Review: 'Tis Pity

'Tis Pity: An Operatic Fantasia on Selling the Skin and the Teeth
Victorian Opera
6 February 2017
Elisabeth Murdoch Hall
to 8 February
victorianopera.com.au

'Tis Pity. Kanen Breen & Meow Meow. Photo by Pia Johnson

The 2015 Victorian Opera production of Die Sieben Todsunden with Meow Meow took me as close to seeing how Brecht and Weil must have imagined their work. It was a highlight of that year and the newly devised 'Tis Pity song cycle reunites Meow and director Cameron Menzies, adds the rather divine tenor Kanen Breen and Richard Mills composing for a full orchestra. And it's about exploring the history of prostitution. All the ingredients are brilliant, so what went wrong?

Of course, Meow and Breen's performances are excellent. Their vaudeville-cum-Brechtian-cum-"Alan Cummings in Cabaret" clowns are backed by red velvet, three male dancers and Orchestra Victoria, with cheap shiny-red cardboard hearts on their music stands. The opening moments are full of hope as Breen sings that sex is both the question and the answer.

Sex? Sex.

What follows is ten vignettes about how women have been exploited by men for as long as records exist. Their order is drawn from a hat in convenient chronological order. This device is only slightly less annoying than the alarm screaching the beginning of each vignette.

There’s no consistent theme. From Ancient Greece to contemporary Hollywood, there are narratives – not structured stories with characters – about "whores", men using prostitutes, keeping wives away from whores, keeping women “subjugated”, evil menstrual blood and hypocritical religion.

The narrative voice is almost always male – even when delivered by Meow. When she does speak as a women, it's confirming the male narrative that working girls (with cockney Pygmalion accents) are selling their souls.

With little exploration of a female point of view and research that feels as deep as a Wikipedia introduction, perhaps Mills's boast that "This project was written at breakneck speed in the month of November" says it all.

‘Tis Pity is under developed and needs to find more heart than those cut from cardboard.

Also on AussieTheatre.com.

Review: The Flying Dutchman

The Flying Dutchman
Victorian Opera
14 February 2015
Palais Theatre
to 19 February
victorianopera.com.au

Victorian Opera. The Flying Dutchman. Photo by Jeff Busby

Opera at the magnificent sea-side Palais Theatre with the audience wearing 3D glasses! Victorian Opera are sure giving us a new look at Wagner's The Flying Dutchman.

Close to his home in Norway, captain Daland (Warick Fyfe) takes shelter in a fjord where a huge and red ship pulls alongside. With the promise of riches, he doesn't notice its ghosty appearance and offers his daughter (Senta, Lori Phillips) to the Dutchman Captain (Oskar Hillebrandt, who has sung the role over 400 times in 45 productions around the world). This actually turns out better than expected because on shore Senta dreams of the legend of The Flying Dutchman ghost ship and its dreamy captain, but she already has a suitor, Eric (Bradley Daley).


Dutchman is one of Wagner's early works and is difficult to stage because the first act is set on a moving ship mid-ocean and the final act brings ghosts. The problems have been conquered with a team of animators and designers from 3D Image Design & Creation Deakin Motion. With three screens on the stage, we're brought onto and into the ships and it feels almost like being in a live computer game.

This is combined with a simple and somewhat traditional design of heavy wood (Matt Scott and Christina Smith) that makes it feel like we're at the Palais not long after it opened in 1927. The combination of the two styles works wonderfully to create a solid and unmovable world that's lost to a world of dreams. Unfortunately the costumes feel out of place. Unnecessarily attached to the late nineteenth century, the women look especially frumpy and not part of the stage world that feels so at home in the huge and crumbling Art Deco theatre.

Although the design is what's bringing attention to this show, there's no holding back from Victorian Opera in the creation of Wagner's opera.

The absolute highlight of the work is the Australian Youth Orchestra, who almost overfill the pit that's not much lower than the stage. Conductor Richard Mills leads them in creating a sound that fills the huge space. The sounds's not as rich as a professional orchestra who know Wagner inside out, but they bring a freshness to the music that's rarely heard. (I should also say that I was close enough to hear Mills singing along, so I don't know if the sound travelled to the back of the C Reserve balcony.)


On stage, Fyfe (who was a favourite in Wagner's Das Rheingold in 2013) continues to master Wagner as a singer and an actor, and Phillips holds onto Senta's indecision and dilemma until the last scene. Director Roger Hodgman lets the story come first on the stage by ensuring that the projections only take over when they need to and by letting everyone in the chorus be as important in the telling as those up front.

Wagner's music is demanding to listen to and his stories about how humans and the supernatural/divine interact are equally as demanding. This combination of traditional opera story-telling, young orchestra and whizz-band new technology grasps it all. This is the kind of production that makes old-school opera exciting and fresh.

There are only three performances and the only one left is this Thursday, 19 February.

This was on AussieTheatre.com

Review: The Riders

The Riders
Victorian Opera & Malthouse Theatre
23 September 2014
Merlyn Theatre, Coopers Malthouse
to 4 October
malthousetheatre.com.au

Photo by Jeff Busby

Victorian Opera and Malthouse Theatre have created a new mainstage Australian opera. How exciting! And it's an adaption of Tim Winton's The Riders, a dream-fit for opera. This is worth being excited about.

The Riders is a personal and affecting story with a scope that's beyond the reach of its characters. Aussie bloke-man Scully yearns for hot sandy beaches but searches his past in Europe for something more than what he wants. As the line between imagery and reality is blurred, it's never clear if it's all happening in Scully's head or if he's lost in the mythology of the horses and riders who follow him.

Scully is renovating a cottage in Ireland for his pregnant wife, Jennifer, and daughter, Billie, who went back to Freemantle to sell their house. When Billie arrives at the airport alone and traumatised into silence, Scully takes his child and searches for Jennifer in the places they recently stayed in Europe.

Alison Croggon (libretto) and Iain Grandage (music) haven't translated the book for the stage – which belongs in the pages it was written for – but have found a vision of the story that condenses Scully's arc, gives a voice and presence to the book-invisible Jennifer, and leaves only three minor characters for the chorus of three.

Croggon's libretto combines grabs of the poetic text and so-Winton symbolism of the book with a poetry of her own that muses on Winton's subtext and, by having Jennifer on stage and letting the audience know more than Scully, lets the drive of the work be Scully's anguish and his spiralling down rather than about the unanswered questions of Jennifer's disappearance.

Grandage's music lives in the emotions of the characters. From hints of liturgical music to bird songs, galloping riders and the ever-building storm, we can hear their hearts and are drawn into the psyches of people who make dissonant decisions on their quest for harmony. And Richard Mills (conductor) creates a sound balance between stage and pit that lets the singers shine and fills the space in ways that question why we don't see more opera in the Merlyn.

Marion Potts's direction focuses on Scully's immediate story. Working with Dale Ferguson's design of manly wooden saw horses that contrast with Jennifer's world of clean light and soulless airports, it allows for a powerful connection to Scully and Billie, but it also lets Scully's journey to hell feel safe and controlled and there isn't a palpable fear for the child he drags down with him.

In being so connected to Scully, it also seems to underplay its epic and the mythological elements. I could see The Riders in the libretto but despite the constant "horses", The Riders presence isn't clear on the stage. In a similar way, a sense of place is missing. For an Australian story that's set in Ireland, Greece and Paris, the sounds and heat of Fremantle are what make the northern hemisphere ruins and cathedrals so foreign to Scully.

Barry Ryan (Nixon in last year's wonderful Nixon in China) is Scully. He's not as young and scruffy as the Scully readers might expect, but any expectations disappear in moments as he shows the contradictions and torment of man who has to lose everything before he can begin to see a future. The broken-family trio is completed with Jessica Aszodi, Jennifer, and Isabela Calderon, Billie, who bring an honesty to their characters that creates a hope that everyone can be happy, even though we know that their time together has to end.

Jerzy Kozlowski, David Rogers-Smith and Dimity Shepherd are the remarkable chorus who let Grandage play with a trio of voices that demand to be listened to while they watch and comment and become the people Scully needs to find.

The Riders is an exciting and important new piece of Australian opera and theatre. It's grand and intimate and positions Australian opera as something that's uniquely ours without letting go of the traditions and cultures that have brought us to this point. I'd love to see it in a major festival and hope that it returns with new interpretations from opera companies in Australia and all over the world.

This was on AussieTheatre.com.

Review: La traviata

La traviata
Victorian Opera in association with Fondazione Pergolesi Spontini
17 May 2014
Her Majesty's Theatre
to 29 May
victorianopera.com.au

Photo by Jeff Busby

Victorian Opera's much-anticipated La traviata is presented in association with Fondazione Pergolesi Spontini (the Pergolesi Spontini Foundataion) who run an opera house in Jesi, Italy, that was built in the late 1700s. You can imagine how much the original 1992 production oozed with connection to place and time and culture, but I'm not sure why Victorian Opera transported it to Australia.

La traviata is the opera non-opera fans know. It's the story of courtesan Violetta who gives up the life of sexy whoring and lavish parties for lover Alfredo and a quiet life the country. Alfie's dad isn't impressed, especially as his daughter is trying to be respectable and having a brother associated an un-unmarried prossie is a problem. But Violetta is all heart and gives up her love and has plot-convenienet consumption.

With the original director, Henning Brockhaus, and the famous – extraordinarily beautiful angled mirror with painted floor clothes – design by the late Czech designer Josef Svoboda, it's the Italian production with an Australian cast.

And the cast are stunning.

Australian Soprano Jessica Pratt is best known in Europe and her Australian debut as Violetta is astonishing. This is singing that stops you dead and dares you not to listen. With clarity like an untouched mountain spring, she finds the emotion in the music and lets it float into our hearts.

Italian tenor Alessandro Scotto di Luzio captures the appeal of Alfredo and he and Pratt sound like they were meant to sing together. But they rely on the music to show their love and haven't been directed to show their unstoppable passion, leaving them looking awkward rather then lovers who are prepared to give up everything to be together.

Much better in this respect is Jose Carbo as Alfredo's father, who show the unbearable loss in Act III.
And Kirilie Blythman, as servant Annina, and Dimity Shepherd, as courtesan Flora, bring more than wonderful voices to the stage.

The sound of this opera is what makes it so worth seeing. Richard Mills's conducting and musical direction brings out the best in all the voices and the chorus, and he ensures that the full orchestra supports and never overwhelms the singers. It's a production you want a recording of.

What's disappointing is that this production never feels or looks like it was made for this cast. There are unflattering costumes made to fit rather than designed for the performers, and ridiculous false beards; the chorus sound magnificent but look uncomfortable and seem unsure of their role on the stage, as do the dancers who swirl around them with little connection to the story; and even when the design reveals visual treats like its stunning lawn of flowers, the connection between design and production gets lost.

As a whole, I saw nothing in this Traviata that I haven't seen before and wonder what we'd have got if an Australian director had been given the freedom to create a production hat resonates in the here and now.

But go to hear Jessica Pratt.

This was in AussieTheatre.com.