MICF review: Dixie's Tupperware Party

Dixie's Tupperware Party
MICF
30 March 2012
The Famous Spiegeltent
to 22 April
comedyfestival.com.au

Why did the walrus go to a Tupperware party?
He wanted to find a tight seal.

This is the only Tupperware joke I knew before a night with the outrageously wonderful Dixie Longate selling me plastic crap. I'm most proud of myself for getting out without buying anything because I love colourful, air-tight seals that keep the moths and or keep celery crunchy for weeks and Dixie's Tupperware Party is a Tupperware party.

Yes, one of those things where housewife-types make devilled eggs and fruit punch and hope that their friends will buy enough plastic crap so they can send their kids to camp and buy lots of shoes. Never been to one? Really? You must and Dixie's is a damn good one to start with.

Dixie lives in a trailer park, has three kids and three dead husbands. Her first Tupperware candy bowl was a gift that still shines like crystal and may bring a tear to your eye by the end of the night. She needed a way out (of jail) and found her role model in Brownie Wise, the woman who realised that women can sell to each other and have fun and she held the first Tupperware party over 60 years ago.

As the home page of the Tupperware site says: "For over 60 years Tupperware Brands has made a difference in the lives of women around the world by offering an independent business opportunity." And they do. Within a year Dixie was the top selling Tupperware seller in the USA. Who ever said drag performers won't earn a living, didn't factor in the power of charm, sass and innuendo. If you're not sure, Dixie is frocked and tucked.

Dixie's Tupperware Party is a tribute to every woman who has ever earned money by selling Tupperware and a ever-fresh night of high-camp, low-class fun that'll leave you singing about rimming. Stop sniggering, you close a Tupperware bowl by rimming it.

Take neighbours, nannas, husbands and anyone who has ever rolled their eyes when you mention the T word.

PS. If anyone wants to buy me a present, I have the celery keeper, but I love the Crystal Wave containers that go from freezer to microwave.

This review was on AussieTheatre.com

MICF review: Tina C

MICF 2012

Tina C: Sorry Seems to be the Hardest Word

Malthouse, Christopher Green, Julia Holt, MICF

22 March 2012

Beckett Theatre

to 14 April

An Englishman dresses an American woman to present a lecture-cum-corroboree-cum-sing-a-long to white middle class theatre goers.  She doesn't understand that we celebrate the battles we lost, but she knows that Mabo isn'a a dance and thinks it's time she explained Indigenous reconciliation to us. With so many levels of wrong, Tina C may well be the most right thing in town

Melbourne met Tina C in the Speigeltent in 2006 and welcomes her back with open everything. Tina C: Sorry Seems to be the Hardest Word is created by the UK's Christopher Green (who we've also seen in Finucane and Smith's Salon De Dance),  but I still have trouble accepting that Tina's not from North America's south.

Gal singer superstar (in her head) Tina loves the soft power of middle-of-the-road country pop, so naturally found an affinity with some of Australia's best country singers and musicians, like Jimmy Little and Bob Randell, and even with the rock of Yothu Yindi. Following Kate Bush's dance steps (remember The Dreaming album), she knows that pretty singers with awesome legs can change the world, and while Rolf Harris played with Kate, Tina is joined by musican James Henry (Deadly Award nominee) and her almost-twin singer Auriel Andrew (Deadly Lifetime Achievement Award winner and a 2011 OAM).

As Andrew sings Randell's "Brown Skin Baby" and tells her own story, Tina rightly cannot understand why our little nation hasn't grasped that white folk are the original boat people. She doesn't care about increasing our white-middle-class guilt; she just wants us to see the bleeding obvious.

Many an academic and drunken dinner party conversation has offered reasons for our blocks in logic, but Tina wonders is it's because Australian Indigenous art isn't easy-to-wear jewellery (like that lovely turquoise Native American stuff) or because they don't make delicious snacks we can buy in specialist delis.

She may have a point. I'm wearing earrings from Indonesia and a scarf from Vietnam as I snack on falafel. Yep, us white folk love indigenous accessories and foreign snacks. So perhaps it's time to follow Tina's example. After all, she wears dot-print hot pants and a knock-off Acubra with as much class as Dame Edna wears sequins.

I can start with my dot-painting handbag.  It was a gift and, even though I love a colourful accessory, it stayed in my cupboard as I was unsure if it's an offensive and condescending appropriation of ancient art or a celebratory integration of culture. Thanks to Tina, it'll be on my arm this week in celebration. I wonder if I can find matching hot pants...

This is the genius of Tina C. Her arguments are so naively off that she unbalances logic and makes us look at something we think we understand from a new angle. There's room for more of Tina's story and a stronger narrative in the show, but nothing can take away from her sparklie heart and the sharp intelligence of her creator.

Phtoto by Lachlan Woods

Appeared on AussieTheatre.com

Review: Beyond the Neck

Beyond the Neck: A Quartet on Loss and Violence
Red Stitch Actors Theatre
15 March 2012
Red Stitch
to 14 April

April 28 1996 may seem a long time ago, but for some it will always be yesterday. We may remember reading their stories and swore we'd remember the names of the 35 people who died so cruelly at Port Arthur, but asked now, only one name comes to mind. Tom Holloway's exquisite and harrowing Beyond the Neck: A Quartet on Loss and Violence is a personal reflection on his visiting Port Arthur and a delicate exploration of the lonely suffering following violent trauma.

Four fictional people visit Port Arthur today. There's a teenager who lost her father in the massacre (Philippa Spicer), a tour guide who was there (Roger Oakley), a young mother on a bus trip (Emmaline Carroll) and a boy on a family drive (Marcus McKenzie). This brave and exciting writing and captures the communal pain of Port Arthur by moving away from the unfathomable enormity of the horror and telling four personal stories that started with violent trauma.

They narrate their stories in a four-part choral-like structure that deceptively offers safe distance, but really allows the hidden emotions to drive the work and seep into our hearts. Like a soprano, alto, tenor, bass score, each have solos and their moments of harmony soar, but it's the disruption of their dissonant notes and changing rhythms that create the tension that demands the pain and relief of resolution.

Director Suzanne Chaundy conducts like a maestro. It's a challenging text that could collapse into sentiment in the wrong hands, but by guiding the cast to hold their emotions close, Chaundy lets the grace notes of humour offer light and understanding without the easy comfort hope or the overwhelming fear of hopelessness.  And the astonishing cast maintain this balance.  Each suffer alone with their secrets, but it's their constant awareness of each other and work as a quartet that makes it so powerful.

The chamber piece is completed with a design trio who create the world and underscore and highlight each story. Dayna Morrissey's set looks like a gallery but makes us see deep into the Tasmanian wilderness, while Philip Mcleod's sound and Richard Vabre's lighting are so integrated with the emotion of the stories that it's easy not to notice how good they are.

Beyond the Neck is beautiful and unmissable theatre told by artists who understand the responsibility of telling such resonating stories and it's so wonderful to see Red Stitch working with Australian writers.

Appeared on AussieTheatre.com

Photo by Jodie Hutchinson

Review: The Most Excellent and Lamentable...

The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of  Romeo and Juliet
The Zoey Louise Moonbeam Dawson Shakespeare Company
2 March 2012
45downstairs
to 11 March

Is there anything as all-consuming as first teenage love? We may smile with gooey nostalgia, but remember what that first heart break felt like and how no one understood because no one could love as strongly as you did? Romeo and Juliet is about that kind of teenage love and Zoey Dawson's all-female version lets us see the story from the heart of a teenage girl.

Dawson creates theatre from an authentic and positive female perspective, and her work continues to remind me of what love was, is and always will be like.

As a teenager, I adored Juliet's suicide because it proved the power of great love. As an adult (possibly older than her parents), it's almost impossible to see any romance in such a devastating choice. By telling it from Juliet's perspective, Dawson and her remarkable and delightfully surprising cast (Brigid Gallacher, Carolyn Butler , Devon Lang Wilton, Laura Maitland, Naomi Rukavina and Nikki Shiels) ensure that it can't be seen as a social tragedy out of the young lovers' control.

Gallacher's Juliet is a 13-year-old who still wears flat shoes and has a pastel bedroom decorated with teddy bears. Her vision of sex is sweet kissing and her idea of romance is so absorbing that she can't see beyond her boy in his blue flannel shirt (played by the five other members of the cast). Gallacher's performance creeps into your heart and reminds us that children have the passion to make decisions that can't be un-made and don't always have the experience to know that it will get better. The stunning final scene takes some liberties with the script, but they are such that they may leave the ghost of Shakespeare wishing he could re-write.

While it highlights the teen suicide, violence and sexualization of children aspects of the story (remember that Juliet is 13 and being forced to marry an older man), it doesn't neglect the joy and fun with characterisations that I've not seen and the best wedding scene ever.

Shakespeare didn't write his women with the same complexity as his men, so it's wonderful to see young women rejecting any concepts that woman are virgins/lovers/wives/hags/witches. The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of  Romeo and Juliet is indeed most excellent and I so hope that Zoey Louise Moonbeam Dawson gets her creative teeth into Shakespeare's comedies.

This review appeared on AussieTheatre.com

Review: Stripped

Stripped
La Mama
7 March 2012
La Mama Theatre
to 18 March

Writer, actor and creator Caroline Lee remains an unmissable force in independent theatre.  Stripped is a solo performance about the nakedness and exposure of death that strips away the pretence of performance to its core of raw emotion.

Working with her long-time collaborator and director Laurence Strangio and lighting designer Paul Jackson, this is Lee's stage adaption of the novel she started when studying Professional Writing at RMIT, and which was serialised in Meanjin and supported by the Marion Eldridge Award and City of Melbourne's arts grants.

Told through interconnecting first-person narratives, it starts as Lillian, a lawyer, is dying from cancer and her sister Sophie, a stripper, faces her own trauma. It's a fascinating adaption that left me wanting to read the novel.

As the writer, Lee's performance comes from such a closeness to her characters that she can concentrate on the subtleties that let her share this deep understanding with the audience, and Strangio shapes the story and brings a physicality that embodies the driving emotion of each scene.

On a coffin-sized light box stage, Lee evokes Melbourne from an inner-city strip club to Chadstone (where no one wants to die). Lit mostly from below, Jackson's lighting exposes the human without the niceties of make up and flattering light (think what you look like with a torch under your face) which continues to bring the internal to the surface.

Yet, for all its heartfelt intelligence and emotional rawness, the text is distracting. Eyes and ears process language so differently and what is exquisite on a page can seem forced on the stage, as we don't need the descriptive adverbs and gorgeous metaphors to create the world or show reaction. There's a moment when a character says "I walked gingerly" and my inner editor grabbed her red pen; telling what we can see takes away from the character and brings too much attention back to the words.

Lee writes stunning words, but stage stories are driven by emotion, and another edit to tighten will free its characters even more, while the words will still shine in print.

This review appeared on AussieTheatre.com

Photo by Pia Johnson

Review: How To Train Your Dragon

How To Train Your  Dragon: The Arena Spectacular
Global Creatures and Dreamworks
8 March 2012
Hisense Arena

It's impossible to not love a life-sized, fire-breathing, doe-eyed dragon. Surely I could have a small one as a pet?

How To Train Your  Dragon: The Arena Spectacular is based on the Dreamworks 2010 film. Created in Melbourne by the same team who made Walking With Dinosaurs: The Arena Spectacular, its home town is first to see the new spectacle that will spend the next years travelling the world.

If you haven't seen the super-gorgeous computer-animated Dreamworks film, Hiccup the Viking doesn't live up to his dragon-slayer dad's expectations and wants to impress the village by slaughtering a scaly critter, but when he captures his first dragon, he can't bring himself to make the kill and begins to realise that his new friend Toothless and all dragons aren't as monstrous as they believed. When he wins the right to kill a dragon at a festival (and impress his rival slayer and love interest Amber), he's faced with choosing between his smoking new friends or his family and village.

Unlike Dinosaurs, humans clearly cohabit with dragons and the giants are joined by a large cast whose circus skills and flying impress even the most jaded tweens. And who prove that old-school puppetry is as wonderful as any animatronic as an extraordinarily beautiful shadow puppets nearly outshines the giants and some of the most loved critters were hand puppets.

But the stars remain the dragons.  Created by Sonny Tilders and his Creature Technology Company team, the animatronic and puppet creatures are nothing less than sensational, with details like hand-painted skins and blinking and moving eyes that instantly make you ignore any visible technology, and movement so fluid that it's easy to forget that they can't follow you home.

What takes this show beyond a circus ring of spectacular creatures, is the incredible animation by Dan Porta and production design by Peter England. The animation is not like the film, with a hand-drawn and darker feel to it. Projected onto a wall bigger than any screen, the animation creates movement that feels like a whizz-bang computer game rather than a film and works to make the huge audience feel more a part of the action.

Feeling close to the characters and having any subtlety of story is a tough call in spaces made for sport and with such how-do-they-do-that co-stars.  Director Nigel Jamieson is no stranger to massive events, having directed several Commonwealth and Olympic ceremonies, and he uses technology to tell remarkably intimate stories on our main stages (Honour Bound). The How To Train Your Dragon film is a story about Hiccup and his family, the Arena Spectacular, almost by definition, needs to be a story about Toothless and the dragons. Much of the emotion of the story still relies on knowing the film, but it works without that back up and I suspect that changes will continue to be made, so when they saddle up the dragons to leave Melbourne, there won't be any moments when the technology is more interesting than the story.

 How To Train Your Dragon: The Arena Spectacular is as spectacular as it claims to be. If you know little fans of the film, it's worth it. My favourite moment was watching a bank of children waving as Toothless flew to them.  But be warned that the merchandise is ridiculously cute, so be prepared for sulking if you're not willing to buy $30+ toys.

Chat: The Suitcase Royale

Zombatland
The Suitcase Royale
Arts House
14–18 March 2012

review

Zombie wombats attack a caravan park. What more do you need to know? Except that Zombatland is the new show by The Suitcase Royale. With wonderfully insane stories, live original music and sets made from found and ‘junkyard’ objects, they have created style so unique that it’s rare to see the Melbourne troupe perform in their home town as festivals all over the world demand their inventive gorgeousness.

AMP has a quick chat to Joseph Neil O’Farrell, Glen Lawerence Walton, Miles Henry O’Neil and new Royale Thomas Salisbury. Zombatland has a very short season at Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, 14–18 March.

 If you’re not scared of zombie wombats, what are you scared of?
“An eight year old with a badge.”

If you lived in a caravan, where would your next stop be?
Heathcote Caravan Park. Best caravan park in Central Victoria. Ask for April, she’ll sort you out.

After so much touring, what’s it like to be home?
It’s great, we get to hang out with our legendary friends and get to enjoy our record collections. Touring is pretty much the best though.

What festival has been the most surprising?
We just played the Perth International Arts Festival. We always knew it was going to be great, but the crowd reaction and turn out just blew us away!

What was your first trash/found prop?
An old gramophone we found out the back of an Italian restaurant.

Where do you find the best junkyard props?
Hard rubbish collection month in Hawthorn.

Where is the best op shop in Melbourne?
Good question, but we will never tell.

What was your best op shop purchase?
On the same day we got a full penguin outfit and miniature motorbike for the penguin to ride on….awesometown!

What do you always buy new (not second hand or found)?
Sandals. Never buy second hand sandals, it’s not natural.

How did the three of you meet?
There is a fourth member now and we all met at Deakin University, or as we like to call it: The Dream Factory.

What was the first album (or possibly CD) that you bought with your own money?
It was a cassingle. “Three Little Pigs” by Green Jelly.

 What song are you embarrassed to know the words to?
“Drops of Jupiter” by TRAIN.

What song will you always dance to?
“Born to Run” by the boss

North or south of the river?
North side for life baby. (Or until the developers kick us out of Northcote.)

Beer or cider?
There is nothing like an ice-cold beer after running from Zombats all day.

Tell me a tour story that should really stay on tour.
There is a long one that took place in the Arizona desert. It involves a coyote cave, being bogged in a river bed, flash flooding and impending death. Lets just say US Border Patrol did get called and we are thankful to be alive. Don’t ever drive out into an unfamiliar desert without a map.

What’s next for The Suitcase Royale?
Very exciting things are in the works. But for now we are pumped to tour Zombatland around Australia for the rest of the year.

This was on AussieTheatre.com