Review: Priscilla

Priscilla, Queen of the Desert: The Musical 
Michael Cassel Group and Nullabor Productions in association with MGM on Stage
30 January 2018
Regent Theatre
priscillathemusical.com.au

David Harris, Tony Sheldon, Euan Doidge. Priscilla Queen Of The Desert. Photo by Sam Tabone Getty Images

As a commercial film-to-juke-box musical. Priscilla, Queen of the Desert: The Musical remains a high kick above the rest. Based on the 1994 film, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, the live show was developed in Australia in 2006 and has been beyond the empty outback to 29 countries and 134 cities, including New York and London. The universal language of dance pop, body waxing and sequins travels well.

For its tenth anniversary Tick (David Harris), Bernadette (Tony Sheldon, who has played the role all over the world and is heading to 2000 performances) and Felicia (Euan Doidge) are back on the bus and have pulled up in Melbourne before heading to Sydney, Adelaide and Brisbane.

Tick is Mitzi most nights in a Kings Cross drag club until his secret ex-wife invites him to bring a show to the Alice Springs Casino where she works. He's joined by former Les Girls star and transgender woman Bernadette and young performer Adam/Felicia and the trio drive an old bus, called Priscilla, from Sydney to the centre. Shenanigins follow as deep-bush meets inner-city, sass and sparkle reject hate, and chosen families create warm fuzzies.

Stephan Elliot's 1994 film did so much for bringing queer stories to the screen and popular narratives. It confronted assumptions, celebrated inner-city Sydney's queer community (when it was still called a gay community), increased queer visibility, and helped drag drag out of its not-so-comfortable portrayal of women with a super-fabulous leap of bloody-bonza-Aussie-original-fabulousness with Tim Chappel and Lizzy Gardiner's costume designs.

It also addressed violence, rejection, shame and hate and has an undertone of fear, bitterness and melancholy that makes it so much more than a flag-waving story about everyone being fabulous.

Twenty-three years later, Australia reminded us that we're still striving for fabulous and that queer communities and families are still considered different by a boringly-large chunk of the country – not just the bush bogans on stage – and our government.

This show welcomes updated technology to add to the outrageous colour, sparkle and Brian Thomson's bus design – and Chappel and Gardiner's costumes are still magnificently witty – but how amazing would it be to see the show updated to reflect Australia here and now? What if it confronted the problematic beneath the sparkle?

I don't understand why shows like this are so often stuck in a time and not updated beyond Kylie songs – there's a lot more Kylie in it now.

Priscilla is fun. The cast are amazing and its broad appeal that tones down sex and makes violence safe with a dance number guarantees success. If commercial theatre is about making money, it's the most successful Australian show around.

This same success seems to make it easy to ignore, or joke away, its problems – especially those that laugh at the very communities it claims to be celebrating.

The lesbian jokes would have felt awkward and dated in the 1970s, and there are trans jokes that are even older and more ignorant. Winking to the audience that "Uluru is sacred" only re-enforces the  unacceptable references to "Ayers Rock" and celebrating the offensive act of climbing it. And for the love-of-not-being-horrible, why keep the Asian, German and Scottish stereotypes – and the Australian ones? This is a show about love and acceptance that encourages laughing at difference.

Tick, Bernadette and Felicia don't make safe choices to find happiness. They risk violence, hate and rejection. It's sad that their show makes safe choices to risk what? Risk offending people who don't like theatre that makes them think for a moment?

The Midsumma festival is also on in Melbourne. There are shows that celebrate queer artists and queer stories and don't smooth away anything that isn't comfortable to acknowledge. If you're going to see Priscilla, make sure you see at least one Midsumma show as well.

Review: Little Shop Of Horrors

Little Shop Of Horrors
Luckiest Productions & Tinderbox Productions
5 May 2016
The Comedy Theatre
to 22 May, then touring
littleshoptour.com.au

Esther Hannaford, Brent Hill, Audrey II

The only down side of the Little Shop of Horrors Melbourne season is that it's only three weeks.

The sci-fi schlock musical by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken (who went onto Disney fame) about a blood-loving plant changing the fate of miserable florist shop workers Seymour and Audrey was inspired by a 1960 film, opened off-Broadway in 1982, and a film of the musical was made in 1986. This version blew Sydney away at the Hayes Theatre earlier in the year and is touring Australia.

The same team that created Sweet Charity at Hayes – Dean Bryant (direction), Andrew Hallsworth (choreography), Andrew Worboys (musical direction), Owen Phillips (design), Ross Graham (lights) and Tim Chappel (costumes) – cut back all dead ideas and preconceptions to grows a fresh, exciting and bloody brilliant version that makes it feel like it were written for now.

Totally over the top, it embraces the ridiculousness and the darkness of the story and by doing so, lets it find its own truth and makes the characters so real that the opening-night audience exploded at the end of "Suddenly Seymour", the show's shmaltzy love song.

Working with Erth Visual & Physical's magnificent, terrifying and all genital inflatable Audrey II plant, Phillips and Chappel's set and costumes are inspired by the 60s but not stuck in the past. They take us from a tiny black and white telly world – complete with Lee Lin Chin – to blooming, 3D, who-turned-up-the-contrast colour.

And everyone in the cast (Brent Hill, Esther Hannaford, Tyler Coppin, Scott Johnson, Josie Lane, Chloe Zuel, Angelique Cassimatis, Dash Kruck, Kuki Topoki) makes the characters so much their own that comparisons to anyone who has gone before them are impossible.

Anyone who says that “audiences” want to see the same old safe musicals that they’ve always seen needs to see what happens when a show is stripped back to book and music, and new creators are allowed to see what they can make from it.

This was on AussieTheatre.com.au.

Review: West Side Story

West Side Story

The Production Company

11 July 2015

State Theatre, Arts Centre Melbourne

theproductioncompany.com.au

to 19 July

West Side Story. The Production Company. Sean Mulligan and Jets.

The Production Company was formed in Melbourne in 1999 by Jeanne Pratt AC. Still supported by individual and business sponsors, they present three short-run musicals a year with the ongoing goal to "provide professional opportunities for local artists and to entertain Melbourne audiences with the best shows from Broadway and beyond".  They usually sell out the State Theatre and chose to celebrate their 50th production with the show that changed how Broadway, and beyond, saw and made  music theatre: West Side Story.

.It's hard to imagine just how mind blowing West Side Story was when it opened on Broadway in 1957. An opening-night critic from the New York Herald Tribune said: "The radioactive fallout from West Side Story must still be descending on Broadway this morning." Here was a story about teenagers, gangs, back streets, sex, racism and violence. Its music was influenced by opera and its dance by ballet but it felt and looked like the streets it was set on. This was Broadway without grinning showgirls and high kicks. This was romance without a happy ending. This was a story about New York and about the real anger, pain and love that wasn't far from the comfy seats and flashing cameras of the opening night.

And it was created by Jerome Robbins, Arthur Laurents, Leonard Burnstein and Stephen Sondheim: artists who had no idea how loved they were to become.

This production is as close to that 1957 production as we can get, being based on Robbins's original direction and choreography that was re-created by Gale Edwards and Michael Ralph. Thanks to the 1961 film, its familiarity – I almost expected the audience to finger click along – is immediately welcomed and loved and it was pretty amazing to see just how wonderful the school dance scene looked like on a stage.

The cast ooze their love for this show. They know how important this piece is; most of them would have been singing and dancing along to the film for as long as they could remember. Even if their accents are a bit dodgy, they are all stunning and their dancing is an tribute to Robbins.

The vocal highlight is Anna O'Byrne's astonishing singing of Maria. On opening night, laryngitis left Deone Zanotto playing Anita karoke style with Amanda Harrison singing and Natalie Gilhome, the assistant director, providing the dialogue off stage. The theatre is big enough for most people to not really notice, but it does question why there weren't covers in the ensemble.

In all, the show was kind of like being there in 1957, except it's no longer mind-blowingly new. Even Tim Chappel's costumes, which capture the 50s and hint at the decades since with super-bright colour and nods to trends like acid wash jeans and ra-ra skirts, don't bring it out of its time.

The expectations, familiarity and determination to be 'that' West Side Story takes away its edge and doesn't let it find its own voice.

It's a story of racism and anger about immigration in a big city where young people are unemployed and first generation immigrants despise the next generation of immigrants because of where they came from. It could be our story. But it's not. While in 1950s and 60s it was a story of the city and world its creators lived in, this one is a piece of history.

Which is exactly what this company aim to do. And they do it well. Sold out theatres really don't care if anyone disagrees. I loved seeing it, but I'd love to see the next Australian telling of the extraordinary West Side Story as a show about us and now (like Barrie Kosky's re-told the piece as  Berlin's story at Komische Oper Berlin). I want to see one that blows our minds all over again.

This was on AussieTheatre.com.

Review: Sweet Charity

Sweet Charity
Luckiest Productions, Neil Gooding Productions, Tinderbox Productions, Arts Centre Melbourne
26 February 2015
The Playhouse, Arts Centre Melbourne
to 7 March
artscentremelbourne.com.au

Verity Hunt-Ballard and cast. Sweet Charity. Photo by Jeff Busby.

"There's gotta be something better than this." I don't think so.

This time last year, new independent company Hayes Theatre took over an old 110-seat theatre in Potts Point in Sydney and opened with a small-scale production of the Sweet Charity. This 1966 Broadway musical was directed by Bob Fosse and starred Gwen Verdon, and was made into a movie in 1969 that was directed by Fosse and starred Shirley Maclaine. It wasn't surprising that the small venue show sold out but it caused a stir when it was nominated for and won some Helpmann Awards (that don't cover indies). Its return season was at the Opera House in Sydney and it opened for a too-short season in Melbourne last night.

If you're choosing between the musicals on in Melbourne over the next couple of weeks, this is the choice. With a small cast (12), small band (four) and relatively-tiny budget, it packs more punch than the biggest shows on in town and reminds how musical theatre can and should grab you in the guts and make you forget everything except what's on the stage.

Director Dean Bryant, music director Andrew Worboys, choreographer Andrew Hallsworth, and designers Tim Chappel (costume), Owen Phillips (set) and Ross Graham (lights) prove that great musicals can be made without the spectacle and money that dominate commercial shows. Start and end with story and character and you've got a show.

In 1960s New York, Charity Hope Valentine works in dance hall and charges for her body and time but gives her heart away too easily.

The choreography and direction is part-tribute to Fosse's distinct style but is never lost to the memory of past productions, and the late-1960s story is told very much from the perspective of now that and put all hope in Charity getting herself a man.

Verity Hunt-Ballard is Charity. She's amazing. She makes Charity's unselfconsciousness seem natural, while letting her be vulnerable and hopeful underneath the tough-innocent shell that lets her pretend that she can see a way out of the world that isn't going to give her a chance to be more than a cheap dance-hall girl.

Supporting her all the way are Deborah Krisak, Kate Cole, Martin Crewes and an ensemble who always put character first.

The bonus is that every number, including the well-known "Big Spender", "If My Friends Could See Me Now" and "The Rhythm of Life", continues the story on the stage and brings an originality that lets each song stand alone and tell its own story.

The show has been tweaked for bigger theatre but it's still best to be close to really appreciate the performances. I moved from see everything to closer seats in interval and it was a different show.

Sadly Sweet Charity only has a two-week season. I'd love to go again, but that'd mean someone else misses out.

This was on AussieTheatre.com.

Review: Gypsy

Gypsy
The Production Company
10 July 2013
State Theatre, Arts Centre Melbourne
to 14 July
theproductioncompany.com.au

Caroline O'Connor stars as Rose in Gypsy. Is there anything else you need to know! If you've seen Connor perform, you know you have to see her; if you haven't seen her, you've probably been told that you have to see her; if you have no idea who she is, have a google and you'll know you have to see her.

Caroline O'Connor is an old-style, belt it out with heart and guts super star and the State Theatre erupted for her last night.

Gypsy is the story of stage mother Rose, whose life is managing and creating the vaudeville act performed by her daughters Baby June and Louise. Abandoned by her own mother and three husbands, Rose holds on to what she loves most, refusing to marry the man who adores her (Herbie) and not noticing how much June wants to leave. When June abandons her family, Rose focuses on the less-talented Louise, finally convincing her to perform in a burlesque show. It's loosely based on the memoir of the 30s famous stripper Gypsy Rose Lee (called Louise).

Gypsy (Jule Styne, music; Arthur Laurents, book; Stephen Sondheim, lyrics) was first seen on Broadway from 1959 to 1961 with Ethel Merman as Rose. It was nominated for a pile of Tonys, but didn't win any. Revivals made up for this. Other famous Roses include Angela Lansbury, Tyne Daly, Bernadette Peters and Patti Lupone, and not to forget Rosalind Russell and Bette Midler in screen versions. Rose is the role that women of a certain age look forward to playing, written in a time when women of a certain age were loved and adored and written for.

O'Connor might have her name above the title, but the rest of the cast as just as super and starry. Matt Hetherington nearly grounds Rose as sensible and love-struck Herbie, Gemma-Ashley Kaplan brings guts to Baby June and Christina Tan transforms from downtrodden Louise to powerful Gypsy. And not to forget the scene-stealing cast of young performers, and Chloe Dallimore, Nicki Wendt and Ann Wood as the three strippers who show Louise that you gotta have a gimmick.

And the design team of Adam Gardnir (set), Tim Chappel (costume) and, Paul Jackson and Robert Cuddon (lights) create a stage that feels and looks as great as a multi-billion dollar show with a background of twinkling stars for the nostalgia-inspired back drops and the gorgeous, extra fun era-inspired costumes.

Now in their 15th year, The Production Company continue to produce the musicals that we'd never see from commercial or professional companies. With limited resources and rehearsal time, they give us the old-style shows we've only ever seen on film or ones that haven't been produced in Australia. They are more than concert versions, but less than a full production, but always made with a love of the work that makes them soar.

This was on AussieTheatre.com.

Photo by Belinda Strodder