Review: Georgy Girl –The Seekers musical

Georgy Girl –The Seekers musical
Richard East, Dennis Smith, Sue Farrelly
22 December 2015
Her Majesty's Theatre
georgygirlthemusical.com

Georgy Girl –The Seekers musical. Photo by Jeff Busby

The most moving part of Georgy Girl –The Seekers musical is a film of the audience watching The Seekers at Melbourne’s Myer Music Bowl in 1967. There were about 200 000 people, around a tenth of the city’s population and still the most people to ever attend a concert in Australia. The film showed young men without shirts in newspaper hats next to middle-aged women in their Sunday best; all totally in love with a Melbourne-formed folk-pop quartet who had such insane success in the UK that they pushed The Rolling Stones and The Beatles off number one spot in the charts.

It’s easy to let the love of The Seekers and their unmatched sound influence the enjoyment of this new musical, which is lost somewhere between a juke box musical and bio show.
The close harmony of this group is captured perfectly by the music team – Stephen Amos, arrangements; Julian Spink, sound design; the orchestra; and Pippa Grandison (Judith), Phillip Lowe (Keith), Mike McLeish (Bruce) and Glaston Toft (Athol) as the quartet – and their concert numbers feel so close to seeing The Seekers in the 1960s that I’d love to see them perform at the Music Bowl.

But great moments don’t make a great musical and this new work suffers from an underdeveloped book and a confusing tone.

The mixed feelings start with a practical set, that looks like it was made of rejected grey office dividers, clashing with costumes that turn up on the paisley and colour of the grooviest of the late 1960s. They seem part satire and part celebration without settling on either. This is also reflected in the choreography and the direction, which never satirises the group but appears to laugh at the society that made and loved them.

Georgy Girl –The Seekers musical. Photo by Jeff Busby

The book (by Judith’s brother in law) starts with an absolute love of this group and this love may be its downfall. It links facts through a narrator (whose presence makes sense after the interval) or projections, and throws in obvious jokes without ever finding a story or even questioning the image they presented on their album covers.

Facts about record sales aren’t story and this show doesn’t let us see the people behind the success, understand the impact of this success or what it is was about this group that made them so loved. Let alone reflecting on what is it about Australian society today that makes us want to hear and celebrate The Seekers again?

Georgy Girl –The Seekers musical. Photo by Jeff Busby

The limited focus is on Judith and her ongoing “what will I wear?” and “I’m too fat” jokes almost dismiss her skill and talent. There’s so little about the men that they are the one who slept around, the one who rang his mum, and the one who wanted to play Albert Hall.

It almost begs to be compared to the remarkable Melbourne-made Flowerchildren: The Mamas and Papas Story. The recreation of the music was glorious but the show left it’s audience unable to hear that music again without thinking about the people who made it.

Georgy Girl – The Seekers musical left me wanting so much more than the title-song earworm.

This was on AussieTheatre.com.

What I loved in 2015: The Best of Melbourne Theatre

Wow, the pile of January invites is already intimidating. But I can't eat fruit cake and drink fizz until I decide what shows I loved the most this year.

Over 200 shows to choose from and I still missed that many again that I wish I'd seen. Melbourne, you really are most excellent in so many ways. (And if you could fix Punt Road, I'd be more likely to venture over to the north side to see even more shows.)

Apologies for not running the What Melbourne Loved series this year. Although it is my favourite series on this blog... Let's come back next year.

Choosing winners has been unreasonably difficult this year. To save my own sanity (how could I not mention X!), there are more special mentions than usual.

A few past winners are on the list again  – Declan Greene and Paul Jackson have won the most over the years – but there are exciting new names, some oldies who I can't believe haven't made it before, and a couple awards for stuff that wasn't in Melbourne. And it hopefully demonstrates that "no review" doesn't mean a show wasn't amazing.


Outstanding Artists 2015

WRITING

Shit. Nicci Wilks, Peta Brady and Sarah Ward. Photo by Sebastian Bourges

Patricia Cornelius for Shit,  Dee & Cornelius, MTC NEON

Angus Cerini for The Bleeding Tree, Griffin Theatre Company (Sydney)

Special mentions

Declan Greene for I Am a Miracle, Malthouse

Penelope Bartlau for Psychopomp & Seething, Barking Spider Visual Theatre & MUST at La Mama

DESIGN

Love and Information. Photo by Pia Johnson

Paul Jackson (lighting) for Love and Information, Malthouse.
(And how amazing was the James Turrell exhibition in Canberra! And the installation at Mona.)

Ryan. Photo by Sarah Walker

Nathan Burnmeister (design), Brendan Jellie (lighting) and Raya Slavin (sound) for Ryan at La Mama

Special mention

Psychopomp. Photo by Sarah Walker

Bronwyn Pringle (lighting) for Songbirds and Angels at La Mama

Jason Lehane (design) for Psychopomp & Seething, Barking Spider Visual Theatre & Must at La Mama.


PERFORMANCE

L'Amante Aglaise. Jillian Murray & Robert Medrum 

Jillian Murray and Robert Medrum in L'Amante Anglaise at La Mama

Die Sieben Todsunden. Meow Meow. Photo by Charlie Kinross

Meow Meow in Die Sieben Todsunden, Victorian Opera

Special mentions

Shari Sebbens, Paula Arundell, Airlie Dodds in The Bleeding Tree, Griffin Theatre Company 

Nicci Wilks, Peta Brady and Sarah Ward in Shit,  Dee & Cornelius, MTC NEON

Steve Gome in Johan Padan and the Discovery of the Americas, Hoy Polloy at 45 Downstairs

Emily Milledge in Antigone, Malthouse


DIRECTION

Susie Dee for Shit,  Dee & Cornelius, MTC NEON

Peter Sellars for Desdemona Melbourne Festival, UnionPay International

Special mention

Daniel Lammin for Ryan at La Mama

Beng Oh for The Yellow Wave, 15 Minutes from Anywhere at The Butterfly Club

BEST FESTIVAL

Dark Mofo (Hobart)

Special mention

The Container Festival, MUST


EVERYTHING THEY DO ROCKS

The Listies

The Listies. Matt Kelly & Rich Higgins

No one makes me laugh like The Listies (Matt Kelly and Richard Higgins). The happiest audiences I have ever sat in have been at Listies' shows. They are so brilliant that I couldn't find enough stars, if I had to do so.

The Listies Ruin Christmas at Malthouse left me in pain. I tried to get my theatre date for the night, Lun (7), to give me some quotes but when I asked him what were his favourite bits, he could only narrow it down to "All of it". And "Where's Matt?".

They let kids be excited about being naughty and make sure they are always in on the joke. Even though there are plenty of laughs for the accompanying groan ups, the kids are never left out or talked down to. If they were around when I was 8, I would have cut their photo out of a magazine and glued it to my wall. (I really did glue a magazine photo of Mark Holden to my wall once; Mum wasn't impressed.)

This year they also released Ickypedia, which is the funniest book in the history of books. Really. Funniest book ever! (And I have read Good Omens and Monty Python's Big Red Book.)

Special mention

Nicola Gunn/SANS HOTEL

Piece for Person and Ghetto Blaster. Nicola Gunn. Photo by Sarah Walker

Nicola Gunn's theatre is astonishing. It's work that somehow takes you out of your brain and into a place that's all feeling, while your brain is working in the background repairing broken thought patterns and creating better ones.

This year we saw A Social Service at Malthouse and the Piece for Person and Ghetto Blaster at Arts House Melbourne.

Outstanding Productions 2015

CABARET

The Orchid & the Crow. Daniel Tobias. Photo byAndrew Wuttke

The Orchid & the Crow, Daniel Tobias and team, Button Eye Productions


Special mention

Changeling, Camille O'Sullivan at Arts Centre Melbourne

COMMERCIAL SHOW
I liked some, but none were a favourite.


MUSICAL

Sweet Charity. Photo by Jeff Busby

Sweet Charity, Luckiest Productions, Neil Gooding Productions, Tinderbox Productions, Arts Centre Melbourne

Special mention

In The Heights, StageArt

Avenue Q, Trifle Theatre Company

COMEDY

Womanz. Tessa Walters

Womanz, Tessa Walters

Special mentions

Catchy Show Title, Dr. Professor Neal Portenza

Beau Heartbreaker, Selina Jenkins

Donkey, Hannah Gadsby

Ghost Machine, Laura Davis

DANCE

32 Rue Vandenbranden. Photo by Herman Sorgeloos

32 Rue Vandenbranden, Peeping Tom; Melbourne Festival


OPERA

Fly Away Peter. Photo by Zan Wimberly

Fly Away Peter, Sydney Chamber Orchestra, Arts Centre Melbourne, Melbourne Festival

Special mention

The Rabbits, Melbourne Festival, Arts Centre Melbourne, Opera Australia, Barking Gecko, West Australian Opera, Perth International Arts Festival


LIVE ART

The Ministry. Photo by Anna Nalpantidis

The Ministry, MUST, Kin Collective


BEST OF THE BEST

Fag/Stag, The Last Great Hunt

Shit, Dee & Cornelius; MTC NEON

The Bleeding Tree. Shari Sebbens, Paula Arundell, Airlie Dodds. Photo by Brett Boardman

The Bleeding Tree, Griffin Theatre Company (Sydney)

Bronx Gothic, Okwui Okpokewasili; Melbourne Festival, PS122, Arts House Melbourne

YOUARENOWHERE, Andrew Schneider; Melbourne Festival, PS122, Arts House Melbourne

MY FAVOURITE SHOW OF 2015

Oedipus Schmeodipus Zoe Coombs Marr & Mish Grigor

Odeipus Schmoedipus by post at Arts House Melbourne

2014
2013

2012

2011 

2010 

2009 

2008 

2007 

The 24-Hour Experience: Ballarat

The 24-Hour Experience: Ballarat
21–22 November 2015
24hourexperience.com.au

The nine who made it through all 24 hours.

Can it really be more than a week since the amazing 24-Hour Experience in Ballarat? I promise to share some more pics of the amazing 24 hours soon.

In the meantime, here's my piece in The Age.

2014 part 1
2014 part 2
2014 part 3
2014 part 4
2014 part 5

Review: The Marriage of Figaro

The Marriage of Figaro
Opera Australia
12 November 2015
State Theatre, Arts Centre Melbourne
to 28 November (selected dates)
opera.org.au

The Marriage of Figaro. Opera Australia

Opera Australia's absolutely splendid The Marriage of Figaro is in Melbourne until the end of November. Premiering in 1786, Mozart's comic opera about infidelity and forgiveness remains one of his most-loved works.

Despite the difficult acoustics of the State Theatre, conductor Anthony Legge creates an exceptional balance between the pit, the stage and Siro Battaglin's fortepiano that accompanies the recitative. With a light touch, if feels like Mozart's "too many notes" are heard through fresh ears and the mix especially celebrates Mozart's love of the sound of human voices and the magic that occurs when they sing together.

And all are glorious voices to hear. Andrew Jones's Figaro contrasts with the delight of Taryn Fiebig's Susanna. Shane Lowrencev's Count is all power and bass, and Jane Ede's Countess Almaviva silences the room when she sings in despair about her marriage.

Jenni Tiramani's gorgeous aqua blue, peache and yellow design uses techniques from the 1700s to make the costumes and her set – which reveals its absolute beauty in the final act in the pine grove –takes advantage of the full height of the theatre. David Finn's magnificent lighting takes full  advantage of the set. With a story set in one day, the lighting creates the sense of moving time and changing moods as it opens with morning light that's hard to believe isn't from an open window and ends in a gradual fade from dust to darkness and candle light.

With eavesdropping servants and an active chorus who each bring a sense of character, Sir David McVicar's direction (revived by Andy Morton for Melbourne) lets the singers find a comedic truth and honesty in their characters; although, overall the production feels confined by its form. There are moments of stereotyped character comedy when the chances to trust the honesty, lust or hurt truth of the characters could make the laughs come from a less easy but far stronger place.

It's a celebration of Mozart and a loving re-creation of The Marriage of Figaro, but there's nothing on the stage that says why Opera Australia are telling this story. There's no reflection about us and now. In the 1990s Peter Sellars directed a famous production of this opera (filmed for television) set in Trump Towers in Manhattan. Still sung in Italian, it felt almost obvious to set it in the obscene wealth of the USA at the time. There's nothing keeping this story in the 1700s. Rich people still think they can control poor people, people still fall in love and lust and lie and beg forgiveness. This is a story that ultimately leaves all of its characters equal, despite money and status and power, so why leave it stuck over 200 years ago in a far away country.

This was on AussieTheatre.com.

Review: The Last Man Standing

The Last Man Standing
MTC
11 November 2015
The Sumner, Southbank Theatre
to December 12
mtc.com.au

The Last Man Standing. Peter Carroll & William McInnes.  Photo by Jeff Busby

My review is in The Age.

Review: Buyer and Cellar

Buyer and Cellar
MTC
5 November 2015
Fairfax Studio, Arts Centre Melbourne
to 12 December 2015
mtc.com.au

Ash Flanders. Photo by Jeff Busby

Barbra Streisand has a replica of a shopping mall in the basement of her super mansion in Malibu. She uses it to keep her collection of dolls, clothes and pretty stuff. This is true. I didn’t know that, and am surprised that Brooklyn-based playwright Jonathon Tolins is the only person who’s been inspired to write about it.

Buyer and Cellar started when Tolins joked about what it must be like to work in her private mall. The result is a solo show about out-of-work actor Alex who loses his job at Disneyland and finds himself the only staff in Bab’s rabbit hole. With the actor playing Alex also playing his cynical boyfriend Barry, Barbra’s bitter long-time staffer, and the diva herself, the playwright oddly begins by telling the audience that none of it is true – except the hoard.

It’s a strange play that at first seems stuck on a one-note Barbara obsession – and when the “People” dress comes out, that note sounds amazing as the audience gasp in unison. But it develops into something far more curious as Alex possibly befriends his boss and has to choose between lying on a perfect couch in her too-perfect world or a duller real life with Barry.

If Alex were in any other tight t-shirt than the ever-watchable, consistently-glorious Ash Flanders’s, I’d wonder what it was doing on an Australian mainstage program, instead of packing in the Midsumma crowds at the Greyhound.

In a work that could easily be as outrageous as an amyl-fuelled Barbra drag queen at 3 am, director Gary Abrahams has pulled everything back to a point where its moments of high-camp glory, snarky bitching, and bonkers-Babs-buying-her-own-dolly feel real.

It could easily be a parody of Barbra fandom, gay men, drag queens, and anyone who’s sung “Don’t rain on my parade” and made a giant muff joke. But it’s not.

Everything that squeals Barbra is still there, but it’s muted enough to let us see the people who love the “People” dress. Even Adam Gardnir’s spiral-staircase, sunken living room, pop-out wardrobe design (beautifully lit by Rachel Burke) is restrained in its campness; his “People” dress is beautiful.

Maybe that’s also the appeal of Barbra herself. She knows how to work hard, how to make her work feel real, and when to stop adding beads to a dress so that it’s closer to classy than crass.

Instead of satirising her, Buyer and Cellar have listened, watched and found the path that knows that being laughed at isn’t the same as being loved for being who you are.

This was on AussieTheatre.com.

Your Turn 5

Your Turn 5
Pop Up Playground
19 November 2015
Bella Union
popupplayground.com.au




Game shows are awesome. Live game shows are more awesome. Live game shows where the audience join in are even more awesome again. Live game shows with audience participation hosted by Ben McKenzie are the awesomest.  Live game shows with audience participation hosted by Ben McKenzie where Melbourne clever-pants people make fools of themselves made by the Pop up Playground team? Invent your own superlative!

And be at the Bella Union on Thursday 19 November from 6.30 for Your Turn 5. Info here.

If you weren't at Your Turn 3, you missed the wonderful Ming-Zhu Hii and me win bronze. (Highlights above.)

On paper, we look like a winning team, but either we aren't as nerdy as we thought we were or are the sort of people who need a quiet room and thinking time. My personal highlight was not remembering that the fourth Young One was Vyvyan, making a toy diorama of Terminator 2 thinking it was Terminator – which Ming-Zhu still guessed correctly – and our team effort of not being able to pinpoint Washington on a map despite knowing that between us we could answer obscure plot questions about The West Wing and House of Cards.

You can also watch Ming-Zhu in The Ex-PM on ABC.

Your Turn 5 guests are:

Richard Watts from RRR's Smart Arts and Arts Hub
Yvonne Virsik from Monash Uni Student Theatre
Sarah Jones from shows like Jonestown
and
Marcus Westbury, who I don't know, but if he's as smart and funny as the other three, he'll be terrific.

Last chance: Dracula

Dracula
Little Ones Theatre
30 October 2015
Theatre Works
to 14 November
Theatreworks.org.au

Dracula. Amanda McGregor, Kevin Kiernan Molloy, Alexandra Aldrich. Photo by Sarah Walker

This gloriously sexy Dracula shows a much better way to do glittery vampires and it finishes this weekend at Theatre Works.

For the Melbourne Festival, Theatre Works welcomed an almost textless The Bacchae cast with women. Now Little Ones Theatre have created Bram Stoker's Dracula as a live silent movie and cast it with women.

This is Stoker’s story told with a black glitter and blood-red aesthetic that reflects, questions and wildly defies any assumptions of gender, sexuality and queer politics.Little Ones Theatre have one of the most unique voices in Melbourne theatre.

Director Stephen Nicolazzo embraces high-camp without the condescending tone or gender insult that camp laughs often come from.  Inspired by the 1980s but seen through today’s eyes, their worlds are visually arresting, sexually free and always unforgettable.

If you want to experience original texts, read them. Then come to the theatre to see them through someone else's eyes.

Catherine Davies, Brigid Gallacher. Photo by Sarah Walker

 Alexandra Aldrich. Photo by Sarah Walker

Dracula.  Alexandra Aldrich, Janine Watson, Morgan Maguire, Kevin Kiernan Molloy. Photo by Sarah Walker

Dracula. Little Ones Theatre. Kevin Kiernan Molloy. Photo by Sarah Walker

Dracula. Little Ones Theatre. Amanda McGregor, Zoe Boesen. Photo by Sarah Walker

Review: Seven Deadly Sins

Seven Deadly Sins
Die Sieben Todsunden
Victorian Opera
6 November 2015
Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne
victorianopera.com.au

Meow Meow. Photo by Charlie Kinross

Victorian Opera commissioned four young Australian composers to write Seven Deadly Sins, with a sin for each of seven Australian cities. They were inspired by Bertolt Brecht's assigning of sins to USA cities for Die Sieben Todsunden, written in 1932, with Kurt Weill, in Paris, after they had fled Berlin. The new sins were performed by Orchestra Victoria and seven singers, while the inspiring piece and its sins were owned, and sung in the original German, by the extraordinary Meow Meow.

Directed by Cameron Menzies and conducted by Tahu Matheson, the new work celebrates the sins of our cities, as much as the music and text of Julian Langdon, Mark Viggiani, Ian Whitney and Jessica Wells – and the newly-graduated talent of singers Kate Amos, Nathan Lay, Elizabeth Lewis, Emma Muir-Smith, Michael Petruccelli, Cristina Russo and Matthew Tng.

Highlights were Adelaide trying to fight Gluttony and resist its own “awesome appetite” for Frog Cakes, Fruchos, Beestings and Coopers Pale Ale, and Canberra’s Pride leading to the fall of Howard, Rudd, Gillard, Rudd and Abbott. “I won’t say sorry!” says Howard in a Team Australia tracksuit. “I will!” says Rudd in a suit, before Gillard sings like Evita about men in blue ties.

Melbourne’s Greed is John Wren asking if it was power or glory. Sydney’s Lust wants real estate and brunch. Brisbane’s Sloth is too hot to get a beer, Hobart’s Envy can’t win a game show, and Perth’s Anger is a mini-opera about an aging mining tycoon with a “with a witch to the left of me and a bitch to the right of me.”

After the interval, Meow Meow was Anna 1 (the singer) and Anna 2 (the dancer) in Die Sieben Todsunden. With the orchestra and a male quartet (Michael Petruccelli, Carlos E Bárcenas, Nathan Lay and Jeremy Kleeman) as her judging family, it was like there was no distance between the performer and the composer and writer.

Meow Meow is the cabaret persona of Melissa Madden Gray but the genius of Meow is that she’s never anything but real. And to have Meow playing the Annas has got to be like seeing the piece as Weill and Brecht did. As a character she’s vulnerable but unbreakable, and as a performer playing a performer playing a character, she understands every note, syllable and satirical nuance about being a German work, set in the US, created in Paris and performed so many years later in Australia. She’s astonishing.

The only disappointment is that it was a one-night only concert. New Australian work deserves to be seen, heard and loved. The Seven Deadly Sins is funny and welcoming as it sings about the Australian propensity to celebrate and indulge in our sinning. Let’s hope there are plenty of new ways to let the sins be shared.

And what about a season of Brecht/Weill with Meow Meow?

This was on AussieTheatre.com.

Review: normal.suburban.planetary.meltdown

normal.suburban.planetary.meltdown
Malthouse Prompt education program
5 November 2015
Beckett Theatre
malthousetheatre.com.au

My review is in The Age.

MELBOURNE FESTIVAL: The New York Narratives

New York Narratives
Melbourne Festival & Arts House Melbourne
www.festival.melbourne

The New York Narratives mini program within the Melbourne Festival is the beginning of an exchange between New York's PS122 and Melbourne's Arts House.

In 1980, PS122 was an artist squat in an old school in the East Village and is now an international leader of contemporary performance that presents and commissions artists "whose work challenges boundaries of live performance".

Established in 2005 by the Melbourne City Council, Arts House Melbourne is one of Australia's leading presenters and supporters of independent contemporary artists.

Before sending Australian artists to New York next year, Arts House shared 12 PS122 projects – performance, film and installation – with the Melbourne Festival and the ones I saw were the works I think I'll remember the most from this festival.

Bronx Gothic

Bronx Gothic. Photo by Sarah Walker

Okwui Okpokwasili's Bronx Gothic was the first show I saw this festival and it left me struggling for words. This was dance theatre made words feel inadequate to describe the experience of sharing and being trusted with this story.

Okpokwasili begins with her bare back towards the audience in the corner of a room surrounded by white curtains. Her movement is somewhere between a shimmy, an orgasm, a fit and demonic possession. It's controlled but without a hint of tension, and disconcertingly mesmerising. As it's hard to tell if she's in pleasure or pain, the need to see her face and to understand is almost overwhelming.

When she stops – exhausted and sweating – she reads the letters between two 11-year-old girls; one is her. At first, it's a welcoming recognition of discovering sexuality and sex with talk of titties and periods. But it doesn't feel like the opening dance, or the songs and dance that are between the letters. 

As her 11-year-olds talk about hard dicks and the taste of cum, the deeper truth of her story and an understanding of the dance reveals itself. At a very nice, kind-of-elite arts festival full of very nice, kind-of-elite people, we're shown a world where a little girl screams at herself for being an ugly nigger.

Drawing on the gothic tradition of sharing letters and the themes of blood, superstition and unseen horror, Okpokwasili's story of sexual abuse, internalised-hatred and blood left me feeling like my heart had slopped onto the floor.

The Shipment

Young Jean Lee's Theater Company - THE SHIPMENT (5min) from Young Jean Lee on Vimeo.

Young Jean Lee's The Shipment, filmed in Seattle in 2009, was part of the Stage to Screen program (films on screen) that I wish I'd seen all of. Would love to see a similar program in non-festival time.

Young Jean Lee was at the 2012 Melbourne Festival with We're All Gonna Die. I described it as "an "not at all theatrey, a little bit hipstery and likely to make you cry (for yourself, in a good way) and sing" and knew that, given the chance, I'd see anything she made.

Working an African American cast – she's Korean American – , The Shipment attempts to address the black experience in a work that includes in-your-face standup, sketch and a living room drama. The tone's astonishing; move a bit either way and it's racist, offensive shit or soppy, self indulgent shit. But it's neither, which left some of the audience huffing out and some of us crying with laughter.

YOUARENOWHERE

YOUARENOWHERE. Photo by Sarah Walker

During it's run, Andrew Schneider's YOUARENOWHERE was the Fight Club of shows that could only be talked about among people who had experienced it knock the air out of us.

And I can't ruin it for anyone who will see it in the future. If you have the chance, go.

A what-the-fucking-fuck, jaw-dropping combination of technology, science fiction, physics and the purest of human interaction, it gave me something I hadn't seen before; I can't ask for anything more than that.

Performance Space 122 provides incomparable experiences for audiences by presenting and commissioning artists whose work challenges boundaries of live performance. PS122 is dedicated to supporting the creative risks taken by artists from diverse genres, cultures and perspectives. We are an innovative local, national and international leader in contemporary performance. - See more at: http://www.ps122.org/about/mission/#sthash.ktjYDmBO.dpuf

Performance Space 122 provides incomparable experiences for audiences by presenting and commissioning artists whose work challenges boundaries of live performance. PS122 is dedicated to supporting the creative risks taken by artists from diverse genres, cultures and perspectives. We are an innovative local, national and international leader in contemporary performance. - See more at: http://www.ps122.org/about/mission/#sthash.ktjYDmBO.dpuf

Acting Stranger

Read about Michael Dwyer's big-screen debut in The Age

Acting Stranger is a live art project with Andrew Schnieder wanting to create moments of intimacy between strangers.

Thirty two Melbourne people signed up to learn a scene, turn up in a public place and perform the scene with Schneider  – no rehearsal, no second take – and walk away without speaking. The scenes were filmed with a camera that was hidden in plain sight.

The scenes are available at actingstranger.com  – today only the New York ones are up, but the Melbourne ones are on their way.

The Melbourne ones had one screening at ACMI. The project was originally not going to be filmed, then only seen on the internet – Schneider says that the he's still working on how it works. But to see them one after the other on a huge screen brought a dimension to the project that the creators themselves hadn't seen.

There's something fascinating about watching people who aren't acting but are aware that they are being watched (the non-actor volunteers were always more interesting). And there's something more addictive about watching people who pass through the scene with no awareness of the camera. But what was most amazing was watching Schneider and his co-creator (whose name I've forgotten) as they saw something they filmed over two days, in a strange city, with strangers, while Schneider was performing another piece at night.

from New York with amazing passers by

MELBOURNE FESTIVAL: Masquerade

Masquerade
Griffin Theatre Company & State Theatre Company of South Australia
Presented by Melbourne Festival
24 October 2015
The Sumner
to 25 October
www.festival.melbourne

Masquerade. Nathan O'Keeefe Photo by Brett Boardman

Kate Mulvany’s gorgeous adaption of Kit Williams's picture book Masquerade celebrates why picture books and stories are so important to children and why whenever a child asks you to read them a book, you stop what you are doing and read them a book. You’ll never regret that choice.

At today's post-show Q and A, Mulvany talked about how Masquerade was the distraction she needed when she was in hospital with cancer as a child.  She want on to explain how when, as an adult, she finally contacted Williams, she flew to his UK home where he served her rabbit pie and gave her the rights to his book – on the condition that her story be a part of the new story.

Published in 1979, his book is about the Moon (Kate Cheel) sending Jack Hare (Nathan O’Keefe) on a quest to deliver a gold amulet to her love, the Sun (Mikelangelo, in the dazzling role he was born to play). But what made this book insanely popular is that each page is filled with riddles and clues that identify the spot where the real gold amulet was buried. It was found in the early 1980s, but possibly by accident. And the lack of amulet doesn’t make the riddles and clues any more fascinating today.

At the heart of this adaption is the story about Joe (Louis Fontain), a child with cancer, and Tessa (Helen Dalimore), his mum who needs hope  – "Mum, why do you let them do that to me?" – as she shares the book with her son. With original music by Mikelangleo and Pip Branson, performed by the ever-divine Black Sea Gentlemen, their story continues after the last page with an adventure that lets Joe and Tessa help Jack Hare to revist Penny Pockets (Zindzi Okenyo) and the book characters and learn why The Man Who Plays The Music That Makes The World Go Around (Branson) sometimes stops.

With a design by Anna Cordingly that’s inspired by the book but created for the mood and complex delight of this version, direction by Sam Strong and Lee Lewis that never lets the story drop and always keeps hope, this is the sort of theatre that promises children that theatre is wonderful and reminds grown ups that a story about love is always the right choice.

Today (Sunday) is the last day of the Melbourne Festival. It’s been amazing and I can’t think of a better way to end it than to see one of the last two performances of Masquerade.

This was on AussieTheatre.com.

MELBOURNE FESTIVAL: Monkey ... Journey to the West

Monkey ... Journey to the West
Kim Carpenter's Theatre of Image
Melbourne Festival co-commission
22 October 2015
Geelong Performing Arts Centre
to 24 October
www.festival.melbourne

Monkey...Journey to the West. Photo by Justin Nicholas

Geelong only feels a long way away when you're in peak hour traffic, otherwise it's an easy drive – or catch the train.

I didn't get into Monkey Magic when it replaced The Goodies on the ABC in the 1980s, but this production has made me fall in love with the story.

If you have kids and want them to see some totally gorgeous theatre, there are three shows left.

My review is in The Age.

MELBOURNE FESTIVAL: Desdemona

Desdemona
Melbourne Festival & UnionPay International
17 October 2015
Sumner Theatre
to 19 October
www.festival.melbourne

Sydney season: 23, 24 & 25 October. Details: sydneyfestival.org.au.

Desdemona. Melbourne Festival. Photo by Mark Allan

The Melbourne Festival production of Peter Sellars Desdemona sold out. With reactions ranging from  "tedious" – there were walk outs and some impressive snoring – to genius, it's been talked about a lot. I'm in the genius camp. I was engrossed, fascinated and enchanted by a work that's equally as meditative and relaxing as it's demanding and forceful.

American Nobel Prize–winning author Toni Morrison and Malian musician Rokia Traoré wrote their reflection on Shakespeare's Othello via email.

Set in an afterlife where people become their true selves, the now-adult Desdemona meets the woman who brought her up, her mother's slave Barbary – referenced once in the text. Traoré sings as Barbary, with two female backing vocalists and two male musicians, and Tina Benko speaks Morrison's text as Desdemona.

The contrast is far more than the obvious black and white. Traoré sings like there's nothing guarding her emotions. It's music that is felt more than heard and the projected translations of her songs are barely necessary. Benko relies on the meanings of her words. Her Desdemona is trying to break free of what she wanted to see as true love and hides behind a wall of anger and confusion that is torn down even when she doesn't want it to be.  Both remarkable performances feed the other without diluting each other's power or story.

In this place they are able to see their relationship through the eyes of the other. Barbary – which wasn't her real name; it was what the English called Africa – saw herself as a slave, with no rank and no choice, who did whatever child The Desdemona wanted. Desdemona saw Barbary as her real mother, her best friend, and the only person who loved and comforted her. She also saw her position as young woman "on the cusp of unmarriageability" as one where her choices were as limited as Barbary's. However, she wanted to love like Barbary and chose a man worthy of her. She married Othello, the only black man she'd met.

Desdemona also meets and shares her meetings with the other dead, including her servant Emilia, her mother, Othello's mother and Othello. Knowing the story helps, but this work is about the relationships between characters so it's not necessary

I haven't read Othello well, but this production let me see it from perspectives that I had never have thought of. And this is the heart of how Sellars creates theatre.

This was on AussieTheatre.com

And here's an extra reflection on its director Peter Sellars.

In the middle of an amazing Melbourne Festival program – one that has taken me by surprise – my favourite hour, so far,  has been Peter Sellars's artist talk on a Friday afternoon.

I've been a fan of Sellars since I saw his production of Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, set in New York's Trump Towers, on the tv in the 1990s. (Who'd have thought then what Trump'd be trying to do now). Even on a tiny screen with subtitles, I was totally engaged in a story that felt like it was written for the world I lived in. It made me look at opera differently.

Then I discovered his work with composer John Adams (I want every opera – every theatre – experience to leave me feeling like Nixon in China does) and was beyond excited when he was apointed director of the 2002 Adelaide Festival. That appointment didn't have a happy ending, but when I asked Sellars about it, he said that surely being rejected by a dull conservative government for programming community and Indigenous work was a good thing.

At his talk, he told us how Desdemona started many years ago as at a long lunch with Morrison and him mentioning Othello's inherent racism and it being a text past its "use-by date". Toni had some things to say about that. Sellars went on to create an Othello set in Washington, just after Obama was elected, and Morrison responded with Desdemona.

Sellars – who has a mohawk perfect for a receding hairline, wears bright print shirts and beads, and hugs every person he meets like they are a long-lost friend –  talks about art as using collaboration, skill, craft and sophistication to create a space that preciously didn't exist.

This space, in his case a stage, is where people come to meet and discuss. It's a space that defines what it means to be human and lets us see the world from another person's perspective. It's all about perspective. He says how one person's freedom fighter is another person's terrorist, so theatre is about finding ways to share other perspectives and find the common and inclusive place where we are all human.

Or, "It's like telling your father something they don't want to hear."

I have days where I am sick of the abuse and eyerolling I get when I talk about missing voices on stage, discuss the politics and assumptions undermining a production, or despair that I want theatre to be something that questions rather than distracts us for an hour or so. I have plenty of distractions in my life, I want to see theatre that shows me something I haven't seen or thought about before; I want to see the world though someone else's eyes.

As his perspective of Othello changed when he saw it through Toni's eyes, Sellars invites us to see Desdemona through the eyes we may never have thought of seeing it through.

MELBOURNE FESTIVAL: Masquerade homework

Masquerade
Griffin Theatre Company & State Theatre Company of South Australia
22–25 October
The Sumner
www.festival.melbourne

"It's been an anti climax since I found it."

MELBOURNE FESTIVAL: The Bacchae

The Bacchae
St Martins, Fraught Outfit, Melbourne Festival, Theatre Works
14 October 2015
Theatre Works
to 24 October 2015
www.festival.melbourne

The Bacchae. Melbourne Festival. Photo by Pia Johnson

I didn't take my eyes off the stage and am still trying to fully understand the astonishingly beautiful, often disturbing and totally unapologetic adaption of The Bacchae created by Adena Jacobs, Aaron Orzech and a cast of teenage women from St Martin's youth theatre.

Euripides's The Bacchae is about the god Dionysus coming to Thebes disguised as a human and generally wreaking havoc with the women of the city who head to the hills and get up to all sorts of drunken, sensual and violent mischief. An angry, and pervy, king dresses as a woman, heads are torn off and most of the action can only be described because it's too much for moral and sensitive audiences.

If you know the Euripides play, it's all on the stage, even though it's told  through live music and dream-cum-nightmare visions with a blow up pool, an inflatable Luna Park smile and blood the colour of gold. There's only a page of the text, and after Dionysus's birth from Zeus's thigh, it's told from the women's point of view. The whole story is re-imagined with young women as all the characters. Dionysus – the god so often envisioned with a huge cock and women at his feet – is a teenage girl who slept in and doesn't have time to straighten her hair.

Let that sink in: young women are the gods and rulers. Not only are they the possessed and riotous mob, they are the people who cause and punish the violence and chaos. And when they become drunk and out of control, they become young men – with long fluffy phallus.  If you're a young man who wonders how young women see you, please see this.

The night I went, there was a school group in the audience. They were silent, in a can't-stop-watching way. Do I even need to say more about the power of this production?

If you don't know the play – and why should you?; embrace every re-telling as a new story – it's a world where young women are the storytellers, the exploiters and the exploited.

It lets us see how they see themselves compared to how they think the world sees them. We meet them as their unique selves wearing denim and t-shirts but they become faceless, oiled bodies in identical bikinis. It's uncomfortable to make the connections between the identifiable teenagers talking about Vegemite toast to the unidentifiable objectified bodies. Which is what makes it so brilliant.

Yesterday I was driving along Warrigal Road and stopped at the North Road intersection. There's a place called Kittens Car Wash where young women in bikinis wash cars. A blow up sex doll holds balloons at the entrance. It's a busy intersection in the semi-industrial suburbs and thousands and thousands of cars stop and see young women in bikinis washing cars.

This is why we need to see young women in our theatres saying how this isn't the world they want to live in. The Bacchae shows us what they think we see when we look at them. They see the objectification, the reduction to sexual pleasure giver (not takers) and a world where they might have to wash cars in a bikini to pay their rent, uni fees or childcare.

And they're saying no.

This is also on AussieTheatre.com.

Review: Jurassica

Jurassica
Red Stitch Actors Theatre
11 October 2015
Red Stitch
to 7 November
redstitch.net

Red Stitch. Jurassica. Photo by Jodie Hutchinson

My review is in The Age.

MELBOURNE FESTIVAL: The Rabbits

The Rabbits
Melbourne Festival, Arts Centre Melbourne, Opera Australia, Barking Gecko, West Australian Opera, Perth International Arts Festival
10 October 2015
Arts Centre Melbourne, Playhouse
to 13 October
www.festival.melbourne

The Rabbits is an hour-long opera based on a 1998 children's picture book. Its Melbourne Festival season is sold out and as the Playhouse exploded with joy at the end of last night's performance, it's clear that this remarkable new Australian opera is going to be around for a very long time.

Adapted and directed by Barking Gecko's John Sheedy, it's a co-production with Opera Australia in association with WA Opera and was commissioned by the Perth and Melbourne festivals. Ostensibly an opera for children, it’s an amazing introduction to the form and sound of opera – and the many children who saw it were mesmerised  – but its levels of complexity and understanding never excludes an adult audience.

The original book is a 32-page, 228-word analogy about English-style rabbits invading and colonising a country of marsupials. It won awards, has been published all over the world, and remains a best seller and favourite book with John Marsden's powerful words and Shaun Tan's exquisite illustrations, which can’t be seen without finding something new. This production captures the heart and essence of the book and brings it to stage by creating characters from a story that doesn't have characters.

It begins with the introduction of a narrator, a white bird inspired from the brolgas on the end pages (the decorative pages inside the cover) and is told through five marsupials (Hollie Andrew, Jessica Hitchcock, Lisa Maza, Marcus Corowa and David Leha) and five rabbits (Kanen Breen, Nicholas Jones, Christopher Hillier, Simon Meadows and Robert Mitchell). Images like the steam-punk-like bike the rabbits enter on, handing a cog to the marsupials, and a lizard in the test tube are moments that are easy to miss on the pages but have become the turning points and drive of the stage story.

Lally Katz incorporates the Marden's sparse text into the libretto and lets the characters, who are inspired by the illustrations, tell their personal stories and do what they can’t do in the book: reflect on their actions.

Kate Miller-Heidke's composition and Iain Grandage's arrangements and additional music is welcoming to new ears and to opera buffs, who can spot the references. The combination of English-style opera and a more contemporary music-theatre style celebrates the sound and form of opera, while never being afraid to embrace music that isn’t associated with old-style opera.

Without trying to capture the endless complexity of the illustrations, Gabriela Tylesova's design takes details and makes them so real that it feels like walking into the world of the book. The mask and costumes for the marsupials and rabbits look like Tan's creatures but allow the performers to be seen (similar in style to Julie Taymor's Lion King design). And with lighting designer Trent Suidgeest, the scene where the babies fly away on kites is almost too much to bear.

With the September release of the National Opera Review, there's a lot of discussion about the value of opera as a form and of the ongoing existence of Australia's subsidised opera companies.

Then along comes The Rabbits. This is an Australian story made with Australian voices that shows how wonderful Australian opera can be. Along with last year’s co-production of The Riders by Victorian Opera and Malthouse Theatre, it's time to be excited about opera in Australia and time to stop asking if opera has a place, but to ask why our resources aren't being used to make more productions like this.

This was on AussieTheatre.com.

The Rabbits. Melbourne Festival. Photo by Jon Green