Last chance: Green Screen and Purgatorio

What really must end this weekend is my time with a gastrointestinal virus. I'm excited that I can now get out of bed, but am leaving myself in quarantine until there is no sign of it. It doesn't needs sharing and I'm on my way to becoming an obsessive hand washer.

As I don't write well in the bathroom, some great shows missed out on reviews and they finish this weekend. There's time to see them both. Unless you are sick. Then stay home.

NEON
Green Screen
Sans Hotel
Lawler
finishes Sunday
mtc.com.au

Nicola Gunn's Green Screen ends the second NEON Festival of Independent Theatre. I can't compare her theatre to anything because Gunn creates work that is like her unconscious explaining her soul.

The more of her work that I see, the less I understand it. And I never want to. I'm scared that if I begin to see how her creations work,  I'll begin to see the trick. Meanwhile, I have no idea how something that begins with a line of toy animals, hummus pasta, a green monster blow-up mattress and gold body paint can say so much and be so personal to someone who has never eaten hummus pasta.

And she's joined by Nat Cursio, Tom Davies, Jonno Katz and Kerith Manderson-Galvin who meet, talk and sing in a community centre that tries to calm with beach-scene wall paper. They are a complete joy.

Green Screen is bitingly cynical but deeply loving and, in a breath, the final moments bring the work's disparate events together to let us know what it's all been about. It's beautiful.


Purgatorio
5Pound and Attic Erratic
The Owl and the Pussycat
finishes Saturday
facebook.com

Well, you might not be able to see this because it's sold out. But it can't hurt to call and check.

Melbourne audiences generally like to let a show run for a bit until they see it. This often means that people miss out on great shows by being cautious and waiting to hear if it's worth seeing. Lesson: go early and be among the people making the word of mouth.

Purgatorio is by Chilien-American playwright Ariel Dorfman, who's best known for Death and the Maiden. Here Purgatory is the soulless empty between Heaven and Hell where a Man interrogates a Woman over the murder of her children, and a Woman interrogates a Man about his guilt over his wife's death. It doesn't take long to recognise the Greek myth the stories are from, but it's far more than a reflection on Medea and Jason as Dorfman continues to explore what it takes for humans to do the unthinkable and if there's hope for redemption in a world set on revenge.

Director Celeste Cody finds the endless layers in the script without giving away its secrets, and she uses the tiny space of the Owl and the Pussycat to create a dark and empty world that's neither hellish nor real. And by placing the audience on either side of the room, each side naturally align themselves with Man or Woman.

But Freya Pragt and Jason Cavanagh ensure that the audience's allegiances are never firm. Both performances are riveting, but it's how they work together that makes this script so frighteningly real.

Review: Glengarry Glen Ross

Glengarry Glen Ross
Melbourne Theatre Company
19 July 2014
The Sumner
to 9 August
mtc.com.au

Photo by Jeff Busby

David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross is many things. It won Mamet the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Drama because it captured a time, place and attitude so remarkably. He re-wrote it as an acclaimed film (1992) and the play's an aspirational piece for actors. Who doesn't want to do a Mamet? But this MTC production fails to capture what makes Mamet so popular.

It's hard to make the anger and social-grasp of Mamet dull, but director Alkinos Tsilimidos manages to make it feel like a soporific mid-afternoon tv movie. It passed the time pleasantly enough, but lacked any spark to make a blaze.

The cast are all terrific actors, but seem to be performing to be watched for their performance rather than working together to tell a story (which has nothing to do with John McTernan coming in at the last minute and still having his script).  They're enjoying the experience of being in the play, but they're not bringing the audience into the world on the stage.

There's no way in for the audience an emotional connection or to find a reason to care. The most empathy comes from Brett Cousins, as the conned Lingk, but the play's not about him; he's there to show what a dick Roma (Alex Dimitriades) is and what a dick Levene (McTernan) can be.

The detail of the design's 1980s office is a welcome distraction, but there's no comment, fun or satire to support the script or help make it about now and us. And it's not like there are no parallels to easily draw about dodgy real estate being sold to people who can't afford it.

If a production isn't a reflection of us and now, why bother?

This was on AussieTheatre.com.

Review: The Book of Loco

The Book of Loco
Malthouse Theatre
17 July 2014
Beckett Theatre
to 2 August
malthousetheatre.com.au

Photo by Pia Johnson

Among walls of tape-sealed cardboard boxes stands a middle-aged man in a suit. He has a beard, an accent and looks like he's going to sweat a lot. And he might be mad and/or mad because he's being searched before boarding an international flight. Boom?

Aliro Zavarce's The Book of Loco won Best Theatre Production at the 2013 Adelaide Fringe. Zavarce was born in Venezuela and moved to Adelaide in the early 90s where he studied drama at Flinders University and has become well known and rightly loved on Adelaide's stages. The Book is an exploration of grief and madness that started when his wife left him on the September 11 2001 and his mother, in South America, became terminally ill.

He kept journals and, working with director Sasha Zahra, created a piece that looks for the lines where grief becomes identity and then moves towards something irrational, and, in turn, sees the rational madness that's everywhere. His own pain and loss is enough to drive anyone loco but what's the excuse of a world that so easily accepts and explains the most crazy of acts, ideas and attitudes?

The trip from the personal to the universal is made even smoother with Jonathon Oxlade's box of boxes design that shows endless hidden and collapsing secrets, truths and lies, and Chris More's animations and graphics that restrict themselves to the edges of the boxes and make it seem like we're looking into the hidden space.

Zavarce is warm and delightfully affable and his story's at its most engaging and moving when he's talking about his personal experiences, especially the end of his marriage and being made to feel like an outsider on a flight home to Australia (in a scene that makes Steve Kilbey singing "Under the Milky Way" sound so ocker). These easy-to-connect-with moments make it easy to accept the earnest madness of explaining the rational madness of a clearly mad world.

But don't get fooled by the earnest rants of a madman, The Book of Loco is funny and loving and ultimately lets the craziness of grief hurt a little less.

This was on AussieTheatre.com.

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: The Death of Kings

The Death of Kings
15 July 2014
Howler Arts Hub and Bar
to 19 July
thedeathofkings.com

Photo by Brendan Napier

Melbourne is hosting the 20th International AIDS Conference on 20–25 July. Alongside the conference is a cultural program, including The Death of Kings with a short run until 19 July.

Based on interviews with men who were part of Sydney's gay scene around Oxford Street in the 1980s, it's a verbatim piece that began when writer Colette F Keen become concerned that the stories about the initial community response to HIV in Australia were getting lost.

The cast of five (Mark Dessaix, Greg Iverson, Sebastian Robinson, Joseph Simons and Tyson Wakely) represent at least two interviewees each. In some ways this is confusing because it's difficult to follow the individual stories, but it also frees the experiences within the stories and the context of their telling to be heard without the emotional connection to a person.

And it is important to keep telling these stories.

It's not just because there are still over 35 million people – 35,000,000! that's the population of Australian and another half – living with HIV/AIDS in the world, but because the communities who led the fight and took the first casualties are slipping out of living memory.

The Death of Kings is about remembering and celebrating how the Sydney's gay community (and its allies) faced (or denied) a plague that took the world too long to understand. There are stories about parents who disowned sons and about men who blamed themselves for getting sick, but they are balanced by the stories of love, acceptance and dance parties – and by those of survival. It's sentimental, but these stories all come from men who are still with us today; they are worth some sentiment.

And it's not all crying and poppers. It includes incidental stories of how communities communicated before the internet and how our federal government responsed. This was the early days of Medicare (imagine, free universal healthcare!) and the Labor government reasoned that prevention and education were far cheaper and would result in far less death than treatment alone. It wasn't long before there were free condoms everywhere and free support where it was needed, and within a realtively short time the Grim Reaper made sure that we knew how to minimise the risks. There was still an unfair stigma associated to HIV/AIDS and it wasn't eradicated, but the spread slowed to the point that young people are having unsafe sex again! This isn't something to celebrate.

For people like me in their 40s and 50s, the idea of unsafe penetrative sex was and is unthinkable. I'm too young to have seen hoards of my friends die, but I remember the AIDS jokes of the 1980s and I know what it's like to see a friend become a barely breathing skeleton and die from AIDS. It's a horrible horrible way to die.

What is also being forgotten is that HIV/AIDS was a death call in the 80s and early 90s. If you were a gay man in your 20s to 40s at that time, it was possible to lose count of how many of your friends died. I try and I cannot imagine what that must be like. Some in The Death of Kings like it to towns and communities who lost most of their young men in wars.

This is why shows like this are so important. Sure, it needs some tightening as a piece of theatre (and its opening night audience were generally people who were around in the 1980s and didn't need a lesson in the hanky code or how to put on a condom), but these works become keepers of stories; stories that mustn't be forgotten because we know what happens when we forget the lessons of the past.

This was on AussieTheatre.com.

Last Chance: The Good Person of Szechuan

The Good Person of Szechuan
Malthouse Theatre and National Theatre of China
2 July 2014
Merlyn Theatre
to 20 July
malthousetheatre.com.au

Photo by Pia Johnson

The Good Person of Szechuan. Epic!

And it finishes on Sunday. So there's still a chance to see it again.

The cast and performances are divine (even the ones playing gods), the design is somewhere between wtf and wow, the text is Aussie and the direction's Chinese. And it's as Brechtian as Brecht can be.

Brecht was a German modernist and a Marxist who rejected the emotional heart-grab of namby pamby naturalism and wrote theatre that was about understanding the manipulation and falsity of realistic storytelling in order to see the creation of fiction by rulers, governments and politicians. He wrote because he saw his world being torn apart.

Be it sense, fate or luck, he left his home in Germany in 1933 and moved around Europe (avoiding German invasion) and before going to the USA in 1941. He began Good Person in 1938 and completed it in 1943; no wonder there's enough content in this play to make it feel like it's written for any audience who have seen it since.

Set in a fictional Szechuan-cum-Berlin-cum-Melbourne-cum-AnyCity, it's about three gods coming to earth to find good people. It doesn't take long for them to settle for finding one good person. With the help of a water seller, they meet prostitute Shen Te, who gives them a room for the night and is rewarded with enough money to buy a tobacco shop. And then it gets really hard for her to maintain her goodness.

Photo by Pia Johnson

This version is by Tom Wright, who makes it sound like it was written in Melbourne. And it's directed (in translation) by Chinese director Meng Jinghui, whose work in China comes close to having a cult following. His Rhinoceros in Love was part of the 2011 Melbourne International Arts Festival. I didn't get it. However, I was sitting next to a group of young Chinese women who didn't stop laughing. It clearly spoke to them, and to so many others; it's been in ongoing production in China since 1999. I wanted to know what I was missing.

But I got The Good Person of Szechuan. Perhaps all I needed was a slither of familiarity.

And from the gods arriving with shopping bags and looking like bridezilla Madonna (Christian and pop) icons (design by Marg Horwell), it's a world that's filled with the nearly unrecognisable familiar.

From designer dresses (thank you audience member for telling me that they are genuine expensive frocks and not be-dazzled K-Mart t-shirts) to the smoke machine, piles of baby dolls and the live musician (THE SWEATS) in a glass box, there are no secrets but this forced distancing is combined with performances that draw us back into the world and make us see it as us and ours.

And Moira Finucane, Genevieve Giuffre, Emily Milledge, Josh Price, Bert LaBonté, Richard Pyros, Aljin Abella and Daniel Frederiksen! What more do I need to say.

The friend who came with me did have something else to say and she said it to the man who was sitting two rows behind us, Minister Malcolm Turnball.

"At the after party, I slyly bumped into him accidentally, so he had to notice me. After introductions, I questioned him about what was happening to the boatload of Tamil asylum seekers. His answer was, 'I don't know'. He tried to reassure me they were safe because we were 'looking after them'. I politely berated him about it and he really didn't have much to say. Finally I said, 'You've just seen a play by Brecht. What do you think he'd have to say about this?' Malcolm: 'I know what he'd have to say'. Me: 'Exactly."

I loved this production because it must be talking to those who don't care about Tamil refugees and carbon taxes and slow internet. It's made for our Malcolm Turnballs. If those in power can see the world how we do, surely they'll change.

Nup.


PS. I'm blaming my computer for losing my real review. And by computer, I mean I accidentally deleted it.

Last chance: The Myth Project: Twin

NEON
The Myth Project: Twin
Arthur
11 July 2014
The Lawler
to 20 July
mtc.com.au

Photo by Sebastian Bourges

NEON's Twin is the first of Arthur's The Myth Project series that's about exploring the Australian psyche and the myths it creates. Exploding in a shiny-streamer world that moves from a cabaret-noir-cum-disco underworld to a bleak country pub that hides a secret, it's the second show opening this week where an established company is working with high school students.

Arthur is director Paige Rattray and producer Belinda Kelly. They work with a group of collaborators and for this project the group includes 32 year 11 and 12 students from Launceston College in Tasmania. Unlike Red Stitch's current collaboration with students from St Michael's Grammar school, The Flock and the Nest, the teenagers aren't the focus of the story. Instead they are a chorus who watch and mock and are welcome every time they are on the stage. And they're terrific. It's easy to stand out on a stage; it's a skill to blend with 31 performers and still be yourself.

The overall story is hard to follow but each episode (by writers Amelia Evans, Duncan Graham and/or Dan Giovannoni) has a satisfying completeness and adds to the ongoing mystery. It starts with twin sisters, a cowboy and a pub, and continues years later at the adult twin's birthday party where the guests are strangers, singing is dangerous and no one knows who is really alive at the end. Does this family have any hope or is Hell a place where our past deeds come back and where everyone wears shiny blue dresses?

And if is Hell, then I'm joining the line to get in. Twin is creepy and mysterious, and while never letting the tension drop, it doesn't lose its sense of fun or its heart; we may not really know what happens to the sisters, but we sure care and want them to be happy.

Part of the joy in watching is the continual questioning of what happened and the displacement from where we thought we were, but it wouldn't work without a cast who are as shiny and spectacular as their teenage ensemble. From dream-haunting weird to sexy-as-all-go-get to innocence-with-a-gun, Julia Billington, Catherine Davies, Kevin Kiernan-Molloy, Rose Lockhart, Markus McKenzie, Kurt Phelan, Guy Simon and Netta Yaschin, with Stephanie Francis and Trinnay Hancock-Holmes as the young sisters, are at one with the picnic-at-hanging-rock-teen-disco-mystery-horror-movie tone and know how to know the truth without sharing the secrets.

This is theatre that wants to create a world that's always questioning the world it's created in. Without using tired icons or even hinting at the obvious, Twin shows an Australia that's disturbingly recognisable and perhaps a lot closer than we'd like to think.

And the next instalments of The Myth Project will be at  Red Stitch and at Theatre Works.

This was on AussieTheatre.com.

Review: The Flock and the Nest

The Flock and the Nest
Red Stitch and St Michael's Grammar School
10 July 2014
St Michael's Drama School
to 19 July
redstitch.net

St Michael's Grammar School is next door to the Red Stitch theatre and when the school approached the theatre company to collaborate on a production, it was impossible to say no.

Working with director Gary Abrahams and playwright Glyn Roberts, The Flock and the Nest was developed specifically for and with the cast of students (a role was created for everyone who wanted to be in it) and four Red Stitch adult actors.

They started with wanting to explore the gap between childhood and adulthood, the pros and cons of competition, and the concept of utopian lives and living the dream. The result is a story about a comfortable family in the city who seem to have it all and what happens when they meet and visit their cousins who live in the country in a small community who are trying to create their own dream.

By involving a cast of 16, it's run time gets close to too-long, but any cutting would cut performances that don't deserve to be cut. It's more ambitious than many high-school productions and its biggest strength is how it feels like a story that the teen cast (from years 9, 10 and 11) had a large part in creating.

The structure and big-picture is from Roberts, but so much character development and character choices clearly come from the teenage actors. This gives it an authenticity, relevance and freshness that is often missing when adults write teenage characters.

As a collaboration, The Flock and the Nest blurs the line between high-school and professional theatre and suggests that collaborations like these could happen more.

This was on AussieTheatre.com.

Reveiw: Closed for Maintenance

Closed for Maintenance
La Mama
13 July 2014
La Mama
to 13 July 2014
lamama.com.au

Closed For Maintenance celebrated the history of La Mama and created a theatrical experience that was so much more than a sit-and-watch play.

From the adventure of going in from the back laneway (and finally knowing where that door leads to) and being dressed in protective gear, there was a sense of nervous excitement and anticipation.  And it was fulfilled.

This was one of those rare occasions when the audience really were a part of the show. Watching the caretaker (Chris Molyneux) and listening to his stories about shows was wonderful, but it was only a part of the experience. What made this so fun was watching other audience members react and interact with the actors, seeing people discover something in the design, or discovering a tiny design gem that you know no one else but you saw. I had a moment when the man trapped in the box drew a picture on a post-it note and handed it to me. I have no idea if anyone else saw it; I kept the post-it.

Meanwhile, forget visceral experience, there was the literal experience of being in darkness with strangers and not knowing what is around the corner and the feeling a snowstorm of foam without knowing what it was, and then bubbles, water and smoke.

It was remarkable how such a tiny space could be made to feel so mysterious and so large. There were memories from so many past La Mama shows. Some I remembered, many I’d never heard of but now feel like maybe I was there, even if I wasn’t living in Melbourne at the time.

This kind of nostalgic celebration could have so easily been a static display or a panel discussion or a website, but Closed For Maintenance made it an experience; an experience that was unlike anything that had been at La Mama in the past and an experience that celebrated how La Mama supports and encourages experimentation, risk and art that refuses to fit into a neat and dull genre box.

And it was conceived, designed and created by Bronwyn Pringle, Melanie Liertz, Lisa Mibus, Pippa Bainbridge, Jessica Smithett and Jack Beeby.

Review: Les Misérables

Les Misérables
Cameron Mackintosh
3 July 2014
Her Majesty's Theatre
lesmis.com.au

Hayden Lee. Photo by Matt Murphy

In 1985 the first English production of Boublil and Schonberg's musical  Les Misérables opened in London. That original production has moved theatres a couple of times, but it's still running, and it's been produced all over the world. It's estimated that 65 million people have seen a production. I guess that at least 64,924,601 loved it to tears and for those who are seeing it for the for first time here in Melbourne will soon know why this astonishing piece of music theatre will soon have been running for 30 years.

Based on the much loved French 1832 novel by Victor Hugo, Les Mis is ultimately the story of Jean Valjean, who was imprisoned for 19 years for stealing bread to feed his niece, but breaks his parole and is pursued by obsessive guard Javert until they both end up in 1832 Paris where the doomed June Rebellion is beginning and God and fate catches up with everyone. Hugo was in Paris during this rebellion and his story has become so well-known that the line between it's fiction and fact is often blurred.

This new production was created for the musical's 25th anniversary and is the same as the one currently running on Broadway. And I can't imagine the New York one being any better than ours.

The new design incorporates projections that are based on visual arts works by Hugo himself. They give a depth to the stage and, at their best, brings us into the graveyard and sewer, but Javert's backstroke to destiny tries too hard to create illusion.

The new Australian cast are relatively unknown but incomparable and unlikely to be forgotten. Vocally, from Valjean to ensemble, they are begging for a cast recording (of course there can be another one!) and each bring something surprising and new to the so-well-known songs.

Simon Gleeson gives Valjean a delicacy that makes the role his own (and he'll be a star like all the Valjeans before him), Hayden Tee lets Javert's humanity continually fight his sense of justice, Trevor Ashley and Lara Mulchay are clowning delights as the Thernardiers, Kerrie Anne Greenland (in her professional debut) makes us wonder why Marius doesn't want Eponine, and there's no one whose name won't forever be connected with their role in this production.

My only quibble is that, as a whole, the production and cast seem almost too aware of its pedigree (it's Les Misérables after all) and build towards moments and hit songs rather than letting them develop naturally. At the same time there's a tendency, from ensemble upwards, to overplay emotion which leaves it feeling more melodramatic than it could be. There's little in the story or music that's subtle in its emotional gut punch and the extra emphasis distracts and brings attention to itself rather than bringing us closer to the story.

Regardless, Les Misérables is beyond critique and the only way to know if it's worth all the fuss is to experience it for yourself.

This was on AussieTheatre.com.