Green Room Award Nominations: Another Year of WTF?

February 21, 2012 //  
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Melbourne’s Green Room Award nominations were announced today. A full list can be found at Stage Whispers. The Malthouse picked up a staggering number of noms – 28 – a bit surprising given the 2011 theatre season was so patchy, but more understandable in light of their dance program and the strength of their design team. Good luck to them. The slew of noms to the Malthouse isn’t my concern this year.

There’s always something about these awards that smacks of utter disorganization and amateurism. In 2012, it is two glaring omissions. The first is that Red Stitch Actors’ Theatre received no nominations at all. That’s objectively ridiculous, especially in light of Nadia Tass’s masterly production of The Aliens, and Brett Ludeman’s luminous performance in it. Did the judges even see the show? I doubt it.

The second bizarre feature of this year’s awards is the lack of an award for Best Musical. Come on, people. Why? Musical theatre is one of Melbourne’s great strengths and it wasn’t a weak year by any stretch – not weak enough to avoid giving the award anyway. I’d be interested to hear a rational explanation for this decision. I can’t think of any.

Whether an explanation will be forthcoming is an open question. Who judges [More...]

Raoul: Perth Festival Review

February 19, 2012 //  
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The most popular reviews on this blog are always the ones I write for free. Grumble. Here’s one from the Perth Festival. I’ve been here all week, and some of the theatre has been incredible. More to come when I return to Melbourne tomorrow.

James Thiérrée with Elephant, in Raoul.

 

Raoul, directed designed and performed by James Thiérrée, Regal Theatre, Subiaco, Until Feb 26.

James Thiérrée has a theatrical pedigree as extraordinary as his talent. He’s the grandson of Charlie Chaplin and the great-grandson of the American playwright Eugene O’Neill. If his grandad had been alive to see Raoul, he might have felt pride and a twinge of envy. It is an incredible achievement. If you’re in Perth or Adelaide for their respective Arts Festivals, it’d pay to book your tickets early before word of mouth spreads and it’s too late. The opening night audience gave a standing ovation and applauded for nearly ten minutes.

Raoul mingles mime, clowning, puppetry, illusionism, and spectacular design to create theatre suffused with strange wonder and a precarious, wistful joy. It’s utterly unique – the most apt comparison [More...]

Blogs, Trolls and Critics: The Rights and Wrongs of Negative Reviewing

February 17, 2012 //  
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The Sh*t on your Play controversy has raged online over the last week, from Crikey to the Guardian theatre blog. Useful links to relevant comment can be found at Alison Croggon’s Theatre Notes. My contribution to the discussion, which appeared on the opinion page of The Age (16/2), is below.

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The celebrated theatre critic Kenneth Tynan wrote in his diaries: “90% of a critic’s job is to demolish the bad to make way for the good.” You could quibble over percentages, but there’s no question negative reviews are integral to arts criticism. They’re also great fun: bracing to write (Dr. Johnson liked to say writing in the negative mode put iron in his soul), and entertaining to read.

The dark art of the slag has made news twice in the last week. The inaugural Hatchet Job Award in the UK – a prize given “not to punish bad writing, but to reward brave, trenchant and learned reviewing” – went to Adam Mars-Jones for his spirited take-down of Michael Cunningham’s novel By Nightfall.

Closer to home, Australia’s independent online news site The Global Mail ran its first arts coverage, a profile by Stephen Crittenden of a Sydney theatre blogger who [More...]

Schism, A View Of Concrete, Two by Two

February 15, 2012 //  
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I’m in Perth this week for the Festival. Before I start on events in the Wild West, here are some Melbourne reviews I’ve been too lazy to post. Oh, and comments have been reactivated for all and sundry, after a hiatus of many months.

Pippa Bainbridge in Schism Photo: Sarah Walker

 

Schism, by Melanie Bainbridge, La Mama, Carlton Courthouse, Until Feb 19.

Twins have long fascinated science, and play an important role in debates over the roles of nature and nurture in human behaviour. Melanie Bainbridge’s Schism, performed by her sister Pippa, welds the trope to a dystopian vision, fuelled by despair at the destructiveness of the way we live now.

The show is played in the round on an elevated stage ringed by petri dishes; the lighting harsh and clinical, bruising to blues and purples; the sound design an insistent and unnerving array of ambient distortions.

We enter to find Bainbridge in a lab coat, spewing forth robotic sound-bites about monozygotic twins. She soon splits into twin sisters who have been separated since infancy, and are the unwitting subjects of an experiment. One sister has Asperger’s, the other [More...]

Sovereign Hill: Review

February 8, 2012 //  
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Sovereign Hill, Ballarat.

Sovereign Hill, Golden Point, Ballarat.

Last year, I used Sovereign Hill as a touchstone for bad theatre, the kind that takes real stories and traduces them through naff re-enactment and tacky showmanship. An indignant email from Barry Kay – the Hill’s ‘Interpretive Theatre Manager’ – followed, together with an invitation to check the place out, which is how I wound up traipsing around one of Victoria’s major tourist attractions on Australia Day.

If we’re honest, Australia Day itself is a shonky bit of stagecraft. Australians have always had a healthy irreverence for authority – the best of us cultivate distaste for fulsome, American-style displays of national sentiment – and Indigenous Australians rightly point to January 26 as a day of infamy.

In Ballarat, bogan theatrics mingled with affirmations that our country’s at its luckiest when our boundless plains are shared. Yes, there was the obligatory V8 ute tearing through the main drag, Aussie flags protruding, kelpie stiff against the wind; but there were also young African Australians draped in the same flag, ‘PRIDE’ zinced over their beautiful black skin, arm in arm with [More...]

A Chorus Line: Review

February 8, 2012 //  
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A Chorus Line comes to Melbourne.

A Chorus Line, Book: James Kirkwood & Nicholas Dante, Music: Marvin Hamlisch, Lyrics: Edward Kleban, Her Majesty’s Theatre, From Feb 4.

When I went to ballet school in the 80s, we had a special annual screening of A Chorus Line, the 1985 film version starring Michael Douglas. It was a pilgrimage, really. Our ballet mistress corralled us into the minibus with a look of religious fervour, as though we were to be inducted into some essential mystery of dance that had previously eluded us – something beyond fifth position and care instructions for lycra. A Chorus Line continues to excite the dance-mad like no other musical, and the latest Australian production is performed with terrific energy and skill. Audiences are in for a treat.

Well before our current obsession with X Factor or Dancing with the Stars, A Chorus Line tapped into the thirst for behind-the-scenes glimpses of performers in the cutthroat world of showbiz. The entire musical takes place at an audition for spots in a Broadway chorus line. Set and costumes are minimised, allowing Michael Bennett’s [More...]

Yes, Prime Minister: Review

February 8, 2012 //  
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The Melbourne production of Yes, Prime Minister

Yes, Prime Minister, by Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, Comedy Theatre, From Feb 4.

Political comedy comes and goes as elected governments do. It seldom endures, and even more rarely becomes, as has Yes, Prime Minister, the inimitable emblem of a whole tradition of comedy. The original show survives, and stands up well thirty years later, as a salient achievement of British high satire. Not that you can tell from this disastrously feeble Australian production.

We do not have form on commercial productions of foreign comedy in a strong tradition. There must be a loose cog in the sausage-machine. Time and again, such shows have been lacklustre. Spamalot! wasn’t a fabulous musical, sure, but the undercooked lameness of its Melbourne performance made it less fun than half an hour in front of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. And the remount of the 60s sex farce Boeing Boeing! was about as swift and titillating as watching Shaun Micallef, in slow-motion, bashing his Y-fronts clean with a rock.

If we can’t capture the irrepressible whimsy of Monty Python, or the zany physicality [More...]

Cinderella: Review

February 8, 2012 //  
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Victorian Opera's Cinderella panto.

Cinderella, by Richard Gill, Victorian Opera, Her Majesty’s Theatre, Until Jan 28

My first experience of the theatre was a pantomime. On the Mornington Peninsula in the early 80s, that was pretty much all that was on offer. It was wild and woolly amateur fare, with pirates and convicts, silly sing-a-longs and cross-dressing, and the liberal use of a shepherd’s crook to rid the stage of the talentless – a la Red Simon’s comic variety quest, Red Faces, on Hey Hey It’s Saturday.

Panto plays an important role in bringing children to the magic of theatre and it’s a style for which we have a national affinity. Richard Gill’s Cinderella reworks a panto first shown at Her Majesty’s in 1914. The fairy-tale is delivered through ludicrous rhyme, with clever composition that serves to educate even as it entertains.

Younger kids must help the Fairy Godmother (Suzanne Johnston) cast spells by singing their ABCs, and everyone will smile at ‘The Willies’ – an operatic nod to the Wiggles – who shuffle the action along in four-part harmony. Between them and Buttons (James [More...]

The New Black: Review

February 8, 2012 //  
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The New Black

The New Black, by Marcus Corowa and Stephen Lloyd Helper, The Arts Centre, Until Feb 4.

The Carnegie 18 series at the Arts Centre is an inspired idea. It devotes space to the development of new Aussie musical theatre: there’s a fair bit kicking around, and what it most needs is a process where it can mature into something ready for the commercial stage.

The program showcased a classic example of this phenomenon with The New Black – a brassy, big-hearted take on the pressures of being a successful urban Aborigine. Jim (Leeroy Bliney) is a lawyer. He has made it in the unforgiving world of corporate law, but his life of fast cars and Armani suits doesn’t come without grumbling over positive discrimination from his workmates, or the odd racist slur when courting his new girlfriend (Chelsea Gibb).

Nor can the family Jim left behind understand his coldness, his reluctance to get involved in family troubles now that he has made it in the big smoke. Being assimilated into the corporate ratrace is one thing – someone needs to [More...]

Midsumma Reviews: Rigor Mortis, Road Movie, Girls Do Gertrude

January 27, 2012 //  
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Midsumma continues apace. Here are three more reviews from the queer indie scene.

Rigor Mortis, By Christopher Bryant, Theatre on a Horse, Owl & Pussycat, 34 Swan St Richmond, Until Jan 29

Queer trash zombie fun @ Rigor Mortis. Photo: Sarah Walker.

When Bruce LaBruce’s L.A. Zombie was banned from the Melbourne Film Festival in 2010, it gave queer zombie art a cachet it didn’t necessarily deserve. The flick was bad and boring. Rigor Mortis is bad and funny: trashmeisters will glory in its camp excesses, and there’s a rabid commitment to kitsch in the acting that might impress even serious-minded theatregoers.

The show is billed as a loose adaptation of that weirdest of ancient Greek plays, Euripides’ Alcestis, mashed into the cult bible of crap Hollywood parenting, Mommie Dearest. For once, it is what it says on the box.

A Z-grade horror actress (Kristina Benton) is murdered by her scheming director (Trelawney Edgar) and a jealous co-star (Jack Beeby), leaving behind a bereft husband (Christopher Bryant) and a seriously hormonal daughter (Emma Palackic). When the husband turns to a Slavic carnie with supernatural [More...]

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