Steaming Great Wodges of Reviews from the Comedy Festival

April 20, 2012 //  
Leave a Comment

I’ve been overwhelmed by the Comedy Festival, which ends this weekend. Here’s a wide selection of reviews if you’re looking for a giggle before it finishes.

Angus Grant's Contact

Contact! By Angus Grant 2.5 STARS

The Arts Centre, Until April 29

$44-$32

Netball. Opera. Why not? If you can wangle Jerry Springer into a libretto, you can probably do anything. Angus Grant’s Contact! is a cheesy operetta that goes behind the scenes of a suburban netball team. It’s packed with hormones and teen spirit, training tips and scrag-fights, girls with coltish thighs and a near-erotic obsession with horses trilling dizzily as they sweat it out on court. And naturally, it ain’t over until the mole on Wing Attack sings.

Grant’s first attempt at composition is encouraging, even if it isn’t always easy on the ears. The score roves from parody of high Romantic opera to jaunty cap-doffing to Gilbert and Sullivan, and the latter works best, with the orchestra heavily skewed towards strings and mallet instruments. This lends it a cartoonish quality, especially effective during the comic choreography of the training sessions.

The plot hangs on team tensions created when [More...]

Melbourne International Comedy Festival: Reviews

April 2, 2012 //  
4 Comments

The Melbourne International Comedy Festival returns in 2012 with over 400 shows. It’s a shaggy behemoth, Australia’s largest arts event, and it’s ready to crush all but the most intrepid reviewers in its giant maw. Helen Razer has a good survival guide to the fest here. Naturally, I’ve already seen quite a few acts. Here’s a quick selection of reviews, with more to follow in the coming weeks.

Celia Pacquola

DELAYED, Celia Pacquola, 4 stars

Melbourne Town Hall, Tues-Sun, 8:30pm (7:30pm Sun), Until April 22.

$23-28

The English language has silly words it doesn’t need except for Scrabble purposes. Words like ‘vejazzle’. Then there are the words it lacks but should contain. A term that refers to a gay man’s crush on a straight woman, for instance, would be useful to describe how I feel about Celia Pacquola.

The best stand-up comedians resemble trapeze artists, leaving you alive to the knife-edge daredevilry of what they do while making it look effortless. Pacquola is in that league. Her ebullient stage presence and mischievous humour make you want to giggle from the [More...]

Red: Review

March 28, 2012 //  
Leave a Comment

Red, by John Logan, MTC, Sumner Theatre, Until May 5

Colin Friels (L) and Andre de Vanny in Red.

For an artist who strenuously opposed the commodification of art, Mark Rothko’s success caused him deep discomfort. His Seagram Murals embodied the conflict. At first, he accepted a prestigious and lucrative commission to paint an abstract series for an exclusive Manhattan restaurant, The Four Seasons. Years later, after the works were nearly complete, Rothko dined there, amid the self-important chatter of New York’s elite. Appalled, he reneged on the contract, and kept the art for himself.

John Logan’s Red is a dense two-hander that takes us into Rothko’s studio as he paints the murals. It hinges on the relationship between the artist (Colin Friels) and his assistant (Andre de Vanny). Refreshingly for the MTC, the play requires an intelligent, attentive audience to work its spell, and there’s nothing dumbed down about its content, which surges from Socratic argument over important developments in 20th [More...]

The Green Rooms Are Letting Us Down: Should Melbourne have a Critics Award for Theatre?

March 26, 2012 //  
26 Comments

All kinds of objections can be raised against arts awards. Ray Lawler gave the most common when he declined to be involved in the founding of the Green Room Awards in 1982. The playwright wished the awards well, but believed that competition was inimical to what the arts – and especially a form as collaborative as theatre – should stand for.  

The obvious riposte is that the strife of creative competition has ushered in some of the greatest periods in theatrical history. Would ancient Greek drama have flourished and been remembered without annual play contests? Would English Renaissance theatre – the decades that gave us Shakespeare and Jonson and Marlowe and Webster – have happened without London’s many playhouses and the intense rivalry between them?

Celebrating artistic achievement through awards has benefits, but only if the awards themselves have lustre and credibility. Unfortunately, most of the cachet the Green Room Awards now possess derives from the opposite of competition. As Melbourne’s only performing arts awards, they hold a monopoly. It really doesn’t matter how shoddy and compromised the judging processes become. If the alternative is no awards at all, [More...]

Australia’s Arts Festivals, The Big Picture: Does Melbourne Need an International Arts Festival?

March 26, 2012 //  
Leave a Comment

I’ve been to all of Australia’s major Arts Festivals  this year, and Melbourne’s compares badly. Does Melbourne need an international arts festival in the 21st century? If we do, what is its purpose within the cultural life of our city? And are we willing to fund the festival so it is as lustrous as its interstate siblings?  A few dinner party conversations in those questions. Be good to have a free discussion on the subject, but please keep it respectful.

A shot from this year's Adelaide Festival Hub: Barrio.

Last week, the Melbourne Festival backed down on its plan to move from October to February-March in the face of stiff opposition. Had the calendar change succeeded, it would have put the event in the same quarter as most of Australia’s major arts festivals: the Sydney Festival in January, the Perth International Arts Festival in February and the Adelaide Festival in March. I travelled to all three this year to take a comparative look at where our festival sits in the big picture, and came away with a strong sense that the Melbourne Festival is in [More...]

Le Gateau Chocolat, Awake: Review

March 26, 2012 //  
Leave a Comment

Le Gateau Chocolat, The Famous Spiegeltent, Until March 26.

Le Gateau Chocolat, with assorted drag terrorists.

As international guest star of the first Melbourne Cabaret Festival last year, Le Gateau Chocolat will be familiar to cabaret connoisseurs. The rest of you, prepare to be blown away.

Only a handful of performers can harness the art of drag into something liberating and superhuman. Our own Paul Capsis can do it; Le Gateau Chocolat is in the same league.

The Nigerian-born diva possesses extraordinary physical and vocal amplitude. He’s large but limber, slipping into a glitzy range of lycra bodysuits and outrageous frocks. He also boasts a huge, resonant, operatic bass that can melt into the honeyed softness of song-speech, or bring the house down with quaking big-notes that seem to start from deep within the earth beneath him.

Backed by piano and cello, he powers through classic show-tunes like the Streisand vehicle Don’t Rain on my Parade, and draws us into an almost whispered poignancy with his interpretation of Radiohead’s Creep. He raises the rafters with the aria Nessun Dorma, and slides glistening into a mire of [More...]

Beyond the Neck, Odyssey: Reviews

March 21, 2012 //  
5 Comments

The latest production at Red Stitch is notable for a number of reasons: Tom Holloway’s first play packs a punch, Suzanne Chaundy directs it with velvet gloves, and the cast is entirely composed of guest performers, yet maintains the high standard the actors’ theatre is known for. Andreas Litras’ one-man show Odyssey is also worth catching: an entertaining fusion of ancient myth and modern migration, now playing as part of the Antipodes Festival, a celebration of Greek culture in Australia.

Beyond the Neck, by Tom Holloway, Red Stitch Actors Theatre, Until April 14.

L-R Philippa Spicer, Marcus McKenzie, Roger Oakley and Emmaline Carroll

Tom Holloway’s Beyond the Neck composes the long shadow of the Port Arthur massacre into a beautifully graduated piece of chamber theatre, a feat more remarkable for the discordant enormity of its subject.

Subtitled ‘A Quartet on Loss and Violence’, the play possesses an unemphatic musicality and Suzanne Chaundy’s rhythmical direction draws it out. She crafts an effect redolent of the purity and sadness of plainsong from the afterechoes of a tragedy few encounter and even fewer [More...]

A Streetcar: Adelaide Festival Review

March 19, 2012 //  
9 Comments

You want to know about Isabelle Huppert in Streetcar? Course you do. Well, readers, I’ll be expanding this review, and will post more on the Adelaide Festival (which I very much enjoyed) as soon as I’ve met all my deadlines for the week. Here’s the edited version.

A Streetcar, Based on A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, Translated by Wadji Mouawad, Adapted by Krzysztof Warlikowski, Adelaide Festival Centre, Until March 18.

Isabelle Huppert in A Streetcar

It divided Paris. It divides Adelaide. It certainly divided me. In this Streetcar from Polish enfant terrible Krzysztof Warlikowski, Tennessee Williams’ lyrical drama slams into the shock of the new like a bird flying into a window.

Starring Isabelle Huppert as Blanche, it’s worth suffering the overweening direction to see what this consummate screen actress does with the fading belle.

The scene opens on Huppert alone, violently stuffing her face. For almost ten minutes. Her Blanche has an eating disorder, that’s clear, and it is the first trickle in a torrent of directorial excess. Warlikowski seems determined to drag screaming into the light every subtlety and subtext [More...]

Hard to be a God: Adelaide Festival Review

March 14, 2012 //  
2 Comments

Sydney in January, Perth in Feb, and now Adelaide in March. I’m here for the final week of the last biennial Adelaide Festival. From next year, it will be an annual event. Let’s hope incoming artistic director David Sefton can muster as exciting a range of international fare as Paul Grabowsky has in this year’s program. Last night, I caught Hungarian director Kornel Mundruczo’s Hard to be a God, an alarming descent into the nightmare of human trafficking and illegal prostitution in Eastern Europe.

*

Hard to be a God, directed by Kornel Mundruczo, Performed by Annamaria Lang, Kata Weber, Diana Magdolna Kiss, Orsi Toth, Roland Raba, Gergely Banki, Laszlo Katona, Janos Derzsi, Janos Szemenyei, and Zsolt Nagy, Dramaturg Viktoria Petranyi, Set and Costume Design Marton Agh, Music Janos Szemenyei, Lighting Andreas Elteto, Sound and Video, Zoltan Belenyesi and Janos Rembeczi. Old Clipsal Site, Adelaide, Until March 14.

Inside the truck, on the set of Hard to be a God.

Kornel Mundruczo’s Hard to be a God feeds on a dark synergy between venue and performance. The Hungarian director plunges us into a sordid underworld of human [More...]

How to Train Your Dragon: The Arena Spectacular

March 9, 2012 //  
4 Comments

Toothless and Hiccup (Riley Miner/Rarmian Newton) from How to Train Your Dragon the Arena Spectacular. Photo: Jeff Busby

 

How to Train Your Dragon Arena Spectacular, RZO Dragons Productions, Global Creatures and Dreamworks Theatricals, Hisense Arena, Until March 11.

Hands up if you hate dragons. No one? Thought as much. Now, through cutting-edge animatronics, the ultimate fantasy creatures monster the stage, taking flight in an arena spectacular from the team behind Walking With Dinosaurs.

While the dinosaurs impressed with their massive scale, that event had almost no narrative. How to Train Your Dragon is even more visually astonishing. Harnessing high-tech puppetry, this show’s wonders are no longer earthbound. And, based as it is on the phenomenally popular 2010 film – grossing second only to the Shrek films in Dreamworks’ animated stable – it has a story worth telling.

Hiccup (Riley Miner) is a brainy Viking lad born into a world of brawn. He comes from a long line of dragon hunters, and certainly can’t compete with the ferocious Astrid (Gemma Nguyen), the toughest dragon slayer in school. When Hiccup [More...]

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »