Heathers, The Musical, Gunghalin College Theatre

30 years ago, "Heathers" was probably the coolest teenage rebellion film of the year. Combing a just-emerging Winona Ryder with a never-better Christian Slater as two teenagers who find themselves up against the most hostile high school of the 80s outside of actual slasher flicks, ruled over by the ultrabitchy and ultraglam Heathers. Daniel Waters script is incredibly quotable, the film is razor sharp and it entranced a generation of disenchanted teens (and anybody else who remembered teen angst).

Hitting off-broadway 4 years ago, the musical has had a pretty good launch worldwide (with productions in London and Sydney). And there's a good solid tunestack from composer Laurence O'Keefe and lyricist Kevin Murphy, although there's also a couple of cases of "this is a song because people remember that bit of the movie" and perhaps a little too much softening of the nastier edges of the original  - also the addition of material outside the perspective of the lead character, Veronica, while probably inevitable in any adaption that isn't going to produce a show that utterly overwhelms its lead, means we lose her personal snarky sarcastic tone (and some of the new material, being placed in the mouths of characters originally written as somewhat shallow peripheral figures, tends towards being pretty crude rather than clever or witty).

This production largely works well with the material it's got - it's well paced, it knows how to individualise and explore it's ensemble, and despite being written, co-directed, musical directed and choreographed by men, there's a refreshing lack of female objectification (there is a reasonable amount of male objectification with three of the male leads appearing in tighty whities, but the only problem I have with that is that I've known Pippin Carroll since he was around 13 and therefore it feels creepy looking at him all buffed up in a tight pair of jocks, but that's my own personal baggage). There's a major problem with the lighting, though, as significant scenes tend to be either under-lit or not lit at all, and this suggests either an overly rushed or not very well planned lighting-and-plotting process during tech (either cast don't know where their light is or the lighting team don't know where the cast is meant to be). Belle Nicol as Veronica has the snarky tone and a strong singing voice, although there are a couple of moments in the upper end of her register where she was straining a little and notes got approximate. Will Huang hosts his usual powerhouse voice and a truly alarmingly cool hairstyle with the twistedly troubled JD, although .. well, Will gets cast a fair bit in things and I usually like seeing him, but ... may the theatre gods forgive me, I do feel like I've seen bits of this performance before, meaning it, perhaps, very slightly lacked freshness. The three titular Heathers are great both as a unit and individually - their introductory trio "Candy Store" is a highlight of character, singing and choreography coming together to lock in this trio as menacing, fascinating and enthralling. Charlotte Gearside as head Heather (Chandler) has every merciless put-down right, moves like a goddess, sings like a demon and dances with precision and intent.  Mikayla Brady as the dopiest Heather (McNamara) has a great sense of blithe adorability up until the point when everything gets too much for her. Maddy Betts as second-in-command-Heather (Duke) seethes wonderfully until her time to take control arrives, at which point she's got all the terrifying authority of someone who just grabbed power for the first time. Pippin Carroll and Pierce Jackson as school bullies Kurt and Ram are a perfect pair of meatheads, embodying the characters brutally moronic presence.

As the previous may make clear, for me this production was a mixed bag - the material's got weaknesses that the production wasn't able to work around, and there were a couple of production hiccups that I couldn't quite get round. I think it's a fair attempt, but I do wish it was all-round stronger.

The Feather in the Web, Griffin, Stables Theatre

This is a fun look at a slightly surreal anti-romantic comedy, as the distinctly unconventional Kimberley (Claire Lovering) finds filling in as a caterer at the engagement party of Miles (Gareth Davies) and Lily (Michelle Lim Davidson) - and instantly falls in love with Miles. Ingratiating herself into the lives of Miles and Lily in an attempt to win Miles for herself, she rips apart the world around them, full of karaoke, improv classes and high-powered business. Nick Coyle's script does feel a little like a series of sketches rather than a sustained narrative (in particular, the first three or four scenes, before Kimberley meets Miles, are entertaining but feel slightly like padding in retrospect - theoretically they serve to establish her, but she comes pretty fully formed from the moment she comes on stage, and none of this background material is particularly relevant). But the show's consistently funny and, in Ben Winspear's production, keeps constantly moving as Davies, Davidson and the show's fourth actor, the luminous Tina Bursill, switch roles constantly throughout the show (I must admit, I'd considered Davies a fine actor who tended towards one or two stage personas, but he showed a lot more versatility than I was expecting  - but Bursill is the highlight whatever role she's switched into, whether it be Miles' snobby mother, a harried improv teacher or a randomly drunk karaoke participant). It even manages, somehow, to come through with a poignant ending as we get a sense that Kimberley's doomed pursuit may be better than the conventional happy ending Miles and Lily are headed for. Provocative, clever and constantly surprising.

Shrek the Musical, Free Rain Theatre Company, The Q

It's been a while since I've reviewed a local musical on this blog - well, excluding Dogfight, which I did about a month and a half ago. It's partially that I've felt a lot of the material is over-familiar to me, partially that ... well, have you seen the film blog? I've been reviewing a LOT of films lately, and that's taken a bit of priority over theatre.

But anyway, theatre is my first love, and it's good to see a "not previously given a production in Canberra" show. I have seen "Shrek: The Musical" before (on Broadway, a bit under a decade ago), and as material goes it's good but has a coupla flaws. This production goes along with that - there's some highlights, but also some clunky bits.

For a start, this does have a teensy bit of a running time issue. Excluding intermission, this is a good 40 minutes longer than the movie, pushing out to a slightly young-kid-challenging 2 and a half hours (there were definite whinges from the boys sitting behind me near the end). And while the movie was pretty good about playing tight and irreverent, the musical occasionally finds itself a little bogged down. David Lindsay-Abaire (book and lyrics) and Jeanine Tesori (music) are highly qualified people (Tesori's done one of my favorite scores of recent years, "Fun Home", and Lindsay-Abaire did the clever book for "High Fidelity" and has a great backlog of plays from the sassily sexy "THe Little Dog Laughed" to the thinkily political "Good People") but this does suffer slightly from clunkiness. In particular, the titular Shrek slightly suffers from having a dearth of solos in act one and a overload of introspective solos in act two (both of them within the space of about ten minutes) - we don't really get a chance to just be with him before he's invaded by all the other fairy tale characters and off doing plot things, and by the time he's given space to just be him, he's at his lowest ebb and we get two songs with pretty similar purposes (both good songs, just ... there's one too many). In general, there's a little too much time spent in the denoument (not only do we get both of Shrek's solos, we also get a group number for the fairy tale characters who haven't been seen for about two hours by the time they come back, and it's kinda difficult to care about them or think of their number as anything but padding at a time when the show desperately needs to be finding its way to the ending).

Having said that, there's great stuff in here. First there's Max Gambale - who I'm sure I've raved enough about previously. This is the first time he's basically carried most of a show and ... while the material doesn't always serve him as well as it might, he sings it strong and mighty and hits both the cantankerousness and the soulfulness with aplomb. Laura Murphy plays Princess Fiona in a style somewhat consistent with her loony Leonora in "Cry Baby" and it actually works wonderfully (it helps she has lyrical assistance - one of her songs describes her as "a bit bipolar" and she takes that and runs with it in an adorably nutty way. Joel Hutchings finds his calling in the loose and goofy comedy of Donkey (he may look like a leading man but being a goofball suits him so very much), and Martin Searles is a hilariously diabolical and vain Farquaad. Tegan Braithwaite as Dragon has a great voice and soulful presence that gives a character with not-very-much-stage-time a genuine power and, eventually, pathos (her song's the one major improvement over Broadway, where the dragon proved to be one of those things the show hadn't quite worked out how to handle yet).

There's very impressive sets and costumes too - Martin Searles' double duty doesn't mean he's scrimped on some fairly elaborate sets (hooray, no projections!) that move the setting nicely with minimal fuss (The Q is not the easiest place to do this kinda thing either - being a fairly big stage with no flytower), and Fiona Leach covers the ridiculously hefty costume demands with skill and glamour.

Yalaria Rodger's direction is a mixed success - she gets a lot of the simpler scenes between small groups of characters very well, and is able to frame strong stage pictures (including using bits of the Q I haven't seen in use before!). But the ensemble scenes between the fairy tale characters are a bit of a mess - both of their songs lack clear focus on who's singing a particular line at any one time, meaning it becomes a bit of an exercise in searching down who's actually got this line (killing a lot of good jokes). Musical direction from Katrina Tang and Ian McLean is consistently strong, and Michelle Heine's choreography  is witty and silly and spectacular whenever required to be.

All in all, this is a mixed bag - a production with significant strengths and a couple of significant weaknesses. It's worth it for the cast and a lot of the production, even if I have a few issues with elements.

Calamity Jane, ONe Eyed Man productions in association with Neglected Musicals and Hayes Theatre Co, Belvoir Theatre

This one's been doing the rounds a while (originally hitting the stage at the Hayes last year, it toured to Canberra in August before playing its Sydney season at Belvoir, but due to different timings of season announcements, I'd booked for the Belvoir season before I realised there was a Canberra season, so ... here's this one). But it comes fresh and easy, an entertainingly loose version of the 1953 movie musical and its slightly lesser known 1961 stage adaptation that brings out the goofy fun in the material. Playing very much to the audience - both the one onstage, and also reaching out into the one in the auditorium, it captures a pure sense of fun.

The main issues are with the material, which, well, is 55 years old. Inspired/borrowed/ripping-off the recently-successful "Annie Get Your Gun", this is another look at a gun-toting Western woman who bustles up against a male lead who's somewhat jealous, and sees her involved in showbusiness. This is somewhat better about maintaining the female lead's dignity (although it still gets a bit messy in act two), and gives Calamity a full community to be part of and beloved by, rather than the slight sideshow oddity that Annie Oakley tends to stay. Even if the song stack isn't quite as strong as Irving Berlin's masterpiece, this holds true as pretty good material, and Virginia Gay makes the uncouth and ungainly Calamity a wonderfuly endearing heroine, singing bold and brassily and otherwise goofing and playing around as the plot demands. Laura Bunting as the more feminine Katie Brown is gently appealing and not too goody-goody, and Sheridan Harbridge as the inelegant ingenue Susan and the brassily bitchy Adelaide Adams is equally apealling. There's a little bit of stiffness to the two male romantic leads - Anthony Gooley's Wild Bill Hickock comes across a bit vaguely in act one and when he becomes more important in act two, it somwehat feels as if he's being bundled in just so we can get to a hapy ending - and Matthew Pearce's Lt DAnny Gilmartin never really is more than a nice set of abs and a charming tenor. In the comedy roles, Rob Johnson as the hapless Francis Fryer and Tony Taylor as pushy proprietor Henry Miller hit every laugh they're going for and then some with alomb.

Look, this is mostly a delight, and my act two quibbles are, in the bigger scheme of things, pretty marginal - in a season at Belvoir that has been deeply uneven, this has given the most straightforward pleasure I've had in that venue. And Virgina Gay's Calamity is a thing to treasure. But dammit, I wish I loved it all the way through rather than feeeling a bit "oh, yeah, this is the plot we had to have" in act two.

The Misanthrope, Bell Shakespeare and Griffin Theatre Company, Playhouse, Sydney Opera House

Moliere's comedies often feel a tad formulaic - one or two characters are obsessed by something (money in "The Miser", religion in "Tartuffe", hypochondria in "The Imaginary Invalid", literature in "The Learned Ladies" etc), most of their household tries to dissuade them, their obsession starts to threaten young lovers, eventually the obsession is broken and the young lovers get married. "The Misanthrope" is a bit different, as Moliere doesn't entirely disagree with the titular obsession - the dislike of human kind and their foibles - in particular, in this play, the polite fictions that society runs upon with small talk and false praise. It's also far more of a social rather than domestic comedy with most of the action taking place in fashionable salons and drawing rooms.

This production fiddles with the timeframe, milieu, and genders of a few of the cast - most noticeably, the titular Misanthrope switches from male to female, their beloved Celimene becomes the male Cymbeline, and events move from the 17th century aristocracy to the 21st century fashionable world of pop music. Not all of this works, but I don't know that it's necessarily the updating that's at fault so much as particular aspects of the translation - Justin Fleming's rhyming dialogue is a little too keen on indulging in cheap Australian colloquialisms for quick laughs rather than really delving into the characters and their issues - and while that's worked with Moliere's other plays, "THe Misanthrope" really does get pretty deep into philosophical argument and takes its characters a bit more seriously than this production really chooses to. Cymbeline in particular suffers - the translation I know best, the Tony Harrison one from the 70s, treats her as a delightfully bitchy and witty figure who's seductive power is never in doubt, while this version has him being largely a standoffish himbo (Ben Gerrard gets to show off very impressive abs, but we never quite get the sense why he's an object of romantic fascination for about half the cast). Danielle Cormick does capture a lot of Alceste's frustration with the world, and the age gap between her and Cymbeline isn't, in theory, a bad idea, but it pushes things into shallow infatuation more than I think the work requires. Rebecca Massey as Alceste's more reasonable (or alternatively, more pliable) friend Phillipa, shows why I've always loved seeing her on stage - she's funny and pragmatic and always enjoyable. The remaining cast are pretty reasonable but not given quite as much material to work with as these key three.

Dan Potra's set gives a convincing air of a music-video studio, slowly stripped of clutter as the cast get closer to truth, and the music by MAx Lambert and Rodger Lock has a chilly elegance that suits Cymbeline pretty well. And this isn't a complete writeoff - Lee Lewis is too skilled to completely fail. But I do wish that the central dynamic worked just that little bit better and the script respected the show's "villain" just a little bit more.

Dogfiht, ANU Musical Theatre Company, Belconnen Community Theatre

"Dogfight" was an early work for the powerhouse team of Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, who've since succeeded wildly both on Broadway ("Dear Evan Hansen") and in Hollywood ("La La Land", "The Greatest Showman"). For all that, it's a piece that has its natural home in a smaller theatre - the focus is mostly pretty tight on the two protagonists, with everybody else in the background. The genre is familiar stuff (three soldiers on their last day before shipping out meet up with girls for a night on the town ... it's pretty much "On the Town"!), but with a couple of harsher twists - the boys are shipping out to Vietnam, not World War 2, and the girls are being chosen as part of a "Dogfight" - the guy who brings the most "unattractive" girl wins a cash prize.

Its' a clever choice for a student musical theatre company - it has depth, it has writers with good credentials, it's got a lot of roles for a young student-aged cast. I must admit I don't entirely love the show on this presentation - Pasek and Paul's songs tend in this one to be very much of the "the idea of the song is in the title, and it repeats it as much as possible" persuasion, with not a lot of interesting development or storytelling going on within the songs. And they never entirely get past the simple problem with the scenario- you don't really want boy to get girl because boy starts as a bit of a creep and, while he attempts to reform later, he mostly ends up only as an apologetic creep rather than anyone likeable. THe musical form isn't always known for the greatest character depth, but in this case nearly everybody is written just a little too thin - the occasional character notes that spring up feel throwaway rather than anything that really shapes something rounded.

In this production, there's a couple of standout things. The best material in the show is written for the female lead, Rose, played here by an exceptional Tegan Braithwaite. Her innocent open-book attitude means she's the one character in the show who's really engaging and interesting, and she manages to make believable that Rose would return to a guy who's never really quite worthy of her. The band under musical director Jack Quail is tight and strong, delivering funky rhythms throughout. Set design by Kat Carrington is the best I've ever seen in the tricky space of the Belconnen Community theatre - it's never been my favourite Canberra performance space, but she makes the best case for it I've seen. Daisy Sibtain as Marcy is impressive in the brief moments she has material, playing sardonic and bitter as the one character who seems fully self-aware and has everybody else pegged pretty well too.

I didn't regret seeing this - it's a chance to see a show that I doubt I'll see many other places - but between only being a middling show and some less-impressive performance in the rest of the ensemble, I can't call this a complete success. But it's a nice demosntration of some of the strengths of ANU musical theatre.

A Taste of Honey, Belvoir Street Theatre

Shelagh Denaney's play about a teenage girl and her fractured relationship with both her mum and the various men in her life was a sensation in 1958 - rough as guts, sexually provocative and hilarious. But sixty years later, it falls flat in this production - partially due to yesterday's provication being today's old-hat, partially due to a production that holds back and feels a little distant from the hot emotional material on offer.

I've seen Taylor Ferguson be highly skilled before, but here, she's just not the rebel the role demands. She's a sullen, discontented teen,but her rebellion is never really very present in her performance - she's more mildly grumbling than actively rebelling. Her self-indulgent mum played by the equally talented Genevive Lemon never really gets the full status of a full blown monster - again, she's too damn mild. The first act in particular drags, as both mother and daughter take up with two separate men - JoshMcConville was engaging as recently as "The Sugar House" back in May, but here there's just not that much material for him to bite into, similarl for Thuso Lenwape as the daughter's merchant navy beau. Things improve in the second act as the daughter drifts into a platonic relationship with Tom Anson Mesker's gay lodger, and there's some warmth between them, but the payoff doesn't quite feel worth the setup.

Mel Page's set keeps up too much of a distance from the audience to the cast - it's not THAT different to the design for "Hir" last year, but while that got out and grabbed the audience and dragged them into the low-budget housing nightmare its cast lived in, this one feels too much like a museum where the passion never crosses into the audience - it's period, but so what. Australian accents are used but, again, don't really do much to get this material to emotionally engage the audience .

So it's another dead fish from Belvoir. Hoping for beter next time.