Empyrean at Gluttony. 3 Mar 2018
The name says it all: ‘fuego’ is Spanish for ‘fire’, and, well…. ‘carnal’ needs no explanation. Put them together and you have a fiery (literally) and hot (in the sensual sense) display of circus skills that have you on the edge of your seat for an hour. Take away the fire, and there are probably better circus acts, but add the fire and it’s altogether something else. All of a sudden the bizarre seems almost unbelievable: not just fire blowing, but swallowing it; aerial gymnastics while on fire, and then a balletic landing on ice; sword swallowing, but ones that glow in the dark, even while they are deep within your torso; playing up tempo anthems on the bagpipes which shoot burst of fire on beat; fire sticks blazing at both ends being flung about and twirled around contorting bodies with seeming abandon.
The question on everyone’s lips is: how do the performers NOT get burned? It’s madness!
But it’s not all shock and awe. There’s humour as well, with the almost obligatory “let’s drag a poor unsuspecting punter up from the audience and embarrass him”. Such routines can be tiresome, but not this one. It was sharp, well-constructed, and, like good pantomime, was riddled with sexual innuendo that sailed completely over the heads of the kids in the audience but had the adults roaring with laughter; no doubt then left with the inevitable follow up questions from their sons and daughters!
The show is well choreographed, and the acts fit seamlessly together. The hour passes very quickly almost leaving you wanting more, but not quite. The show finishes with a traditional parade of the cast, rather than a fiery up-beat bang!
Recommended for all the family!
Kym Clayton
3.5 stars
When: 3 to 18 Mar
Where: Empyrean at Gluttony
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Adelaide Festival. Ex Machina. Her Majesty’s Theatre.
The footage of early Russian space missions is grainy old black and white as seen from the porthole of Robert Lepage’s Far Side of the Moon.
There’s Soyuz, Luna, Saluyet, and Sputnik.
Actor Yves Jacques writes large upon the blackboard wall the name of Tsiolkovsky, the father of Russian rocketry, for the audience to ponder. The space program is more vanity than science, he asserts. It is the narcissism of the mortals who see the moon above them as a mirror. They probe space. They send messages into the mysterious infinity.
SETI is the computer reach of everyman to find and make contact with extra-terrestrial life. A puppet spaceman is seen in and through the portholes which open onto the void of space. He’s a little white space walker, a man probing the moon and yonder.
But, suggests the play’s creator, perhaps the sacred place should be the far side of the moon where instead of looking at himself, man would look into the great void.
Thus arrives the name of this renowned piece of Ex Machina Theatre.
And from the artistry of the marvellous French Canadian actor, Jacques, emerge the characters of an earthly story. Two estranged brothers are brought together by the death of their mother. Andre is a successful TV weather man. Phillipe is the thinker and dreamer, the space wonderer, but a man with an unlucky streak. He enters the SETI competition, to make a short film to be sent into space. He also gets all his timing wrong when he makes his own first air trip to a conference. His brother, Andre, is the busy one, too busy to take care of his mother’s fish, his mother’s last living thing. Indeed, he was too busy for much of the clean-out of her apartment and is left with the final chore of taking out the shelves which the brothers used to stay apart from each other in their bedroom. It gets stuck in the lift, another symbolic void in the story, stranding him against the clock. He telephones angrily for support and for someone else to tell work why he is going to be a no-show.
This and the many scenes of the play are delivered via the opening and closing of a wall of sliding panels which cover the lower quarter of the stage. The washing machine throbs there and the porthole opens there. A lecture theatre materialises from there. An apartment materialises there with that poor fish swimming in its own black void. The actor moves between characters, with an ironing board as his primary prop becoming all things, most spectacularly, a motor scooter zooming past a projected landscape to Quebec’s Plains of Abraham whence a war with the English was lost.
The low-set staging of Far Side of the Moon is fascinating to behold. The solitary actor segues between characters, including his mother and a doctor, with practised ease. It is two hours of hard work for the actor, his only companion the puppeteer, Eric Leblanc, out of sight. He, himself, must fly through the porthole into space. It is an extraordinary moment. But, none more so than the climax of the production when he is seen as a weightless man floating upside down in space. It is quite spectacular and it’s all achieved through mirrors.
Samela Harris
When: 2 to 7 Mar
Where: Her Majesty’s Theatre
Bookings: bass.net.au
Chrissie Brown & Liz Cahalan. La Boheme. 3 Mar 2018
Chrissie Brown and Liz Cahalan’s latest production is a very raw look at their own experiences with parenting, and childbirth.
Both mothers to two year old toddlers, their tales have the parents in the audience nodding with understanding, wincing at the graphic detail, empathising as the girls lament, and sympathising with their experiences.
Fair warning should be given to any would-be parents, and especially to those who may currently be pregnant with their first. This show might put you off the idea altogether.
They milk the routines for all it is worth and dine out on their love for Bonds trackies, wine, and maternity underwear. But it is all met with a good dose of humour and plenty of feminine empowerment.
More cabaret than burlesque, on the rare occasion the women do dance it is clear that parenthood has not stripped them of their sensuality or sexual appeal.
But this show is more catharsis than revelation, and despite almost being cancelled due to the difficulties of juggling parenting, business, and performance, goes resolutely on. If for no other reason but to prove it is a story these women have earned the right to tell.
It is unpolished, honest, oddly humorous, and in your face. A lot like the daily responsibilities of parenting.
Paul Rodda
3 stars
When: 3 to 11 Mar
Where: La Boheme
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Gluttony. The Octagon at Gluttony. 1 Mar 2018
The queues to see Hans aka Matt Gilbertson in Gluttony are quite the place to be for the Fringe. Since his shows are at the early slot of 6.30 this year, audiences fall into line at about 6, complete with wine and beer and nibbles. Outriders trot off to bring back additional supplies if the drinks have gone down too fast. Everyone chums up and, it turns out, few are seeing Hans for the first time. The man has a hard-core Adelaide following.
It’s not surprising, of course.
He gives them their money’s worth. Year by year his shows have grown slicker and more expertly honed.
Needless to say, this year, back from triumphs in the UK, he is better than ever; his voice, his moves, his pace, all have been refined.
This is his great ‘Australia’s Flair’ tribute show. Hans is one of us, as dual-citizened and Aussie as Barossa mettwurst. “Come and see the real thing,” he sings draped in a piece of green and gold kitsch.
With saxophone soaring, the Ungrateful Bastards play, the downlights splay and the Lucky Bitches kick up their choreographed heels with high-octane energy. They need that energy to keep up with Hans who is in top condition and exuding a power of foot-stompin' vigour.
Prancing, dancing and Hansing. Hans picks his targets from the audience. "Are you old enough?” he sings and picks Kel with the walking stick and straw hat who, he reckons, is clearly out from the retirement home. Kel’s an old Hans fan and he’s right into any mischief Hans can throw his way. Perhaps less so Patrick or Torsten the genuine Germans from Kent Town. Hans milks their bemusement with glee.
From his Southern Cross sequinned outfit and into his Aussie bush bling complete with perplexed-looking toy kookaburra on his shoulders and a cling of weeny koalas on the neckline, Hans powers through the Australian song book and some nice, sizzling political satire.
There’s a burst of spectacular tap dancing, a whirling Flight of the Bumblebees on the keyboard, some rousing accordion and an aerial stunt which rather takes the breath away. Costume changes, blinding bling, some rowdy rock; Hans rounds off the show with the Angels’ great Aussie anthem and the audience replies in traditional loving invective.
The 6.30 timeslot might be a bit early for some of the Hans content, but whatever time of day, his people will find him and adore him. Again. And rightly so. He’s our showbiz treasure.
Samela Harris
5 stars
When: 1 to 18 Mar
Where: Gluttony, The Octagon
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Adelaide Festival. Elder Park. 28 Feb 2018
When Grace Jones takes to the stage in Elder Park - an unfashionably fashionable 45 minutes late - it is like the arrival of the Queen of Sheba at the Dia de los Muertes, day of the dead. She is wearing a shiny skull mask haloed with long black spikes and a body suit with thick, white skeletal markings that Keith Haring might have personally designed. But if this is some kind of memento mori then Ms Jones has very different plans. She’s going Nightclubbing.
The nine piece band, including two women singers, is already primed. With whip-crack drums and indolent piano chords, Jones turns Iggy Pop’s song into a statement of Stylish Intent. “We’re Nightclubbing, nightclubbing / We’re walking through town.” With its stalking, vogueing insolent gait, the song establishes all that is to follow.
We are in a State of Grace. This is the performer who defined club chic in late 70s New York, the triple-triple threat performer, airbrushed and sculpted for album covers by controversial designer Jean-Paul Goude – those Dick Tracy shoulder pads, the topiaried crewcut hair, the sheen of her complexion. She became Paris Noir redux, an Art Deco figurine for the Temple of Disco.
But whatever Goude thought he was up to – and racial stereotyping is even more problematic nearly forty years on – Grace Jones leaves us without a shadow of doubt that she is in total charge of the Jones TM. She is an empowered woman, and is now an empowered woman of three score and ten.
She has shared that power, revelled in it, and spread it around, encouraging, enticing, inciting especially her niche audiences – people of colour in racist New York City, the gay community beset with the nightmare of AIDS. It is no wonder she is so celebrated; she is not just some lazily-labelled diva, or an icon (whatever that worn-out tag is now supposed to mean). Grace Jones is a pioneer and a cultural liberator. And she invented Lady Gaga.
After she has woven her Nightclubbing way around the stage and catwalk, Jones pushes back her skull mask and it sits like a tiara above her famous face. But this is a gradual reveal. Now it’s the outsized dark glasses - and lip gloss you can see from King William Street.
The set gets underway with This is from her 2008 Hurricane album.
“This is my voice / My weapon of choice / This is life.” The lyrics are personal and characteristically defiant – “most of my crimes are of optimism / 40 thousand volts of recognition”.
Jones has always had a flair for interpreting others. Chrissie Hynde’s Pretenders classic, Private Life is an outstanding example. Moving into a reggae rhythm the band lay a sinuous riff for Jones’s sardonic narrative – “Your marriage is a tragedy / But it’s not my concern. I’m very superficial I hate everything official / Your private life drama, baby, leave me out.” The song is still a classic, and this extruded, beat-heavy version is a highlight of the night.
A cluster of Jones favourites are next I’ve Seen that Face Before (Libertango), Warm Leatherette (with community singing! Before setting out tonight, who in the crowd expected to be crooning Warm, Warm Leatherette ?) and from the 1982 album, Living My Life, another nod to her country of origin - My Jamaican Guy.
Several of the newest songs in the set refer back to her early days in Spanish Town, Jamaica and the free-spirited childhood before, aged thirteen, she moved to US with her family. It was there that her father converted to Pentecostal Christianity. After his premature death, her mother re-married - to an even stricter, clergyman, Master P (whose treatment Jones later described as “serious abuse”).
Physical mistreatment and excessive religious zeal shaped her attitudes and outlook on life. She later said, in 2015, “I am very militant and disciplined. Even if sometimes that means being militantly naughty and disciplined in the arts of subversion.”
Her newest song Shenanigans celebrates that freedom: “smoke the weed / get a little higher” as does Williams’ Blood, a meditation on family genetics and attributes. Her reply to those who ask, “Why don’t you be a Jones like your Sister and your brother Noel?” – is to repeat her free-spirited refrain “I’ve got the Williams’ blood in me.”
Similarly when she sings Amazing Grace – prefaced by “Pray for me I am a wicked child” – her rendition is not the pious sentiment of Christian acceptance. Her experiences of the hypocrisy and cruelty of organised religion are still bruised and vivid. As a matter of plain fact, it is Beverley Grace Jones who is amazing, for getting the hell out of there.
This performance is a series of masks and revelations, facets of a complex woman who can celebrate the simple hedonism of dance pop alongside a very different kind of personal introspection. And with masks and revelations come the many costume changes – a profusion of wigs, millinery, bowler hats and atavistic head-dresses, of scarves, capes, shawls, arm and ankle bangles, fur-tails, and, for the final cluster of greatest hits - her naked, elaborately painted, decorated skin.
The Roxy Music classic, Love is the Drug gets a rather hurried tempo which doesn’t suit its languid self-satisfaction, but Jones is a sight to behold, in her bowler hat, standing in a vortex of coloured down spots. Then, wearing a platinum wig which hangs to her waist, Jones and Co grind their way though the raucous carnality of Pull Up to the Bumper. With lyrics that would make Fats Waller blush, it is Grace Jones at her mischievous, transgressive best. She rolls out a giant hula hoop while several hundred kilos of gold tinsel scraps fall from above, enveloping the entire eco-system of Elder Park.
The band, led by the excellent, electric bass guitarist Malcolm Joseph, concludes the night with an extended version of Slave to the Rhythm. The sound, lighting and general production, under the excellent direction of former Adelaidean, Kamal Ackarie, has been first rate.
It is long ride as Jones moves along the catwalk, gladhanding the crowd, the huge monochrome video stage images show the star triumphant and, even as her voice begins to tire, still shining. As for the audience – what can you say? We are slaves to the rhythm. And, on a cool night in March, full of festive admiration for a remarkable artist.
Murray Bramwell
When: 28 Feb
Where: Elder Park
Bookings: Closed