Review: The River

The River
Red Stitch Actors Theatre
1 May 2016
Red Stitch
to 28 May
redstitch.net

Ngaire Dawn Fair & Dion Mills. The River. Photo by Jodie Hutchinson

Award-winning UK writer Jez Butterworth (Mojo, Jerusalem) continues to explore men and masculinity in The River, which has its Australian premiere at Red Stitch.

A man (Dion Mills) has brought his girlfriend (Ngaire Dawn Fair) to his cabin by a lake and convinces her to come fishing on a moonless night.On his return, he frantically tries to call the police because he can't find her, but she comes back and is different woman (Christina O'Neil). The night continues with the women  – who are seen how the man remembers them – alternating in each scene, creating a mystery that questions time and identity but may have its answer in a much baser reality.

Director John Kachyon returns to Red Stitch (his last show was Midsummer in 2012) and again creates an intimacy that is often missing in the small theatre that can leave its audience feeling distanced from the stage. With a realism design by Chloe Greaves, the performance space is moved to the centre of the room with four rows of seating on either side. This creates interrupted views and others so close that it'd be easy to touch the actors.

The intimate realism is continued with contained and honest performances that let the characters, rather than the actors, control the action. There are still moments of the actors being too aware of being watched, but Butterworth's elongated scenes of moving furniture or gutting a fish create space where the acting disappears and the audience feel like invisible voyeurs.

This was on AussieTheatre.com.au.

Review: Into the Woods

Into the Woods
Victorian Opera
19 July 2014
The Playhouse, Arts Centre Melbourne
to 26 July
victorianopera.com.au

Photo by Jeff Busby

After the success of their Sunday in the Park with George (1984), Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine created Into the Woods (1986), which beat Phantom of the Opera at the Tonys and firmly sits on the top of many favourite-musical lists. Following the success of their 2013 production of Sunday in the Park with George, Victorian Opera have followed with an Into the Woods that's as close to sold out as it can be and even closer to perfection.

With a boldness, a sense of cheekiness and an understated sophistication, Vic Opera tell the tale with Australian twists and a loving understanding of the power of once-upon-a-time story telling. If you have a ticket, don't let it out of your sight because the show's simply unforgettable and reminds us that music theatre should never be a fading and dull copy of another production.

Lapine's book (he also directed the Broadway version) takes characters and well-known stories from the Brothers Grimm's collection of European fairy tales (mid-1800s) and sends them into the woods to find themselves together as part of a bigger story. Act one brings everyone through trials to their happy-ever-after; Act two asks what happens next and is as dark, confronting and blood-filled as traditional fairy tales really are.

Part of the inspiration for Woods was the 1976 book The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales by academic and therapist Bruno Bettleheim. Since his death (1990), Bettleheim has been criticised academically and personally, but his book continues to influence and inspire countless writers. Internationally successful Australian children's/young adult writer John Marsden (Tomorrow When the War Began series) is among those who recommend it. It's partly a Freudian psychoanalytic analysis of Fairy Tales (mostly the Grimm's collection) and the rest is a discussion about the psychological impact of fairy tales on children – or the importance of telling and re-telling stories. At the most simple level, we tell stories to understand the world.

But there's nothing simple about Into the Woods. From its surface of fairy tales and gorgeous syncopated rhymes (that Sondheim and his lyrics!), layers are torn away and complexities revealed until grown ups find themselves crying because they see it as a story about themselves. We re-tell stories to understand the world and our place in it.

And the music's by Sondheim, so it shares the every emotion without a word being spoken.

Photo by Jeff Busby

While one of the genius notes of Into the Woods is the complexity of its re-telling of known tales, much of the magnificence of Victorian Opera's production is how director Stuart Maunder lets the story be told without over complication or sentimentality, while supporting the comedy and freeing it from the so-well-known Broadway production that so many of us have seen because it was filmed for TV.

Adam Gardnir's design of bare trees creates an ever-changing wood that's comforting and familiar and terrifying and bone-like (with perhaps a nod to Freud), and the woods are given depth, darkness and magic flashes by Philip Lethlean's lighting. Which are all an ideal world for Harriet Oxley's costumes that take the shape of pantomime-fairy-tale costumes, but are filled with bold colour and geometric shapes that help tell a story that's for now and forever.

Conductor Benjamin Northey and sound designer Jim Atkins create a recordable pit–stage balance that uses the amplification to emphasise the unique sound of each singer, and helps to enforce the idea that stories are best told by human voices.

Vocally and emotionally the cast nail it. While Christina O'Neil (Baker's wife), Rowan Witt (Jack), Queenie van de Zandt (Witch), Josie Lane (Red Riding Hood) and Lucy Maunder (Cinderella) lead the way, everyone brings a real bit of themselves to their roles and every character has their moment of pure enchantment.

The only disappointment about Into the Woods is that it has so few shows and the tickets left can be counted on one hand (hint: try for singles). With producers letting sub-standard shows run for months in big theatres, surely there are ways to bring this production to a bigger audience. #IWish.

This was on AussieTheatre.com.

Review: Sunday in the Park with George

Sunday in the Park with George
Victorian Opera
20 July 2013
The Playhouse, Arts Centre Melbourne
to 27 July
victorianopera.com.au

Victorian Opera's Sunday in the Park with George is exquisite, and it's heartbreaking that it can only run for a week as so many people will miss this emotionally-perfect production of Stephen Sondheim's most personal work.

Sondheim wrote Sunday in the Park with George after his Merrily We Roll Along (1981) was booed by critics and closed after 16 Broadway performances. Urban legend says that he was ready to quit music theatre to write mystery novels, but writer and director James Lapine persuaded him to return and they were both inspired by a painting by George Seurat, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884).

The resulting work by Sondheim and Lapine (who directed the first production) is a passionate and deeply personal exploration about being an artist and the sacrifices that accompany the choice to make art. It won Tonys for its design and the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and the London production won Oliviers, including Best Actor in a Musical for Australia's Philip Quast.

The first act is set in 1884, as George sketches in the park and develops his new style of painting (pointillism or neo-impressionism, that creates its images and colours from the human eye merging its dots of colour). The fictional story is about the people in the painting, including George's mother and his lover, who are both rejected by George in favour of his art. The second act is in the 1980s in America where George's great grandchild, also George, is trying to create and fund his digital work in a world of snobby art critics, and planning to show his interpretation of Seruat's work in Paris on the island depicted in the famous painting.

Alexander Lewis (who studied at WAPPA and is currently in his second year of the Lindemann Young Artist Development Program at The Metropolitan Opera in New York) is outstanding as the Georges. Musically, it's like Sondheim wrote for him and emotionally he grasps the conceit of a man who gives up love for art, without ever losing the empathy of his audience. Christina O'Neil (who was also at WAPPA and a new Red Stitch ensemble member in 2013) is his counterpoint as lover Dot (and his grandmother in Act 2). She, too, sings the music like it's hers, but it's the heart and understanding that she brings to Dot that is so engaging.

And they are supported by an ensemble who are each memorable, none lesser than Nancye Hayes, as George's mother, and an Act 2 art critic, whose Act 1 song to George is a masterclass in how to perform Sondheim (warning: bring a tissue).

Conductor Phoebe Briggs understands how Sondheim applied pointillism to music and ensures that the musicians and voices never let one outshine the other. While director Stuart Maunder (whose direction of Sondheim's A Little Night Music for Opera Australia left me cold) ensures that the story is led by the powerful emotions that created it.

But even for nothing else, see it for Anna Cordingley's design. The most famous productions of George won awards for design. Victoria Opera doesn't have a Broadway budget, but Cordingley has created something that's as creative and original as Seruat and Sondheim. The costumes are made with material that's digitally printed with Seraut's colour palettes. This makes them look like they walked out of a new version of the painting and visually unite the two acts in ways that past designs haven't. Her detail is intricate and, even from the circle, it's easy to see that every hat is a finished work of art and her parasols are as beautiful as the music that sings about them. Meanwhile the set uses all of Seraut's known works and her cascade of falling colours is such a simple idea, but genius in how it supports the story and George's art.

After the success of Nixon in China, Victorian Opera are continuing to put Opera Australia to shame with a production that deserves to run for months, if only to show everyone who sees expensive opera and commercial music theatre why reviewers like me complain when they miss the mark.

It finishes on Saturday and its nearly sold out. So book now. And full time students and under 30s can get $30 tickets.

This review is on AussieTheatre.com.

Review: Gaybies

There aren't many seats left for Gaybies and it finishes tomorrow/today (Saturday).

Everyone has loved it to pieces and all the reviewers are raving. Here's Cameron's review for a start.

MIDSUMMA 2013
Gaybies
Midsumma and Dale Splender
16 January 2013
Sumner Theatre, MTC
to 19 January
midsumma.org.au

Gaybies is on its way to being an important piece of theatre that shakes up stale and dull opinions. Opening at Midsumma, it's singing show tunes with the choir, but there couldn't be a better and more fabulous audience to introduce this work to.

Created by music theatre director/creator Dean Bryant, Gaybies is the first work commissioned by the Midsumma festival, which has been celebrating queer culture for 25 years. With little time and resources, Bryant explored verbatim theatre – verbatim theatre recreates interviews (The Laramie Project is one of the more famous) – and interviewed people whose voices and stories aren't always heard in the talkback radio screaming, media hoo ha and politician point scoring over what makes a family: children with one or more gay or lesbian parents.

If you've ever even thought "But what about the children?", here's the answer.

There's the awkwardness of seeing your dad at a gay club, the unexplainable death of too many "uncles" in the 80s, surprising a teen boyfriend's mum by explaining that drag queens taught you how to wear pantyhose and heels, and the "who cares!" attitude of friends when you out your mum – but it's mostly stories about kids being kids and parents being parents. And I dare anyone to not relate to at least one story on the stage regardless of their gender, sexuality or attitude.

As the first time it's been seen and having only gone into the rehearsal room this week, it's presented as a semi-read work, but the scripts are noticeable for a few seconds and the books become part of the stage story. There's heart and guts in every story told, but it's Daniel Clarke's gorgeous direction that brings shape and structure to the stage and the script (that's still a bit rambly). With songs, a party table, craft, bubbles and compulsory glitter, he creates context and a reason for everyone to be and stay on the stage and to get up and share their story.

And bringing every bit of love they have to the stage, there's a cast of local favourites who are all so lovely that no one can be singled out: Trevor Ashley, Virginia Gay, Brent Hill,  Gareth Keegan, Kate Kendall, Todd McKenney, Emily Milledge, Ben Mingay, Christina O'Niell, Alex Rathgeber, Georgia Scott, Magda Szubanski, Rob Tripolino and Christie Whelan-Browne.

Gaybies is created to knock out intolerance , but it's more a celebration of everyone who has faced even a hint of that intolerance in their lives and been left wondering or hurt at its ridiculousness. See it because you want to celebrate or just because it's honest, beautiful and heartwarming. And it only runs until Saturday, so you really have to get organised now.

The Midsumma audiences are adoring this show, but to have the impact that it will have, it needs to get  produced, supported and seen widely. I believe that dullness and intolerance can change with truth, so what about starting with performance at a full sitting of our federal parliament?

This was on AussieTheatre.com

Review: The motherfucker with the hat

The motherfucker with the hat
Red Stitch Actors Theatre
10 June
Red Stitch
to 7 July
redstitch.net

The motherfucker with the hat opened on Broadway last year and scored a pile of Tony Award nominations. And, as always, Red Stitch continue to let us experience such exciting new writing.

Welcome to a residential hotel in Times Square, New York, where no one cares that they can walk to Broadway to see a play.  Here Jackie (Demitrios Sirilas) is out of jail, is in AA, has a new job and is waiting on the bed for his long-term love Veronica (Michelle Vergara Moore). Then he sees a hat that isn't his. So begins a frantic tale about addiction, loyalty and morality with Jackie and Veronica; Jackie's yoga-going, health-drink peddling AA sponsor Ralph (Adam McConvell); Ralph's attention-lacking wife Victoria (Christina O'Neill, Avenue Q, Tell Me On A Sunday) and Jackie's cousin Julio (Mark Casamento), who's impressive in the kitchen, happy to hide a gun and always prepared to go Van Damme for his blood.

Irish-American-Egyptian New Yorker Steven Adly Giurgis is a NY theatre favourite and has written for TV shows like NYPD Blue and The Sopranos.  Starting with dialogue that oozes so much authenticity that it's easy to miss its rhythm and craft, his writing tears away his characters' barriers to exposes the rawness that they try so hard to hide. And he knows that the only way to get through life is to laugh at it.

Director Peter Bell loves the script and lets his cast bring everything and more to their performances. Each show a personal connection to their character and Casamento especially finds the heart of Cousin Julio. However, the desire for authenticity sometimes distracts from the story and trips the rhythm of the writing.  Authenticity isn't found in an accent, it's in the attitude and the connection to character. Inconsistencies in accent and style create barriers that leave another story about "them" because it loses the connection to "us".

And, of course, it's about us. Theatre is created to make us look at ourselves. From the opening projections, there's no doubt where we are and it's a script that reaches the heart of its characters. When story comes from such heart, we care – and when we care, we accept everything else.  The motherfucker with the hat has everything to be a total mofo, if it would trust the characters and not care about being so real.

This review appeared on AussieTheatre.com