Review: Out of the Water

Out of the Water
Red Stitch Actors Theatre
7 February 2014
Red Stitch Theatre
to 8 March
redstitch.net

Red Stitch have opened the year with some of the best performances I've seen there.

Out of the Water is by US writer Brook Berman. With parallels to The Odessy, with its journey home disrupted by sirens, it captures the unease of early middle age that's fuelled by the palpable pain of what's missing or what might have been.

Polly (Kate Cole) is in her later 30s and leaves New York for a funeral, one of her dead mum's husbands, where she meets Graham (Brett Cousins), her nearly-forgotten step brother, who never left the same conservative Illinois town. They're not related and there are drunken sparks, but Polly doesn't expect Graham to turn up in NY or that his 17-year-old daughter with a Jesus crush, Cat (Emily Milledge), would follow.

With a story ostensibly about family and fidelity, there's fear of movie-of-week melodrama, but it's quickly dismissed as director Nadia Tass embraces the overt theatricality of the work and ensures a tone that lets the humour be dark and the subtext speak loudly, as the lovers say everything except what they want to.

The lighting design (Jason Bovaird) creates texture and more spaces than the design, but this cast could perform in a concrete bunker and still make us care.

Too often at Red Stitch, actors put their performances before their characters; not in this case. Cole and Cousins make the attraction between these broken and not-especially-likeable people felt as much as it's seen, and their toeing of the not-incest-but-not-Facebook-status line makes for a tension that's only momentarily broken with frantic – and hot and honest – sex.

Their contrast is Cat, who wants to bring her dad home but gets caught up in the excitement of being in NY, finding a perfect first kiss and wondering if falling in love is as wonderful as ice cream. Milledge (who last year came to attention in The Rabble's Story of O and Room of Regret) finds endless hope in this teenager who knows she should be hurting and understands what her dad is going through far more than Graham does himself.

With the year starting with such complex and complete performances from a cast who work with an awareness that makes them feel like they really are family, I'm excited to see what Red Stitch  – with new Artistic Director, Ella Caldwell – bring us next.

This was on aussietheatre.com.

Photo by Jodie Hutchinson

Review: The Other Place

The Other Place
Melbourne Theatre Company
31 January 2013
Playhouse, Arts Centre Melbourne
to 2 March 2013
mtc.com.au

The Other Place opens the MTC's 2013 season and is sure to be a subscriber favourite. Twitter told me there were people in tears at last night's opening and I'm believing Twitter, even if there were hard-arse non-criers in my row.

As it's the MTC, it's about middle class, middle age professionals (this time, doctors instead of academics) and this Broadway hit, by US writer Sharr White, is so dependent on the mystery of its plot and characters that it's hard to write about it without spoilers. But it's about MCMA profs in crisis and includes children, illness and estrangement; you know what to expect.

Catherine McClements is 50ish Juliana, a medical researcher at the peak of her career. She's on stage all night and by holding back and letting Juliana be difficult to initially like while easy to trust, her heartfelt performance builds to create the empathy and shared pain that deserves the audience's tears. She's supported by Heidi Arena, David Roberts and David Whiteley who each rightly let Juliana decide how they support her.

In the opening scenes, the mystery sits like a slinky at the top of a staircase. It's irresistible not to push and interesting enough to watch and see what's revealed at each step, but once it's started to tumble, its trajectory is known from that first nudge and there's no hope of unexpected deviation or twist. It's not that the script doesn't hold onto its secrets, but the direction (Nadia Tass) and design (Shaun Gurton with David Parker's film) play the clues obviously and use sentiment to highlight what, I suspect, most people figured out far too early in the night. It's like they don't trust the audience enough to let them be surprised or shocked.

The Other Place is ideal for an MTC season, but is it $98 show? Even a concession ticket is $77 or under 30s can spend $33. If $100 is a lot of money for you (it sure is for me), I suggest you start this weekend's theatre at Theatre Works for The Dead Ones or the Northcote Town Hall for Caravan Burlesque and you'll still have enough change for dinner and/or another show, or even have a good blub at War Horse, but wait and see if The Other Place turns up on a discount ticket site. If it does, see it.

Photo by David Parker

This was on AussieTheatre.com

Reveiw: Promises, Promises

Promises, Promises
The Production Company
3 October 2012
The State Theatre, Arts Centre Melbourne
to 7 October
theproductioncompany.com.au

The Production Company finish their 2012 season with 1968's Promises, Promises and, for all its promise, it seemed to leave its audience perplexed. This is the first time I've been at Production Company opening night that didn't end with a standing ovation.

Promises, Promises opened on Broadway in 1968, the West End in 1969 and only came back to Broadway in 2010. Based on Billy Wilder's film The Apartment (written for Jack Lemmon and staring Shirley Maclaine and Fred MacMurray), it's a one-off collaboration between Burt Bacharach (music), Hal David (lyrics) and Neil Simon (book); names that should righty leave any theatre lover drooling.

Simon had four shows running on Broadway in 1966 (Sweet Charity, The Star-Spangled Girl, The Odd Couple, and Barefoot in the Park), and the book (the action is all in the text) is as witty and observant as any of his award-winning plays. Hal David's lyrics are fautlessly funny and still able to break hearts (the show's most famous for "I'll never fall in love again") and I don't believe anyone who says that they don't like Burt Bacharach. Many try and copy his sound, but no one sounds like Bacharach better than Bacharach, and Orchestra Victoria capture his distinct dissonance, ear-melting harmonies and the 60s brass and big orchestra sound that ensures that even the show's lesser numbers are wonderful.

Set in 1962, it's a story about young no one accountant Chuck Baxter who lets middle-aged executives use his bachelor pad to have sex with young women, based on the promises that he'll get a promotion. Meanwhile he's in love with fellow no one Fran Kubelik, not knowing that she's one of the women in his apartment.

The gorgeous design captures the time, the ensemble ensure that "Turky lurky time" brings the house down, Chelsea Plumley's Marge MacDougall is a comic highlight with "A fact can be a beautiful thing", but the night belongs to wonderful Matt Hetherington as Chuck Baxter. Dismissing those who have been before him (Lemmon, Jerry Orbach, Sean Hayes), his Chuck is impossible not to adore (even with some lyric hicoughs and a sound mix that sometimes lost him in the band) and Hetherington is the heart of this production.

Production Company favourite Marina Prior is Fran, the object of Baxter's love and a young woman who naively sees no option but to be treated like she's worthless. Sure Matt and Marina's aren't 20, but vocally Marina's voice is too full and emotionally she brings too much maturity to Fran, missing her lightness and frustrating innocence. I would have loved to have seen Marina play the older and far funnier Marge.

But casting isn't what's holding this production back.  Promises, Promises is a product of its time;  a time of amazing clothes and music, but a time of attitudes that we hope not to see anymore. In his 1996 memoir, Rewrites, Neil Simon described the "enormous temptations" of their out of town run and says, "We were in a pre-AIDS world where all you had to worry about was your conscience and your discretion." It's not hard to see that the attitudes on the stage were the attitudes of the time.

Choosing to present this story is already a choice to comment on these attitudes.  By making one of the young women a man, director Nadia Tass makes a clear statement that we are looking at this story with a contemporary perspective, but this tone and directorial voice is inconsistent and confusing.

It's story about a woman who believe's she's nothing because she's treated like nothing, but playing the executives as buffoons and their 'girls' as drunken idiots supports the idea that what they are doing is harmless fun. It's this contradicting attitude to the time and the characters that leaves the production feeling awkward and flat. Of course, theatre is not tv, but Mad Men is set at the same time in the same city and world, and presents the misogyny of the time without demeaning the women (or the men).  Jilted secretary Miss Olsen (Hester Van Der Vyver) grasps the tone perfectly – nearly as well as Mad Men's Miss Olsen – and more of this subtle tone would give the show the guts it's missing.

As Promises, Promises is a show that's rarely produced (despite its pedigree), it's a wonderful choice for the season and subscribers won't be disappointed. There are issues, but I still enjoyed it more than the raved-about Chess and The Producers. It's a piece that lets story and character lead and any Bacharach is better than no Bacharach.

This was on AussieTheatre.com

Review: The Aliens

The Aliens
Red Stitch Actors Theatre
27 August 2011
Red Stitch
to 24 September

On realising that The Aliens was another work about young disillusioned American youth on July the fourth, I was as disillusioned as a disillusioned American youth who has realised that the American Dream is a crock. But it didn't last, as this is a fascinating and beautiful study of young men drifting from love and home.

American writer Annie Baker is only just 30 and has already won significant awards for her plays Body Awareness and Circle Mirror Transformation (which is on at the MTC this month). The Aliens is her third major work and was nominated for an Obie (the Off-Broardway Theatre awards given by The Village Voice – the Off-Broadway Tonys).

All three are set in a fictional Vermont town called Shirley. Shirley's fiction enables her to easily transform into any city. Even with northern hemisphere accents and references, it was no stretch to see the same world a short walk from Red Stitch's theatre, in any direction.

Heartbroken novelist Jasper (Brett Cousins) and shroom-loving college drop out KJ (Brett Ludeman) spend their days in a filthy alley behind a new-age cafe. Their comfortable silence is strangely comfortable to watch and the intrusion of high school student Evan (David Harrison), who works part time in the cafe before going to Jewish band camp, lets them talk about their band with many names, Bukowski's poems, their respective genius minds and their attempts at reaching to women for comfort.

Baker's gentle writing lets us observe and accept without judgement.  Her exposition is such a part of their conversation that is goes unnoticed and her story is so subtle that the impact of its climax is unexpected, especially as director Nadia Tass is unafraid of the silence and lets her actors use the time to create men we know and recognise.

This is writing needs time to settle into the hearts of its audience, but its sparseness creates a world that is far more familiar than alien.

This review originally appeared on AussieTheatre.com.

Photo by David Parker