2020 was a real 2020 of a year, not least in local theatre. With so many shows cancelled or deferred til 2021, it's important to look at the shows we did get a chance to see, and to praise what was great about them.
First of all, there's my favourie musical of the year - never mind that I only got to see two musical productions this year, "HMS Pinafore" is still my favourite production of a musical all year. Kate Gaul's production gave a free-wheeling, funny, delightful gloss to the Gilbert and Sullivan perennial, finding the right moments to play serious and giving us performers performing in a gorgeously gift-wrapped show that maintained all its energy in the Q in a little toybox stage-within-a-stage. It's playing Sydney again in Paramatta as part of the Sydney festival and will hopefully continue to delight audiences as much as it possibly can.
In local plays, my favourite is one I wouldn't have expected - Liz Bradley's production of "What the Butler Saw" - I'd always found Orton's play a bit of a cold fish on the page, with its brutal take on farce feeling more cruel than the genre's usual take. Bradley's production leaned into this by empasising the painful reality of the events, the blithe indifference towards justice and the wild improbability of the deus ex-machina in a farce that was twice as funny for being twice as honest about the pain.
In performers I need to give special mention to Amy Dunham, who scored twice in two very different roles - as the petulant Rose-of-Sharon in "The Grapes of Wrath", singing a gorgeous "Down to the River" and drawing us into the emotional final moments of the play, and as the cleaning-obsessed Jane Hopcroft in "Absurd Person Singular", causing constant delight with her nervously demented energy. Gutsy performances that went all-in, truly WILI worthy.
Goodbye 2020, you had moments of glory but will not be missed. Onwards towards a renaissance of a 2021.
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