This Changes Everything, Echo Theatre, The Q, 22-30 Jul 2022

 

This is big-thinking theatre. A cast of 18 take on a dystopic story of dealing with the big questions of dealing with an increasingly overwhelmingly pressured world, of flawed idealism, of the ways communities form and organise themselves, and about how we fall prey to charismatic leaders through fear, inertia, ego, and groupthink. 

Writer Joel Horwood introduces us to a small remote community of teenagers through the eyes of three new arrivals. We see the hope that inspired the project, but also glimpses of the issues, from directionless meetings that require complete agreement to decide anything, to the limited resources, to the mysterious departure of one of the group. And as the days progress, the trio get more enmeshed in the building tensions until everything boils over into a somewhat familiar scenario to anybody aware of revolutionary politics of the French or Russian varieties, or Orwell's "Animal Farm" or Golding's "Lord of the Flies". With a cast this big, there's a little bit of a limitation in that no one character gets a deep dive inside - most of the characters are given one or two characteristics for the duration, but the interactions of all these personalities is where the work gains its strength as we see egos, fears and ideals clash in escalating dangers.

Jordan Best directs with clarity and clear intention, whether it be the crowd scenes with a sea of voices arguing their way towards consensus, or the smaller two-and-three-character scenes that highlight elements of life among the team. She has a strong way with a striking image, using the various areas of the set (designed by Best and Ray Simpson) to give power to particular moments. Jacob Aquilina's lighting design picks out spaces and helps with the paranoic mood that develops over the course of the story. 

There's a lot of strong work in the ensemble, but it would be unfair to pick out individuals - partially because part of the pleasure of the play is the developments as various characters shift into prominence and power while others are cast aside brutally. But all are passionate, committed performers who give themselves over to the drama well. 

William Best's original music gives the narrative a moody underpinning, building our sense of tension and imminent doom. There's also strength in the costumes and makeup choices, with boilersuits and a simple bit of facepaint giving the cast a sense of unity and belonging that frays as the story goes on. 

This is, in short, the reason I come to serious theatre - to engage in strong ideas expressed strongly, with passion and devotion.  It's well thought out and a great addition to the theatrical landscape of our region, and should be watched by anybody interested in the world around them. 

Urinetown: the Musical, Hearts Strings Theatre Co, Courtyard Studio, Canberra Theatre, July 15-23 2022

 A couple of years ago the Canberra area was overflowing with active musical theatre companies. Between Philo, Queanbeyan Players, SUPA, Dramatic Productions, the ANU Musical Society, Phoenix Players and Free rain we had seven companies regularly providing solid productions of a widish variety of musicals (though most of them still did runs of "Grease", "Les Mis" and "Jesus Christ Superstar"). COVID and time has narrowed the field a little, so there's now space for a new entrant - Heartstrings Theatre Company. On their first appearance, long may they reign.

The selection of show, the venue, and the production methodology shows this is a little bit different - choosing a modern satirical musical with sharp takes on capitalism, optimistic thinking, environmental collapse and social revolution is a very different choice to the more familiar repertoire we've seen lately. Using the small confines of the Courtyard Studio means that we get a production with more-than-usual emphasis on the performers and the storyline rather than spectacle and stage-filling choruses. And that follows through into the set design and the performance style - a set of ladders, some sawhorses, and a short scaffold, plus a few cloths make up the entire set, with the performers lending credibility to everywhere from public street to secret hideout to top-floor-office-building. Helen Wotjas' costumes have a distinctly homemade, patchwork look which gives the show a friendly embracing style, with performers swapping characters and sometimes gender with the addition or subtraction of a coat and, now and then, a hat.

Mark Hollman and Greg Kotis' show is a weird contradiction - a cynical show that's also deeply charming, a bitter social message that's seductive and constantly refuses to take itself as realism, and a score that combines the discordances of Brecht-Weill with the celebratory gospel and romantic yearning songs of the contemporary American musical. It's clever without being smart-alecky, and able to be simultaneously emotionally resonant and ridiculous. Ylaria Rogers directs with a clean style, using the limited space of the Courtyard to maximum effect and giving a show that plays to both the heart and the brain, allowing for a beautifully silly, apparently-simple-while-the-cast-is-clearly-working-their-butts-off show to land with full effect on the audience. Leisa Keen's control of both a four-part band and the harmonising of an 11-strong cast makes beautiful sounds come from the stage, and Annette Sharpe's choreography is fun, and varied and always feels like a logical evolution of where the show is going at that particular moment.

There's so much strength in this cast, from Karen Vickery's ingratiatingly cynical narrator, Lockstock, to Petronella Van Tienan's bubbly classic-musical-theatre-heroine Hope, even able to dance along while bound-and-gagged in act two. Joel Horwood's Bobby Strong combines classic musical-theatre-hero integrity and earnestness with goofy idiocy. Max Gambale plays evil capitalist with enthusiasm and verve, particularly his bloodthirsty "Don't Be the Bunny". Deanna Farnell gives bitter cynicism and emotional outpourings as required in the inevitable surprise revelations. Natasha Vickery enjoys the hell out of playing the ultimate hopeful-little-girl, Little Sally, bantering gormlessly with Lockstock. Joe Dinn switches easily from cynical Senator Fipp to desperate emotional Ma Strong, adding to the joy. Glenn Brighenti's dopey sidekick Barrell and psychotic Hot Blades Harry both register strongly.  

This is not really a go-buy-tickets kinda review because, as I understand it, the show has found its audience and is very much on its way to completely selling out, so much as a "buy early for the next thing Heartstrings does because judging by this level of quality you won't be disappointed" kinda review. Long may they sail.  

10 years later

 

"If I've made a fool of myself, I have at least made of myself the kind of fool I want to be. That is the Virtue and Power of Pretentiousness" - Tony Kushner, opening quote from "The World only spins Forward", an oral history of the creation of "Angels in America".

So, a decade ago today, or nearly 300 posts ago, I started up this exercise of logging my experiences in theatres around the region and beyond (with reviews in here from London, New York, Chicago, Seattle, Sydney, and Melbourne). It's been an interesting ride, starting out anonymous and getting less and less so to the point where, in late 2018 after certain interactions, I put my name in my bio and decided to live with this being my public shingle. I've attempted to be fair to productions and to meet them at their level of production and talk about what I saw and whether I enjoyed it. 

It's not always been easy - there's been one point where a particular e-mail had me talking to two lawyers - but I've tried to be fair and honest in my opinion, and only harsh where I felt the target was big enough to take it. There's been missteps, and reviews I probably wouldn't write today (in particular, one preview I was unduly harsh on for a show that was clearly on its first rehearsal in the venue), and there's been cases where I've got to express my love for a particular production when it has captured my heart. 

There are things I wish this blog could have been which it hasn't really had a chance to do. I'd kinda hoped the comments section would be more active than it has been - these entries are not meant to be holy writ, they're meant to indicate my thoughts on the production and open up the floor to further discussion. But apart from the occasional private message telling me I've been too easy on something or too harsh, it's been pretty quiet. 

So this will continue to be a personal record of local theatre history, one inevitably affected by the biases and preconceptions of its writer, only covering stuff where I've either been comped (rarely) or where I've decided I'm interested enough to pay for my own ticket. There are some shows where I feel I've seen them enough and don't need to give them another run (so the next few revivals of "JC Superstar", "Les Mis" and "Twelfth Night" are probably not getting a review), and there are genres where I don't feel I'm particularly knowledgable to give a useful review (which is why I've not reviewed Canberra's very active modern dance scene at all). But hopefully, a couple of you will continue to find it interesting and worth the read.

Arsenic and Old Lace, Canberra Repertory, Theatre 3, 9th June-2 July 2022

 Joseph Kesserling's 80-plus-year-old plot boiler has a core to it that's instantly engrossing - two gentle sweet little old ladies who's principle hobby is mass-murder with their own special concoction of wine with a couple of doses of Arsenicc, strycnine and cyanide. Otherwise dedicated to the utmost proper behaviour (to the extent that they gasp at the possiblity of ever fibbing about their hobby), they're part of a charmingly eccentric milleau - the brother who thinks he's a former political figure, regualar visits from the reverend and his eager-to-marry daughter, the nephew who's an uptight drama critic and the other nephew who's eccentricities lean distinctly sadistic. Their story has been delighting audiences on-and-off ever since, a rare case of American comedy embracing light toned lunacy rather than sledgehammer go-for-the-gut bellylaughs. 

For this production, Ian Hart has modified the script in some interesting ways to attempt to bring the play into the modern era (though it does end up feeling a little stranded between now-and-then, with characters having attitudes and making references that live more comfortably anywhere between 1942 and 2022), and a local context rather than the original's Brooklyn (though the geography of the adaptation's imaginary Queanbeyan is somewhat eccentric and involves some fairly speedy travel back and forth to various Canberra institutions). To nitpick in a couple of places - both Teddy Brewster (now Bobby Brewster for this adaptation) and Jonathan Brewster require impersonations of particular American types - Teddy obsessed with Theodore Roosevelt, Jonathan bearing a resemblance to Boris Karloff - the chages to Robert Menzies and Freddie Kruger, despite the best efforts of the actors involved, Robbie Matthews and Rob de Fries, don't quite land with full context - Bobby is still doing Teddy's enthusiastic "Charge!" and bugle calls that don't really sit as well with Menzies (besides which Menzies is not a particularly easy PM to hook an impersonation on - why not Hawke?); and De Fries' Kruger impersonation is down to a couple of light scars (rather than the all-encompasisng burn marks), a stripy shirt and a lurching manner (to be fair, Kruger is pretty much the only horror icon of the last several decades that doesn't wear a mask - though the reference to having the little-old-ladies recently having gone to see a movie with him accompanying a bloodthirsty young boy wears out as soon as you realise that the last "Nightmare on Elm Street" movie came out a dozen years ago).  

There are other slight indulgences with the script - it's a longish show played in three fairly full acts, which get slightly longer when Andrew Kay's delightful set proves adaptable to give us both an exterior AND an interior rather than the all-in-one-location original - the insistence on inserting bonus scenes outside the house drag out the evening a little too much for material which rarely has anything to add after the opening exposition dump. 

Fortunately the core of the show is well cast. Alice Ferguson has the slightly larger of the two central roles as Abby, the one who gets the big exposition scene where she explains and justifies why she's been so generous with the poisoning, and sells the character's self-justifying morality wonderfully - she sells the show's big leap-of-faith that she and her sister can be so convinced they're just doing the right thing. Nikki-Lynn Hunter forms a good double-act with Ferguson as the goofy chef of the pair, with an infectious grin and enthusiasm (and matches accents to Ferguson's native Scottish). Jack Shanahan has the hyperactive role as Mortimer, the figure who has to have everything explaind to him and who gets to run around trying to fix everything, and gives it a spin of massive-young-man-ego and utter disregard for anybody else that's going on around him - while he's theoretically the straight-man of the show, his normality is exposed as just as nuts as anybody elses. Robbie Matthews makes the slightly script-muddled character of Bobby somewhat endearing as he's eagerly led as long as people play into his fantasy. Rob de Fries has an enthusiastically sadistic creepy manner as he lurches across the stage threatening doom to everybody. Natalie Waldron gets the role that is most clearly 1940s - a girl who's biggest feature is to whine in the middle of the stage about how she wants to get married while the man in her life either ignores or berates her, and while she doesn't exactly modernise the cliche, at least she commits to it. Kayla Ciceran is suitablly weirdly drugged-out-of-her-mind as the sinister Dr Swan. David Bennett in a triple role gives good effect to each part that makes you not wonder very much why Queanbeyan has so many Oklahomans in it. Mae Schrembi gives enthusiasm to the Police Officer Who Has Written A Play and is very enthusiastic to explain all of it to people. 

All in all this is a production that hits most of the key delights of the play, even while inserting some slightly unnecessary tampering with the material. 

The initiation, Canberra youth theatre, Courtyard Studio, Canberra Theatre Centre, 16-19 June

 

On the hills of Black Mountain, six teenagers gather - only two of them are currently friends, with another a former friend til they started going to seperate schools. One of them seems to know more than she's telling, and soon they're all drawn into a sinister ritual that will draw more out of them than they're expecting in the course of one long night.

Cathy Petcoz's script slips between three genres, having elements of teen slasher,  straight teen drama and mythology. It doesn't always juggle all three successfully - most teen slashers tend to include moments of deliberate humor to defray the tendency for the horror to get giggles if not carefully managed, and this doesn't quite get around the audience giggle-factor. Petcoz is clearly aware of how classic teen slashers have fairly retrograde attitudes of sexuality and gender presentation, but here she's mostly just pointing out where the behaviour is problematic rather than feeling like the problems are being engaged with and combatted meaningfully. There's elements of the straight teen drama that more effectively raises the creeps inherent in simply being a teenager than the genre elements do - these are fears that don't go away as simply once the story is over and the monster is banished. A year after "Little Girls alone in the woods", this is another play that plays in some of the same mythological space, albiet less comfortably. 

There's strong meat here for the six performers to engage with - in particular, Lantsamy Carruthers impresses, giving a spine to the narrative as the instigating character - Tara Sexena is as close as this story gets to a "final girl" and takes her to places that most of her breatheren don't get to. Juniper Potter gives her character a rounded independent strength. Sylvie Burke and Zoe Harris take two roles which could be close to cliche as the private-school meanies and give them a few more dimensions. Harry Ziano is effectively befuddled and vulernable as the sole boy of the team.

Petcoz is doing double duty as writer and director - I do think a seond set of eyeballs may have wrestled more effectively with some of the challenges of doing this kind of genre mashup, but it's effective direction, buidling tension as the show progresses.

There's meat in this show but I don't know that this has come out of the developement process entirely clean - it does feel like some elements of the script are there more to engage with dramaturgical notes than to actually clarify and focus the narrative, and it's led to a script that is maybe trying to do a little too much - it's unfortunate that this has to be the show that follows a script as tried and tested as "Dags" for CYT and it's possible that any show after that one is going to look a little more raw, I hope that this does get a life beyond the courtyard as I think the young performers are well showcased here, but I do wish that the mix worked a little better for me.

Dubbo Championship Wrestling, Hayes Theatre Company, Hayes Theatre, 13 May-12 Jun 2022 (and Riverside Theater Parramatta 16-25 June)

 In Dubbo, a regional wrestling promotion is still rolling into its twentieth year, struggling by with declining viewership and aging competitors playing out the same old ritulaistic rivalries. The return of the promoter's daughter Rose after some mishaps in Sydney, plus her mum, the conniving Cheryl and her new man, disgraced American wrestler "Perfect Ten Ken", could bring on change, particuarly as DubboMania XX approaches. And inevitably everything's going to be worked out in the ring in a series of contrived matches for ridiculously high stakes on the way to the only possible ending, an unlikely but inevitable victory of good over evil. 

Rock musicals have huge passions, verging on the ludicrous, predictable plots and intense physical dancing. So does wrestling. So this is a rich field for a joyous theatrical spectacular, and the writers, brothers Daniel and James Cullen, know how to combine their sports movies cliches with loud rocking riffs and some goofy comedy to bring pure delight to an audience. Combined with Sheridan Harbridge's direction, Ellen Simpson's choreography and Tim Dashwood';s fight choreography, using the musical skills of Joe Accaria and Glenn Moorehouse, this is a fun night out of spectacle, song and emotional catharsis. 

The performers get great chances to show off their skills, whether it's Zoe Ioannou's moody protagonist Rose, Bishanyia' Vincent's villainous Cheryl, Justin Smith's goodhearted old galoot Ozzy, Terry Serio's rough dad Des, Aaron Tsindos's egocentric idiot Ken, Genevieve Lemon and Noni McMallum's double act as the Tradie Ladies, or William Tukia-Edwards, covering as the gently heroic Ron. 

This is certainly loud entertainment that indulges in stereotypes of old-style australianism and is sentimental and cliched, but it's also great fun, a true panto-in-tights, and a surprisingly well developed new Australian Musical that, if there's any justice, should be a great touring unit for years to come (with a cast of 8, a band of five and a simple but effective set, why wouldn't you tour this)? A delightful night out. 

Ghosting the Party, Griffin Theatre Company, Stables Theatre, 20 May-18 June 2022

 

This play is perfectly built for popular consumption - three generations of women deal with aging, life, their relationships with one another and the inevitability of death. It's material that is all-too-relatable to people of any age, looking right down the barrell at our mortality and examining it with honesty, wit and compassion. Andrea James stages it with verve and style, using the tiny Griffin stage and her three actresses to take us from fasionable bar to suburban home to 5pm discount dinner special - with two of the three women also getting a chance to switch into alternate roles for substantial cameos. 

Belinda Giblin plays the oldest, Grace, blunt in her aggravation with the frustrations of age and with her daughter, but still with compassion for her daughter and granddaughter. Jillian O'Dowd as the one in the middle, both mother and daughter, finding herself caught in the role of caregiver in two directions, is compelling as she attempts to put a sunny face on as much as possible while clearly deeply uncomfortable with the directions some of the conversations are going. Amy Hack as granddaughter Suzie lends a junior perspective, being slightly peterbed by the ways her elders act (and in a role that feels slightly under-written - she's basically limited to responding to the other two rather than really having an arc of her own). 

Isabel Gordon's set isn't one of the best Griffin sets, largely because it feels like it wants to be in a prosecnium space facing the audience straight on, rather than the usual Stables corner - though the chintzy decoration gives it a nice surburban homely vibe. 

This is surprisingly light material for the normally more sober-sided Griffin, and gleefully so - it could be accused of perhaps being a little slight and outside Griffin's remit of providing new directions for Australian theatre (rather than familiar crowd-pleasers) but it's still a worthwhile exercise.