild and wacky genius costumes from Tim Chappel and Lizzy Gardiner really shine, not to mention Brian Thompson’s bedazzling and beloved Priscilla, the bus. There’s creamy professionalism in all the production values, the sound and lighting, the wigs and makeup, the choreographers and the techs on the fly towers who make it possible for divine Divas to rise and dip and glide graciously above the stage up there in all their finery. Those voices, those floating spirits of song! Today’s Divas, Angelique Cassimatis, Samm Hagen and Cle Morgan, are nothing less than red hot mamas in the sky. Gorgeous. So’s the multi-tasking Priscilla ensemble. What a lot of handsome beefcake, athletes as well as song and dance performers. Fit and fast, fast and fit. Drilled to perfection. The girls, too. When one can tell who is who.
And then there are the character players, the stars.
Song and dance man, David Harris, plays Tick, the drag queen who is secretly a dad. He's a complex and conflicted soul. Harris evokes his many layers in a consummate and credible characterisation.
Euane Doidge embodies bitchy and outrageous Felicia. He’s fabulously athletic, a sensational singer and the absolute favourite among the many youngies in the audience.
Robert Grubb is a classy, seasoned Australian actor and he renders a strong and simpatico Bob, the outback mechanic who joins the road trip. No wonder Bernadette falls for him. Lena Cruz is absolutely hysterical in the uber-cameo role of his mail-order bride, Cynthia. She brings the house into a torrent of spontaneous applause.
Cruz is among those who have performed in earlier productions of Priscilla. Performers seem to get attached to the show once they get a taste of it. Hence Tony Sheldon. He’s clocked up 1750-plus performances and been bestowed with countless major awards around the world in the role of Bernadette. Like the supreme showbiz pro that he is, he plays his part with immaculate freshness. He is the glowing heart and soul of the show. His stage presence is magical. He never steals a scene, but he continues to draw the eye simply with his grace and meticulous underplay. It is a privilege to be in the room with him.
Finally, there’s just one more behind-the-scenes facet which makes this show the exceptional Australiana experience it has become. It’s Simon Phillips, a luminous director if ever one there was.
Bravo.
Samela Harris
When: 23 Aug to 15 Sep
Where: Festival Theatre
Bookings: bass.net.au
Therry Dramatic Society. Arts Theatre. 17 August 2018
Kerrin White has an eye for anniversaries. He directed Frankenstein for The Rep earlier this year on the 200th anniversary of the novel, and this old chestnut on the 100th anniversary year of the end of World War I. I guess most thought that Alan Seymour's 1958 play about Anzac Day is as stodgy as cold porridge on an August morn or somebody else would have directed a full production in Adelaide on or after 2014 - but White has proved otherwise. This play is an utterly fascinating time capsule of attitudes and norms of the late '50s - not only concerning the meaning of Anzac Day, but also touching on family and working life, class distinction, loyalty and mateship, first love, outgrowing your parents (or thinking you are), and that everlasting theme - the son-father relationship.
The Adelaide Festival of Arts refused to produce the play in 1960, and instead the Adelaide Theatre Guild's amateur production was the world premiere in the same year. The director received a death threat, and during a subsequent Sydney production, Seymour's life was threatened. Why, you ask?
It's hard to believe in these days of the post-Howard Government-inspired boost for Anzac Day - when attendances at the dawn ceremonies are swelled by young people, and Gallipoli is regarded as a holy place - that when Seymour wrote his play, many thought Anzac Day was a disgrace and hoped it would disappear with the diggers. The play was inspired by a Sydney uni student paper calling for the end of Anzac Day in 1958. To actually express the issue through a conflict drama where a family might split up over the issue was additional sacrilege. And more than ten years later, in 1971, Eric Bogle had his returned digger say in the song, And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda, "...the young people ask me, ‘What are they marching for?’ // And I ask myself the same question."
All the foregoing tells you one really loves this play and you shouldn't miss this opportunity to see it on stage. Kerrin White’s set design is a simple, functional and elegant representation of a tiny 1950s worker's flat. John Rosen as the father, Alf Cook, opens with a nationalistic spray against the Italians and Pomes (the evil immigrants of the day), but doesn't add much to the text with his tonally monotonous delivery - speed is no substitute for expression or spontaneity. Christopher Leech is a gem as a genuine digger - and household mate. His Wacka Dawson's reluctance and later inability to articulate his Gallipoli experience is emotionally wrenching. He is great in my favourite scene with Julie Quick, playing Alf's wife. Quick won awards from the Adelaide Critics Circle and the Adelaide Theatre Guide for her Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 2015, and provides another formidable performance here. Bravo! This leaves the antagonists comprising Alf's son, who's getting new ideas at uni, and his North Shore young love, whom he conspires with on an anti-Anzac Day article for the uni paper. Respectively, Jai Pearce's teenage sullenness and Ashley Penny's upper class air cut through admirably.
I'll say it again - wouldn't miss it.
David Grybowski
When: 16 to 25 Aug
Where: Arts Theatre
Bookings: trybooking.com
Red Phoenix Theatre. The Bakehouse Theatre. 16 Aug 2018
Mystery, wonder, and excited questioning is heart and soul of real science and science fiction, based on real science.
Science fiction literary great Jerome Bixby’s The Man from Earth is a tremendously rich text. Bixby marries great questions of scientific inquiry and life through a series of characters representing every science discipline, allowing Bixby to explore some of the great ‘what if’ questions.
A cabal of professorial colleagues (Andrew Horwood, Lindsay Dunn, Lyn Wilson, Alicia Zorkovic, Brendan Cooney, Eliza Bampton) arrive at John Oldman’s (Fahad Farooque) home unexpectedly, to farewell him with good cheer and love. He’s quizzed, why go? Why now? What next?
Oldman’s collection of artefacts and art, pored over by his friends aren’t exactly run of the mill stuff for such a young man. They prompt more questions.
This tussled questioning brings Oldman to the point of seeming to unveil the truth about himself and his motives. It’s not what one expects. A 14,000 year old man is before them? Really? Then a crucial element is thrown by Oldman, informing the extraordinary tale and intellectual, emotional roller coaster to follow. He suggests “think of it as science fiction.”
Robert Kimber’s direction focuses sharply on modulating the ever shifting tone of the work in such a way tension between believing Oldman’s words as truth, or simply an intriguing intellectual construct is constant. It brings consternation, rejection, profound upset, and moral fear as certainties of science and history are roughly shaken up. Kimber recognises the darkness at the heart of human endeavour, to know, to be sure, to be safe Bixby is addressing. Oldman threatens safety, and is taken to task.
The great challenge comes not from the many expressions of emotive, savage and intellectual consternation of his gathered friends but the shambolic, loud intrusion of a much aged grand lector Will Gruber (Brant Eustice). Gruber poses challenges of character and humanity to Oldman that are like sharp edged, mortal barbs.
The great beauty of Bixby’s writing, given great life in this production and casting, is the tussle of dealing with what is unknown and being able to stay with it - not run from it. In performance, Fahad Farooque masterfully bears the full weight of responsibility for the exquisite intellectual and emotional balancing act at the work’s core. Brant Eustice is a magnificent counter to Farooque’s performance. All the doubt, anger, and fiery minded illumination of what is and what's not, flares out of Gruber with tremendous righteousness.
Richard Parkhill’s lighting design is subtle and subliminally suggestive in stone tones for both interior and exterior settings, providing the perfect atmosphere over the two acts of the work.
David O’Brien
When: 16 to 25 Aug
Where: Holden Street Theatres, The Studio
Bookings: holdenstreettheatres.com.au or 8225 8888
State Opera Of South Australia. Festival Theatre. 4 Aug 2018
Performing anything for one night only is a big ask of any company, and a once-off performance of an opera is an even a bigger ask. When that opera is one of Richard Wagner’s, then the whole undertaking is almost mind-numbingly bizarre, but that is precisely what the State Opera of South Australia has done, and like the curate’s egg, the result has its good bits and its not-so-good bits.
The Mastersingers of Nuremberg is one of the longest operas ever written, and is almost certainly the longest in the current repertoire. It comes in at about four hours twenty minutes – not including interval breaks – but State chose to perform only Act III, which is close to two hours long. The whole thing is a brute, and can easily try the endurance of even the most stoic opera-goer. However, it’s a comedy (of sorts) which partially dulls the barb that is its enormity.
Choosing to perform only Act III however proves to be a weakness in the production. All the unfolding of character development that we might have witnessed had we seen the entire opera is of course absent, and, in his own words, director Andrew Sinclair was compelled to “concentrate on the stronger issues of romance, humanity and the importance of art” to the exclusion of almost everything else. If one does not know the plot sufficiently well, then the minor characters come across as two dimensional and relatively shallow and the principals’ fare marginally better. The drama is muted and understated except where emotions are in plain sight. Being a ‘semi-staged’ performance, the sets, scenery, properties, costumes and lighting are minimalist – almost sparse. This of course requires the audience to fill in all the gaps themselves, which is arguably unfair. Grand opera is, after all, meant to be grand. It’s why we go, and Wagner is a master of the artform demanding that all production elements come together in such a way that the whole exceeds by far the sum of the individual parts.
But, there is the music and the singing, and that almost puts every other misgiving to the sword.
Almost.
Wagner’s score is rich and exquisitely embroidered. Every sentence of the libretto is set to its own deliberate musical schema, and conductor Nicholas Braithwaite draws the very best out of the mighty Adelaide Symphony Orchestra.
Shane Lowrencev is stately and dignified in the pivotal role of Hans Sachs, and overcomes Sinclair’s almost absurd direction that requires him to sit at a desk almost motionless for the full six-minute duration of the prelude at the beginning. That inactivity cast the mould for his characterisation for the rest of the opera: patient, stoic, and accepting. Bradley Daley sings Walther von Stolzing beautifully. He brings lightness, grace and assuredness to the role, and it is one of the best vocal performances one has seen from him. Kate Ladner’s characterisation of Eva is restrained but her fine vocal line sails over the orchestra whenever it is needed to do so, as did Fiona McArdle’s Magdalene. Sam Sakker is animated as David and, pleasingly, he is instantly believable. His acting performance is one of the evening’s highlights.
The minor characters are played by Robert Macfarlane, Hew Wagner (who had the most expressive and animated face on stage of the entire company – he is so interesting to watch), Adam Goodburn, Andrew Turner, John Bolton Wood, Pelham Andrews, Jeremy Tatchell, Joshua Rowe, Daniel Goodburn and Robert England.
And then there is Andrew Shore in the role of Sixtus Beckmesser. His performance is an object lesson in how to breathe life into a character. His opening scene is hilarious, very welcome hilarity, in which he perfectly synchronises movement and music with the one magnifying the other. Presumably Sinclair had something to do with this, and the whole production would have benefitted from more of this penetrating direction.
The chorus of the State Opera is again wonderful, and the procession of the Guilds is a triumph vocally. Chorus master Simon Kenway extracts the very best from the large chorus. The clarity is exemplary.
The visuals of the procession are however lacking – much more colour and chorography and lighting effects are sorely needed, as they were elsewhere in the production. But, in Sinclair’s words, this is a semi-staged production, and corners are cut, presumably for budgetary reasons. One would have much preferred a Wagner gala evening along similar lines to previous Puccini and Verdi galas, but, based on the ecstatic audience reaction and their generous applause throughout a curtain call that was almost endless, one is clearly in a minority.
Kym Clayton
When: 4 Aug
Where: Festival Theatre
Bookings: Closed
University of Adelaide Theatre Guild. Little Theatre. 4 Aug 2018
Those eyes. Those eyes.
Goats do, indeed, have the most wonderful eyes and one ponders whether it was indeed in having eye contact with a gorgeous, intelligent goat which inspired Edward Albee to write this wildly shocking and also desperately funny play.
Matt Houston’s production in the Little Theatre balances these emotional extremes of the play superbly. Indeed, one does laugh and one also cries and, from time to time, the eyebrows leap up to hit the roof. But, mainly, one laughs.
It is not only the calibre of the four performers which hit the spot but the spot itself. The play takes place in a living room and the intimacy of the Little Theatre really intensifies the action in a way rarely achieved in a proscenium theatre. One seems to be right within the play.
The Goat is a tragi-comedy on the theme of how one bad choice in life can render absolute downfall.
Celebrity architect Martin believes he has the perfect marriage with Stevie. They are of the smug intelligentsia, a rather self-congratulatory couple with a gay teenage son. Then, one day, just as he is about to be interviewed for a TV show by his best friend, Ross, Martin gets terribly vague and distracted and everyone is asking why. Oddly, Martin has difficulty accepting why the news of his relationship with a country goat causes such emotional mayhem around him. And thus are the perspectives of love and humanity, bestiality and loyalty, and family played out in various levels of fury, debate, analysis, rage and bitter humour. It is a wild ride of a play.
Peter Davies plays Ross, the best friend and TV interviewer who is the first to discover "who is Sylvia". His role is all about incredulous shock and indignation and Davies plays it to an hysterical tee. Benjamin Quirk depicts the awkward and vulnerable teenage son, still treated as a kid by his self-absorbed parents. He is the collateral damage and Quirk brings home, complete with broken voice, the poignant impotency of watching a marriage collapsing in shards around one.
Gary George portrays mad Martin, the man whose complete collapse of judgement has created this domestic horror story. George embodies him as bald and bespectacled, a perfect candidate for a mid-life crisis. It is a toweringly torrid role fraught with moral and philosophical conflicts, all of which George delivers to the audience like clever slaps in the mind. There is much to think about.
It is Rachel Burfield who steals the show, however. She is the wonderful Stevie, the model bourgeois wife who has to come to terms with the unspeakable. Burfield’s pain and passion are visceral. It’s a sensational performance.
Indeed, with a simple and very practical domestic set and some perceptive lighting, this is a very classy production indeed - and emotionally rather enriching in an odd, Albee sort of way.
Samela Harris
When: 4 to 19 Aug
Where: Little Theatre
Bookings: trybooking.com