Ha Ha Comedy Pub Crawl with Scottish English & Irish Comedy Awards. Pig Tales at Gluttony. 7 Mar 2018
Gary Little is certainly not little. He is a big strapping bloke who hails from Glasgow, and his humour is uncompromisingly self-mocking. If you met him on a dimly lit street you’d probably fear for your safety and walk the other way, but in in front of an audience he is something else.
There is an ordinariness about him – he could be the guy who lives next door. He talks about ordinary things, but as quality comedians do, he sees the droll side of almost everything and you just have to laugh. This is in fact quite unsettling because you find yourself laughing at serious topics like depression and poverty, and laughing heartily at frivolous things like ‘spooning’ (and getting excited!) and dog walking!
Little’s style is anecdotal and conversational. He doesn’t try to make profound political statements, or, thankfully, gather cheap laughs by making fun of his audience or dragging them up on stage. He just holds a mirror up to us all and gets us to laugh - good honest laughing. It’s refreshing!
Kym Clayton
3.5 stars
When: 7 to 18 Mar
Where: Pig Tales at Gluttony
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Adelaide Festival. Brink Productions. Dunstan Playhouse. 6 Mar 2018
There aren’t enough superlatives with which to crown this Adelaide Festival production.
It creates for its audience one of those lifetime experiences, all at once beautiful, transcending, sensual, original and relevant.
It is epic in its scale in every way. Never have so many bare feet padded quietly across the Playhouse stage, a stream of humanity, an ebb and flow of bodies and voices over a theatrical grassland. Aloft, an orchestra and soloists deliver music, dramatic, ethereal, effervescent, and ethnic. Joycelyn Pook’s composition complements, heart and soul, one of the great epic sagas of history, Homer’s Iliad as reinterpreted by English poet Alice Oswald. And, her considered words are delivered with consummate expertise by illustrious Australian actress, Helen Morse.
All this comes from Adelaide’s Brink Theatre under direction of the peerless Chris Drummond.
Two hundred and fifteen people, old and young, lanky and portly, straight and stooped, tall and tiny, even a babe in arms, are onstage for Memorial. They are The Soldier Chorus. They represent the number of soldiers named in Memorial and they represent the human worlds from which all soldiers come; families and friends and communities.
Drummond has contrived this production exquisitely, his huge chorus dressed in understated street garb, not so much choreographed as designed in their placements upon the stage, their fluid movements, their pace, their circuits and crossings, ever with passive arms, has been beautifully coached by Yaron Lifschitz. Their voices at first seem incidental but as the saga evolves, their choral presence grows until a mighty roaring climax.
All the time, gracefully in their midst, her slim presence defined by a burgundy patchwork sheath dress, is Morse. And she brings that splendid voice of the theatre. It is a voice so perfectly modulated. She is never shrill. She is strong. She is subtle and passionate and every word arrives clear and entire to convey utter understanding. She lifts forth the beauty of Oswald’s poetry to linger in mind’s eye. She lists, exhaustively, the names of the soldiers, so many of them hard to pronounce, and yet enunciated clearly, potently, each one a tribute to a life, to an identity. One could not imagine a more difficult script for an actor to master and one can only be in awe of Morse for her embodiment of it all; her voice, with and without the music, rising and falling with the love and death dramas of the Iliad.
In one passage, from the rivers of people swarming around her, a bowl is carried respectfully across the stage and proffered to her; a merciful sip of water to lubricate that wonderful voice. In itself, this is a gracious and elegant piece of theatre.
Then there are the singing voices coming from the great orchestral shelf above the stage: counter tenor, Jonathan Peter Kenny, who is also the musical director; sopranos Kelly McCusker and Siobhan Owen; mezzo Melanie Pepperheim; plus Macedonian and Bulgarian singers, Tanja Tzarovska and Belinda Sykes.
The orchestra segues between the cultural references from soulful reflection to pulsing folksy exuberance. The music is simply exquisite and one hopes there will be a recorded soundtrack somewhere.
Also important in the realisation of this magnificence of theatre is the technical artistry of Jane Rossetto’s sound and Nigel Levings’s mighty lighting. All this professionalism and intelligence, this phenomenal massing of humanity for this iteration of significant war history recalled in the honour of the centenary of Armistice, is embraced under our South Australian Brink banner.
Standing ovation.
This is what Festivals are all about.
Samela Harris
When: 1 to 6 Mar
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: Closed
Guy Masterson – CIT, in Association with Smokescreen Productions. Bakehouse Theatre. 5 Mar 2018
He regains consciousness on the beach. There is a woman there. No, she has not rescued him.
Awkwardly communications are established, neither character willing to reveal their identity to the other.
But the mystery woman gains the upper hand, bit by bit drawing his story out of him until it absolutely erupts in a torrent of terribleness.
For he is “The Death Angel” of Auschwitz, the monster Dr Mengele, the Nazi SS doctor whose ruthless mass experiments on Jewish prisoners were among the horrors of the Holocaust.
She, on the other hand, is Azra'il, the Jewish Angel of Death.
This is the third of Guy Masterson's Lest We Forget series running at The Bakehouse. It is performed by Tim Marriott from England and an Adelaide actress called Stephanie Rossi. She has stepped in for this Fringe season and, with only five rehearsals, she has established a commanding characterisation.
It is impossible not to study her as she parries lines on eugenics and euthanasia.
She is an actress with beautiful composure and focus, not to mention a lovely voice for both speech and song.
Mengele is a piece of theatre as gruelling as it is gripping.
It’s very artfully written to give a sense of tension and expectation. Marriott commits his all to delivering the vanity and pure ugliness of the man, one of the world’s true psychopathic narcissists, a man who chose who would live and who would die as they arrived at the concentration camp, who experimented on victim’s eyes, who removed organs from babies without anaesthesia.
Azra'il patiently elicits much of this information, leading him on through a remorseless confession, before she reveals her identity and raison d'être. Then she gives him a bit of his own medicine by using her angel superpowers to symbolically whip him into agonised submission before committing him to death.
In fact, Mengele escaped justice. He died in 1979 by drowning in the sea in South America after many years of freedom. The play’s ending of spectacular supernatural revenge feels like a Mossad dream.
It is questionable but it feels good.
Samela Harris
4.5 stars
When: 5 to 17 Mar
Where: The Bakehouse Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Head First Acrobats. The Flamingo at Gluttony. 4 Mar 2
18
Three swashbuckling pirates in a ship full of shtick.
Well, it is a rubber ducky of a ship and it is more in the imagination than in evidence in the tent at Gluttony. But such detail is incidental to the activities of its crew. They are hapless, hopeless, bickering, boisterous, disobedient, sneaky, entirely silly - and very good at it.
In other words, these pirates know the ropes.
They’re Melbourne acrobats and clowns called Head First. They’re highly trained and extremely personable. Loosely, they cast themselves as the sensible should-be captain, the buffoon, and the loser. They tell all sorts of pirate jokes some of which cross the age barriers and are hard to resist re-telling. What ships do pirates struggle with? Relationships. Haw haw haw!
They tumble, they dance with mops, they do prat falls, they do classic clown routines, ladder tricks, play at Ghost Busters and do wild chases to the Benny Hill theme, juggle knives and do spectacular seesaw stunts. The most fantastic act is with the spinning wheel.
It’s a dauntingly strenuous show, dangerous and funny.
Well worth the family Fringe dollar.
Samela Harris
4.5 stars
When: 4 to 18 Mar
Where: The Flamingo at Gluttony
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Nikki Britton. Gluttony, The SpiegelZelt. 4 Mar 2018
She’s strident. She’s vulgar. She’s not everyone’s Grandma. In fact, she may not be anyone’s Grandma. Comedian Nikki Britton comes up with the gloriously funny concept of her character having been named “Grandma” at birth. Immediately, the imagination is sparked and one’s internal chuckles take on a life of their own.
Britton is a professional comedian and she knows her genres. There is nothing alternative or have-a-go Fringey about her act. She has a well-honed skill set and a well-conceived scenario to both amuse and inspire children.
After a bit of fairly ferocious old-fart farting around and once the world’s biggest communal fart has been wafted from a tittering tent, Grandma hits the deaf-old-lady shtick as she asks the kids their names. She pushes this routine as far as it can go and it just gets funnier. By default, she assigns names to hapless kids: Mushroom, Toiletpaper.
She engages young and old throughout the show. Most importantly, she plays on the positive theme of realising one’s hopes and dreams. To this end, she brings kids onstage whence, invisibly, she has a tech with art skills who draws career environments on the big white screen behind each kid: a veterinary room, a stage, a lawyer’s office. It is charming, clever and generous-spirited.
There’s plenty more to the show, including a messy cooking segment and a science experiment.
The kids love it all. And, when an FA/18 Hornet screams an overhead flyover, Britton shows there are no flies on her by nicely wrapping the din up into a bit of timely improv.
May Grandma never grow up but come back for more Fringes.
Samela Harris
4.5 stars
When: 4 to 12 Mar
Where: Gluttony, The SpiegelZelt
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au