HMS Pinafore, Hayes Theatre Co, The Q

"HMS Pinafore" has been delighting audiences pretty much from the point where it opened in 1878 - the first big Gilbert and Sullivan hit, it's locked in its immortal status by, like most great pop culture, getting referenced in "The Simpsons" ("Cape Feare", where Sideshow Bob performs a one man production for the family). And it retains a lot of its delights, some 140 years later, from Sullivan's gorgeous score and Gilbert's jokes that still retain relevance and hilarity ("When I Was a Lad" will forever be hilarious as long as men with no qualifications better than an ability to say "yes" the right number of times get to head national institutions). The simple story of a humble sailor in love with a captain's daughter plays with ideas of class, responsibility and romance in delightful ways, with an ending as brisk and hilarious as possible (just don't look at the logical implications too hard).

Kate Gaul's production brings out all these delights and a few bonus ones. After a couple of years of enjoying the Hayes productions in their own venue but not necesarily on tour (sound issues with "Little Shop of Horrors", intimacy issues with "Sweet Charity"), it's a delight to see they've worked out how to tour these - a simple stage-within-a-stage is the toybox a tight ensemble of 12 get to play in (many of them both as performers and as musicians - there's no pit, just a case of performers picking up a violin or a trombone or guitar to accompany the action, alongside Musical Director Zara Stanton, who also accompanies on  piano (or clarinet, or accordian, or whatever else she has nearby).  There's a slight panto-quality to it (with Thomas Campbell playing Little Buttercup as panto dame, and Bernie Palin as Ralph Rackstraw as principal boy) that helps, adding a bit of eyebrow glitter to glam up the occasion, and using the excuse of Sir Joseph Porter's arrival for everybody to get into party gear that they keep for much of the rest of the evening, it lets cast members bounce muck around with genders quite happily.  It's careful to keep the one serious bit (the emotional too-and-throwing between Palin's Rackstraw and Hanna Greenshield's Josephine as she first rejects him for his class-inferiority, then rejoins him) to true emotional effect - for the first time in a while, I actually did get caught up in the usually tedious stuff between tenor-and-soprano (oh, just ask me how I feel about Marius and Cosette, I'm sure I'll ramble on for a coupla hours).

This is fluff, but it's quality fluff expressing joy, wit and charm, and is absolutely worth catching.

The Grapes of Wrath, Canberra Rep, Theatre 3

Steinbeck's classic novel isn't entirely a natural for theatre adaptation (in the way that, say, "Of Mice and Men" absolutely is) - it moves over one and a half thousand miles from Oklahoma to California, it splits focus between a number of different members of the Joad family, and much of it takes place on a small overladen truck. And Frank Galati's adaptation doesn't entirely solve this - there's still a lot of Joads to keep track of, not all of whom really get fully fleshed out. There are also a couple of places where it feels repetitious - the Joads are warned twice what will await them on the California fruit farms, then it's enacted on them - and having ensemble members play similar roles in each of these sequences only emphaises it here - it doesn't come across so much as foreshadowing as "haven't we seen this scene before?"

There's moments of glory in this production, but there's also moments of messyness. Much of the ensemble work is unfocussed - action happening everywhere that means whatever the main story is gets lost  - and there's a lot of physical props that means that, when actions require miming (in the burial and flood sequences, for example), we're stuck in a no-man's land between literalism and symbolism. The Joad's truck takes up so much stage space that there's no sense these people are crammed in together - everybody has plenty of space to spread out in comfort.

At the same time, there are moments that do play like gangbusters, particularly the famous "I'l be there" sequence between Tom and Ma Joad late in the play. Plus you get Amy Dunham singing "Down in the River to Pray" in that heartbreaking voice of hers. And those are both worth seeing. I just wish the rest wasn't so damn scrappy.