Columbia Artists Management, LLC - Tim Fox and Alison Ahart Williams, Kraft-Engel Management - Richard Kraft and Laura Engel. Entertainment Centre. 14 Mar 2015
There is a huge and expectant crowd at the Entertainment Centre for this Festival once-off and Australian premiere, exclusive to Adelaide. It is a night to remember.
Unless you have been living in Woop Woop for the last quarter century, you must have seen at least one Tim Burton film. I had visited the Tim Burton retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and you may have sojourned to Melbourne a few years ago to see the same at Federation Square. Burton is a product of a mundane suburban LA upbringing filled with movie dreaming. The exhibition was chock full of his sketches, ink drawings and water colourings of exotic and macabre characters that became manifest in his movies like The Nightmare Before Christmas, Corpse Bride, Mars Attacks! and Beetlejuice. His gothic and ghoulish designs muscled up the superhero genre in two Batman movies, and re-defined Alice in Wonderland. He has made millions and millions of sketches (bet you thought I was going to say millions and millions of $$).
Film-wise, composer Danny Elfman has been right there with him since Pee-wee's Big Adventure for a total of sixteen blockbuster Hollywood movies over twenty-five years - one of the most productive, creative and successful partnerships in show business history. Elfman's haunting, loud, strange and unrelenting compositions are combustible standalone and explosive with Burton's visualisations.
On the night, a gigantic Adelaide Symphony Orchestra conducted by John Mauceri is backed up by the Adelaide Festival Chorus. Overhead is an enormous screen. The format in the first half sees a film announced on the screen, then a few minutes of Burton's illustrations, followed by a few more minutes of film outtakes. Then a screen saver comes on that looks like it was designed by an Aboriginal artist from Utopia though probably was also by Burton. At this point, the music obtains a fresh vibrancy as one's attention is no longer diverted by the visuals. All the same, one longs for some actual synced footage instead of the moving montage.
The second half of the show is more interesting, thanks in part to favourite movies like Batman and Edward Scissorhands, but principally because of guest soloists Bertie Blackman, Sandy Cameron and Charlie Wells. Cameron, dressed provocatively in a leather strapped outfit, burns her violin strings with some awesome stroking, and the nine year old Charlie Wells presumably got the gig because no castrato had the balls to do it.
Oh, gosh, I nearly forgot. Danny Elfman his very self is there in red hair and a purple suit. With theatrical gusto, he reprises some songs he voiced in the Christmas-Hallowe'en mix-up Nightmare Before Christmas. His energy and effervescence is breathtaking. It's sort of like meeting an animated Beethoven, and you wonder - How did you create all this music?
After two standing ovations for our magnificent orchestra and this smorgasbord of compositions, Elfman apologises for not getting to Australia sooner. Maybe there is the making of a new movie there - The Ghost of Don Dunstan! Bravo!
David Grybowski
When: 14 Mar
Where: Entertainment Centre
Bookings: Closed
