Review: Cosi

Cosi
Melbourne Theatre Company and Sydney Theatre Company 
4 May 2019
Southbank Theatre, The Sumner
to 8 June
mtc.com.au

Cosi. Photo by Jeff Busby

My review is in Time Out.

Review: Astroman

Astroman
Melbourne Theatre Company
2 November 2018
Fairfax Studio, Arts Centre Melbourne
to 8 December
mtc.com.au

Callen Tassone & Kamil Ellis. "Astroman", MTC. Photo by Jeff Busby.

I've been singing "Eye of the Tiger" all weekend and am trying to change my earworm to the much cooler "Tainted Love". Astroman is set in 1984. Geelong, in 1984.

Playwright Albert Belz knows Astroman is his love letter to the 1980s and the decade he was a teenager and he wrote this story about a Maori family living in coastal Aotearoa (New Zealand). He moved New Zealand to Geelong in 2011 and, after later moving to Melbourne, relocated the story to the place that welcomed him to Australia. I'm sure he's a Cats supporter for life.

There's also a production of the play currently running at The Court Theatre in New Zealand. In a better arts funded and supported world, they could swap venues and let us all see both productions.

Teenagers Jiembra, Jimmy, (Kamil Ellis) and his twin brother Sonny (Callen Tassone) have just turned 13. The got a Walkman, a Rubik's cube, which Jimmy solves easily, and a BMX bike that no cop would believe "an abo owns". It's mostly a loving reflection of the mid-80s in towns away from the big cities. In this memory world, Sonny can proudly wear the Aboriginal flag on his sleeveless denim jacket and not get beaten up, but no one's forgetting that it wasn't all breakdancing, take away Kentucky Fried Chicken and acid-wash jeans.

But it was all arcade video games. This amazing new technology let anyone kill aliens and pretend you were in Star War, Star Trek or Battlestar Gallactica. They also broke barriers of class, age and gender as everyone played them, be it at the local fish and chip shop or the arcade. If you has a 20-cent-piece in your pocket, you could play.

The brothers have recently moved from Townsville and live at their auntie's house with their mum (Elaine Crombie) and sister (Tahlee Fereday); Jimmy says their dad is away training to be the first Austronaught, Australian astronaught. They spend as much time as they can at the Astrocade playing games. Here, arcade owner Mr Palvis (Tony Nikolakopoulos) takes a liking to the boys, but they have their rival MJ (Nicholas Denton) to contend with.

What follows is as cool as seeing The Karate Kid for the first time. Director Sarah Goodes and Associate Director Tony Briggs (he wrote The Sapphires) know their 1980s culture, as does designer Jonathon Oxlade. There's a "world championship" competition with far more than a high score at stake, montages, dance sequences, an awkwardly placed gun, opposites-are-really-the-same romances, and a convenient solution that doesn't feel earned. Yeah, just like so many 80s movies and sit coms.

And, like those stories, the characters make up for any problems and let the metaphors of "seeing the patterns" and "making the most of your last life" resonate. It's an absolute joy to be part of this family for the night. When they sat down for dinner, I'm sure I wasn't the only person who wanted to be balanced on a plastic stool around the table and be the first to take the lid off the orange casserole dish.

But I have no idea how I know the words to "(Hey You) The Rock Steady Crew"; I didn't even like it in 1984.

MELBOURNE FESTIVAL: You and me and the space in between

Melbourne Festival
You and me and the space in between
Terrapin Puppet Theatre 
7 October 2016
Beckett Theatre
to 9 October 2016
melbournefestival.com.au

You and me and the space in between. Melbourne Festival. Photo supplied

I wonder if we go to theatre to re-create, or discover, the childhood experience of sitting in a loving lap and being read a story.

Hobart’s Terrapin Puppet Theatre have been creating and touring children’s theatre since 1981. You and me and the space in between only has four days at the Melbourne Festival and continues this festival’s dedication to ensuring that children and their families can see amazing theatre that’s made for them.

Finegan Kruckemeyer’s story of The Proud Circle Island is like falling into the pages of a storybook. With a paper design (Jonathon Oxlade), the pages come alive with iPad animation (Oslo Davis), live music (Dean Stevenson), puppetry (Felicity Horsley) and the comforting narration of Eve (Katherine Tonkin), who likes wondering about things and was 12 when the water on her island began to rise.

As their home is threatened by the sea, the people decide to leave “all there was” and row their island to through the sea in the hope of finding a place where people will welcome them to safety. They find a land very different to their island and the people of both places meet with a recognisable mix of curiosity and fear.

The allegories are clear, but Sam Routledge’s direction ensures that story and its characters are always at the centre of the many circles. Its telling is welcoming and gentle, even in its dark and scary places, and reminds us all that whispered ideas are as powerful as shouty ones.

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: Moth

Moth
Malthouse Theatre and Arena Theatre
16 May 2010
The Tower, CUB Malthouse

If the teenagers on Glee leave you wondering why your high school memories aren't so perky and choreographed, Malthouse and Arena theatre's Moth is the perfect antidote.

Declan Greene continues to fascinate and seduce Melbourne theatre goers by consistently surprising us with unexpected stories. Moth is far removed from his uber-high-camp Sisters Grimm work, darker than his 2009 Fringe hit A Black Joy and more grounded in reality than his 2009 MTC Young Artist commission  Pretty Baby.  But it's still filled with authentic characters dragged in from the limits of social acceptability,  gooey visceral imagery,  odd pop culture references, absurd reality bluring and a dark dark humour that leaves you almost hating yourself for laughing.

Sebastian (the perfect Dylan Young) is too weird to ever be accepted and clinging onto the equally-desparate friendship of Claryssa (the equally-perfect Sarah Ogden), the emo wicca chick who has let herself become too weird to ever be accepted. These are the kids who no one ever sat next to at school, whose parents have no idea that their babies are in so much pain that they won't recover, and who leave me so glad that I was a teenager before the internet and its mass humiliation.

With a story of bullying too familiar to teens on the outer and too vile for many grown ups to even comprehend, Greene plunges into the fractured minds and perceptions of these souls and takes us to a surreal world where Jesus and Saint Sebastian have chosen a misfit to warn the world of its pending destruction and two young people scream for rescue and forgiveness.

Greene writes difficult material that could easily be lost in a moosh of preachy compassion or over-arty pretence, but the Arena creative team of Chris Kohn (director), Jonathon Oxlade (design), Rachel Burke (lighting) and Jethro Woodward (composition) are at one with their writer and create a world where the morphing of time, space and character is natural, expected and so beautiful that you understand why moths fly to blinding light.

Like young writer Polly Strenham's teens in That Face, currently at Red Stitch, Greene (who is an old fart compared to Strenham) writes teenagers who aren't silly or pretty or full of impossible dreams, and force their audience to understand their extreme, illogical and exaggerated reactions and feelings to the world they are growing into. Greene leaves us relieved to have grown up and embarrassed to know that we still don't want to be friends with a Sebastian or a Claryssa.

Moth is rightly selling out, so book now so that your not among those who wish they had seen it

This review appears on AussieTheatre.com.


Photo: Jeff Busby