On Stage (and walls) Melbourne

Review - Mr Braithwaite Has a New Boy - Outcast Theatre

2011-01-15T09:37:00.018+11:00

Chat-tered Illusions

If I said a new play has just opened in Melbourne by one of Australia's best comic writers who produces a new piece nearly every year, you'd probably think David Williamson's Don Parties On. Wrong! I said one of Australia's BEST comic writers. Steven Dawson's gay themed comedies have the baroque excess of Restoration comedies. Ribald and irreverent they magnify the lustiness of the characters and parade them before an (providing they appreciate a good raunchy romp) audience. Mr Braithwaite Has a New Boy is no exception. With his trademark inclusion of occasional on-stage nudity and nearly constant, 'adult' language Dawson mixes the Pygmalion theme with Pretty Woman and adds the comic and dramatic tension of older men mentoring a younger men in Joe Orton's Entertaining Mr Sloane or Mordaunt Shairp's The Green Bay Tree to make one of his most elegant plays yet.

The understanding of a classic farce situation is all there. Like Alan Ayckbourn at his best Dawson plants a theme, idea or phrase and has it re-surface throughout the play to funny effect. Johnny’s insistence, for example, that he is not a prostitute but an ‘entertainment coordinator’ is taken by other characters and re-worked to new advantage each time. Dawson also delights in his own recurring dramatic devices too, namely gratuitous (as he puts it) nudity. In the opening scene a young man enters wearing only a towel which he removes and sits provocatively on the sofa slyly smiling - to us as much to himself - and alternates with covering and uncovering his penis. There was more teasing humour in those few seconds as he teased us with that strongest of ticket seller than all the self-conscious, full-frontal nudity the MTC has thrown at audiences in the last decade.

Half buried under a mountainous toupee Iain Murton is delightful as the prissy Braithwaite as he tries to turn Johnny into a genteel companion who doesn’t use the ‘f’ or ‘c’ words or sprawl naked on the sofa. As Johnny James Miller rattles of Dawson's outrageous, foulmouthed dialogue to Mr Braithwaite’s horror or provocatively poses – naked or near naked – in a wonderfully raunchy portrayal of the rent boy. Like a latter day Liza Doolittle, he is unable to self-censor in polite, or any, company, dropping expletives in front of Harold’s neighbor or brother-in-law but, again like Liza Doolittle, he grows fond and grateful toward his mentor despite the impossibility of fulfilling Harold’s proposal.

Nathan Butler pulls of a hat trick playing Braithwaite’s nosey and narcoleptic neighbour Edna, lecherous best friend Maurice and spiteful brother-in-law Edmond. Dawson doesn’t bury this impossible relationship with sentimentality but creates an endearing portrait of an odd couple. Perhaps frustrated by Harold’s constant reprimands for using bad language or letting his sweaty balls mark the sofa when he lounges around in the nude, Johnny reverts, sneaks out to see friends, a few client’s for old-times-sake, even steals money from Edna’s purse and samples her medications during one of her frequent black-outs.

The ending is hardly a surprise but Dawson resolves the two in an emotionally rewarding way without laying on the sentiment and then quickly ends the play, snapping us away from potential lugubriousness with a final, feline recurring device.

Mr Braithwaite Has a New Boy
written and directed by Steven Dawson
Harold Braithwaite - Iain Murton
Johnny – James Miller
Edna - Nathan Butler
Maurice – Nathan Butler
Edmond - Nathan Butler
Mechanics Institute Performing Arts Centre, Brunswick
14 January - 12 February 2010
Bookings: outcast.org.au

This is an expanded version of the review published in MCV

Review - A Midsummer Night's Dream - Opera Australia

2010-12-04T16:32:00.006+11:00

Transplanting Britten’s Shakespeare opera to an Indian setting was a seemingly illogical step by Hollywood director Baz Luhrmann but the result made for a popular production. Dating from 1993 Luhrmann directed this long before his rise to fame but his flair for exotica and rich visuals was apparent even then. Luhrmann’s relocating of the story from ancient Athens to 1920s India cashed-in on the trend at the time for Bollywood movies and Indian inspired fashion and décor. The world of Indian mysticism does, however, seem more suited to the mysterious world Britten creates in his score. These spirit beings are to be feared and to enter their realm should therefore be far more disturbing. Ravel did the same in L’Enfant et les Sortileges, his enchanted garden is an alluring but fearful place, so is Britten’s. This Midsummer Night’s Dream was a run-away success when first staged and, unlike any other production of a Britten opera, played to full houses. The production was so popular it was presented at the 1994 Edinburgh Festival to equal acclaim.

Having the fairies as Indian gods and the mortals as British Raj confuses the text and storyline and Luhrmann’s tendency to keep the action busy often spoils the nocturnal, dreaminess of most of the music. An English bandstand set in a park somewhere in India in 1923 dominates the set. The roof becomes a platform where Oberon oversees his magical ministrations while on stage level there is a pond below the bandstand where fairies and mortals meet. The orchestra have been relocated from the pit to the middle level and, dressed in military band uniform, are constantly in view as are the subtleties and inventiveness of Britten’s score.

The loveliest of the opera’s scenes, where Tytania awakens to the transformed Bottom is beautifully done here. Lorina Gore’s increasing ecstatic and extravagant vocal lines float around Conal Coad’s trombone accompanied bellowing and braying as Bottom.
With his genial, rollicking bass, Coad leads the mechanicals in their three scenes with great success. In the guise of an army entertainment troop, the effect is straight out of an English Music Hall parody of Italian opera along the lines that Britten and librettist Peter Pears intended.

The quartet of lovers is superb. Henry Choo’s ardent and honey-voiced Lysander sounds very much in the British tenor tradition. Choo’s first scene with Hermia is beautifully sung. Even more so as he sang the repeated “I swear to thee” phrases running up and down a staircase! Lisa Harper-Brown’s plaintive soprano beautifully contrasts with Dominica Matthews’s mezzo in the famous squabble which, here, becomes a cat-fight ending with both splashing about in the pool. The physical prowess of Opera Australia’s ensemble singers often matches their vocal prowess.

The most physical performance of all is Tyler Coppin’s as Puck. Does anyone cast a boy in this role anymore? But using an adult actor gives greater opportunity to create a character and with his small stature Coppin has the best of both worlds and looks like an adult trapped in boy’s body. His slapstick performance contrasts nicely with Tobias Cole’s stealthy, almost sinister Oberon. Perched above the stage with white face and blue, clawed hands and backed by Britten’s melismatic music Cole’s performance reinforces this role as still one of the best in modern operatic literature for a counter-tenor.
In a sound-world all of its own, Oberon’s music benefited from Cole’s restrained performance. With their prominence on the stage Orchestra Victoria, lead by Britten authority Paul Kildea, were able to glean every nuance in the fairies' music as well as the deliberately lumpen scenes for the rustics and their play. Despite its determination to please at all costs, the undeniable vitality of this production has made it a classic.

Britten - A Midsummer Night's Dream (1960)
Oberon - Tobias Cole
Tytania - Lorina Gore
Puck - Tyler Coppin
Theseus - Jud Arthur
Hippolyta - Catherine Carby
Lysander - Henry Choo
Demetrius - Andrew Moran
Helena - Lisa Harper-Brown
Hermia - Dominica Matthews
Bottom - Conal Coad
Quince - Richard Anderson
Flute - Graeme Macfarlane
Snug - Shane Lowrencev
Snout - Andrew Brunsdon
Starveling - Samuel Dundas
Opera Australia Children's Chorus
Orchestra Victoria
Conductor - Paul Kildea
Director - Baz Luhrmann (revival director - Julie Edwardson)
Designers - Catherine Martin & Bill Marron
Lighting Designer - Nigel Levings
State Theatre, The Arts Centre
December 4, 8, 11, 14, 16 & 18, 2010

pictured Lorina Gore as Tytania and tobias Cole as Oberon [picture Jeff Busby]

Review - Rigoletto - Opera Australia

2010-11-27T16:32:00.006+11:00

The Joker is Wild
Not revived too frequently this 1991 production by Elijah Moshinsky updates the story to the 1960s and the films of Federico Fellini inspire the sets and costumes. The revival is even more welcome thanks to the outstanding performances of Michael Lewis and Rigoletto and Emma Matthews as Gilda.

The swinging, cynical sixties Moshinsky creates is the perfect world for the Duke. Paparazzi swarm around his act one party where showgirls dance with bishops. Act one springs along in this updated guise, the circus-like party music even sounding like the sort of music Fellini’s regular composer Nino Rota would have written had he lived a century earlier.
Michael Yeargan’s revolving ‘doll house’ set shows the Duke’s palace, the street where Rigoletto meets Sparafucile, Rigoletto’s house and Sparafucile’s inn. A quick quarter turn in acts two and four and you have some open space for Gilda’s abduction and the final father-daughter duet. It all works splendidly and is another of Opera Australia’s landmark productions. The set also concentrates the action close to the front of the stage so, when the many set pieces come along, the characters are conveniently up stage nicely placed to deliver their arias.

Michael Lewis is a model Verdi baritone, perfect diction, smooth legato and clear, ringing top. Lewis exploits every note of the music, sung and unsung, to convey character. Seen during the prelude, applying a grotesque clown make-up (anticipating Heath Ledger’s Joker from Batman), Lewis’s Rigoletto then stands to show this Rigoletto’s extra handicap. Crippled, Lewis beetles about on walking sticks. Lewis’s thirty years singing the role bring insights into the character’s words and music illuminate every dimension of Rigoletto’s tragedy big and small from his terrified freeze at Monterone’s curse to the perfectly timed pause and wild yowl when Gilda dies.

Emma Matthews is radiant as Gilda. Mentored in the role by Joan Sutherland, she now takes the highest alternatives at the close of “Caro nomo”, singing with a security and sophistication that would make her late, great predecessor proud. Matthews’s acting matches her singing and she creates an understandably fatalistic young woman out of Gilda. Her murder scene is actually shocking; she strides fearlessly into the tavern so Maddalena seems to see it is a woman, not a man, and shrieks with horror as Gilds is stabbed. Jacqueline Dark, in the unlikely double act of Gilda’s untrustworthy guardian and then co-assassin brings a Freudian undertone perfectly in keeping with the story.

Rosario la Spina makes less of the Duke than his colleagues seeming to sing without much involvement but this has the advantage of suggesting the Duke’s detachment from his many victims.

Conductor Marko Letonja and Orchestra Victoria do some splendid work with shaping the tender moments. The Rigoletto/Gilda duets are as lovingly shaped as they are sung and the often-repeated ‘curse’ theme and storm music are thrilling without being bombastic.

Verdi - Rigoletto
Rigoletto - Michael Lewis
Gilda - Emma Matthews (Natalie Jones 25 & 27 November)
Duke of Mantua - Rosario La Spina
Sparafucile - Richard Anderson
Maddalena/Giovanna - Jacqueline Dark
Monterone - Jud Arthur
Marullo - Luke Gabbedy
Borsa - David Corcoran
Count Ceprano - Richard Alexander
Countess Ceprano - Jane Parkin
Usher - Clifford Plumpton
Page - Jodie McGuren
Director - Elijah Moshinsky (Revival Director - Cathy Dadd)
Conductor: Marko Letonja
Set & Costume Designer - Michael Yeargan

Presented by Opera Australia
State Theatre, The Arts Centre
November 22, 25, 27 December 1, 3, 7, 10, 18, 2010

Review - Le nozze di Figaro - Opera Australia

2010-11-20T23:40:00.021+11:00

I Love’s ya’ Porgi
It’s good to see Neil Armfield’s insightful production of Le nozze di Figaro again, especially in the lead-up to his greatly anticipated Ring Cycle in Melbourne in 2013 (the first complete cycle staged in Melbourne in a century) for the Wagner bi-centenary.

Armfield’s view of late eighteenth century life in Spain is a dark one. The Almaviva household is held in the same disdain as the then monarch Carlos IV and his dysfunctional family. Goya inspires Dale Ferguson’s costumes; Countess Almaviva in particular, in oyster satin (and thanks to soprano Rachelle Durkin’s supermodel physique and bearing) has the devastating allure of Goya’s beloved Duchess of Alba. Goya even makes an appearance in act three to ‘photograph’ Figaro’s nuptials and, just as the he did in his portrait of the Royal Family, captures a household in sexual, social and political turmoil.

Fergusson’s sets feature deliberate anachronisms that, to my eyes, show the contemptible attitude of the Almaviva’s to their staff. A shabby, red vinyl reclining armchair dominates act one for Cherubino then the Count to hide behind or in. It’s the sort of out-of-date furniture that would normally be dumped but here is given to the servants to furnish their quarters. For the wedding celebrations the Count has laid on a cheap looking spread that, with its old fashioned hot water urn and Sunshine brand cups and saucers resembles a remote Country Ladies’ Association luncheon circa 1962!

I personally prefer a deeper voiced Figaro in contrast to a lighter voiced Count as here. With that gruff edge to his voice Teddy Tahu Rhodes exemplifies the peasant against the more refined voice of Peter Coleman-Wright’s aristocrat. In “Se vuol ballare” he embellishes the repeated theme. The result is a little ungainly but in terms of characterisation the growl in his voice works splendidly. Even better in “Non più andrai” he directs the second verse to the Count, seated smugly in that recliner chair, and, towering over the trembling Count, warns him his days of philandering are over too and reminding us just how revolutionary this opera (and the play it derives from) was feared to be. Armfield fills the opera with insights like these and the principal singers - especially Coleman-Wright, Rhodes, Durkin and Tiffany Speight - integrate them into their performances with easy assurance.
Tall and sleek Durkin’s arms glide naturally into gestures both graceful and, at appropriate times, erotic. When, in act two, the Count tries to force her away from the door to force open the closet where Cherubino hides, he at first violently lays his gloved hands on her only to let them roam over her breasts and body making the sexual connection still existing between the two – despite their current marital problems – alarmingly obvious. Durkin’s response to this rare moment of contact with her faithless husband, melting at his touch, is simultaneously elegant and erotic. Erotic obsession is the basis of this opera after all and this insight into that eroticism created a frisson. The Countess’s attraction to Cherubino was insightfully played up too; the Countess wilting to his act two serenade like Gomez used to when Morticia spoke French.

Speight’s voice grows in size and stature with each appearance. Speight also has charming way with and special claim on Mozartian maids. Sian Pendry bravely displays the rampaging teenage sexuality of Cherubino behaving at times like a spaniel in heat! She neatly negotiates the rapid pace set for “Non so piu” beautifully enunciating the words as do he rest of the cast.

The secondary characters weave through the story with only occasional success, pity because Mozart and Da Ponte allow them often substantial stage time. Elizabeth Campbell’s Marcellina is another character caught in a precarious situation. Her frustrations run deeper than mere anxiety over her age. Her favour with the Count Almaviva, depends on her winning her case against Figaro. In Campbell’s hands there is that sense Marcellina is greatly relieved when she finds Figaro is her son and she can escape to bourgeoisie security now as Bartolo’s wife. When Armfield’s production was first staged Don Basilio’s and Marcellina’s arias were cut. They were restored for the revival in Sydney, although Marcellina’s is excised for this Melbourne season.

The tenor Robert Tear specialises in singing Basilio and devotes an entire essay to him in his book Singer Beware offering an illuminating analysis into “the quality of thought which might invest a small part with a fresh interest and, at the same time, probably alter the usual balance of the opera. “If the aria, is cut,” he writes, “the character becomes extremely hard to play simply because the chance of explaining his character to the audience is taken away, all the earlier behaviour seeming merely eccentric or stupid.” Basilio is a man of great intelligence, according to Tear, “more intelligent than anyone else in the Almaviva household” the seemingly bizarre aria "In quelli anni cui dal poco” is making a point about this “musician/thinker’s position in a philistine aristocratic house of the period.” While the near-revolutionary sentiments of Figaro’s are extrovertly apparent in Armfield’s clever twist in “Non più andrai”, there could have been similar possibilities with Basilio’s aria explaining his philosophy and how it helped him survive the “fooleries of class and politics” surrounding him.
Figaro is as much about disguise and hidden identity as it is about eroticism and Basilio revealing that he has disguised himself in a donkey skin his entire life should hardly come as a surprise after the multiple disguises of the previous acts. In Opera Australia's older production Basilio actually wore said pelt, converted into a cloak which he wore over his familiar curé's garments. In this production Basilio only speaks of the donkey skin.
Conductor Marko Letonja actually highlights the ascending horn passages at the end of Basilio’s aria so they ring out with a confidence worthy of Beethoven and suggest maybe Basilio is another plebeian hero. Kanen Breen plays Basilio primarily for laughs and by the time the aria arrives the character has become a rococo incarnation of Kenneth Williams. It’s an assured performance however; with a smug strut, the character slithers around with decreasing fear of his master after all.

There is a touch of early music practice from the orchestra; fortepiano replacing the usual harpsichord and the strings adopting that occasionally ‘wiry’ sound associated with early music practice. Acts one and two work the best in this current revival, the sexual and social strain made delightfully relevant by director and cast.

Mozart - Le nozze di Figaro
a co-production between Opera Australia and the Welsh National Opera
Conductor - Marko Letonja, Anthony Legge (November 23 & 27)
Director - Neil Armfield
Scenery & Costume Design - Dale Ferguson
Lighting Design - Rory Dempster
Count Almaviva - Peter Coleman-Wright
Countess Almaviva - Rachelle Durkin
Susanna - Tiffany Speight
Figaro - Teddy Tahu Rhodes
Cherubino - Sian Pendry
Marcellina - Elizabeth Campbell
Bartolo - Warwick Fyfe
Basilio/Curzio - Kanen Breen
Barbarina - Claire Lyon
Antonio - Clifford Plumpton
Bridesmaids - Katherine Wiles & Margaret Plummer
Opera Australia Chorus
Orchestra Victoria

Presented by Opera Australia
State Theatre, The Arts Centre
November 17, 20, 23, 27, December 2, 9, 11 & 15, 2010

pictured - Rachelle Durkin & Peter Coleman-Wright (picture Branco Gaicia)

Wagner's Ring Cycle announced for Melbourne in 2013

2010-09-07T08:22:00.006+10:00

Opera Australia have announced performances of three cycles of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring Des Nibelungen in November and December 2013 in Melbourne to coincide with the 200th anniversary of Wagner’s birth. Although the iconic Sydney Opera is the usual venue for premiere Opera Australia’s events, the cycles will be exclusive to Melbourne.

Der Ring Des Nibelungen has not been performed in Melbourne since its Australian premiere in 1913 by an English touring company formed by Thomas Quinlan as part of a grand – but ultimately unsuccessful - scheme of performing nine Ring cycles around the world in six months! Die Walküre had premiered in Australia, at the Princess's Theatre in May 1907 but Quinlan's company staged the cycle twice at Her Majesty's Theatre, Melbourne;
Das Rheingold on 19 August 1913
Die Walküre on 22 August 1913
Siegfried on 25 August 1919
and
Götterdämmerung on 29 August 1919

The cycle was not performed complete in Australia again until a French production was imported by the State Opera of South Australia in 1998.

The 2013 cycles will be the first time Opera Australia have stage the Ring in its entirety. A previous attempt at staging the cycle was abandoned after the first two operas only.
The 2013 project will be a joint venture between Opera Australia, the Houston Grand Opera and the Victorian Government’s Major Events Company. Melbourne philanthropists Maureen and Tony Wheeler are contributing $5 million of the $15.5 million production budget. A co-founder with her husband of the Lonely Planet travel guides the Maureen Wheeler is Wagner enthusiast, having attended Ring productions around the world.

Neil Armfield will direct the cycle which will be also be staged in Houston over four seasons - Houston Grand Opera's first-ever staging of the cycle – commencing in 2014. Armfield’s previous work with the Houston Opera includes a cycle of Britten operas. His most recent, Peter Grimes, is part of Houston’s 2010-11 season.
The musical director in Melbourne will be the Australian composer and conductor Richard Mills.
An exclusive orchestra will be created for the cycle, consisting of players from the permanent ensemble for opera and ballet performance in Melbourne, Orchestra Victoria, and its Sydney equivalent, the Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra and other orchestras from around Australia. Younger musicians from elite training schools like the Australian National Academy of Music will be introduced into the pool of musicians to learn the culture of the repertoire and be mentored by established musicians in order to present the cycle when it is restaged on future occasions.

Four of the singers participating have been announced. British soprano Susan Bullock will sing Brunhilde. Finnish baritone Juha Uusitalo will sing Wotan. American tenor Gary Lehman will sing Siegfried and John Wegner will sing Alberich. Bullock, Uusitalo and Wegner have sung their roles at major houses on a number of occasions. An established Tristan, Siegfried, Parsifal and Tannhäuser, Lehman is adding Siegfried to his repertoire.
Other singers, from Australia and overseas, completing the casts will be announced as they are confirmed.

Dates for the three cycles are still to be confirmed and tickets go on sale in 2011.

Review [of sorts] The Turn of the Screw - Victorian Opera

2010-06-10T10:42:00.006+10:00

When lighting designer Matt Scott is good, he's very good and created the one deluxe image in this otherwise uninspired production.
The children's former governess, Miss Jessel, has drowned herself. When her ghost appears Scott picks out her figure on the drakened stage in flickering, dark green light suggesting her submerged body in the rippling lake.
That contrast of saturated colour against total darkness was worthy of a lighting maestro like Mario Bava.

Benjamin Britten - The Turn of the Screw (1954)
Australian premiere - University of New South Wales (1968)
Victorian Opera
Playhouse, The Arts Centre 7, 9, 11, 13, 15 & 17 2010

Review - Boston Marriage - Melbourne Theatre Company

2010-06-10T10:32:00.016+10:00

Material Grrrrrrl

Not that are many, but Boston Marriage is one of the funniest male authored imaginings of lesbian sexuality since Frank Marcus’s The Killing of Sister George.
Countering the charge that he could write only for and about men, American playwright David Mamet concocted a play featuring only women. A ‘Boston Marriage’ is a 19th century American term for a domestic arrangement between two unmarried women. Whether a Boston Marriage has a sexual dimension or open to quiet speculation. In Mamet’s play it is rampagingly obvious.

To secure a house and income to support herself and her estranged lover, Anna (Pamela Rabe) is the mistress of a wealthy man. Her estranged lover, however, is a woman, Claire (Margaret Mills). Instead of welcoming the offer of a ‘Boston marriage’ Claire wants to use Anna’s home for, an assignation with sweet, young and curious girl. Both women’s plans backfire when their new loves have an unexpected relationship of their own.

The farce is not played out as physical comedy. Instead Mamet has the pair taunting Anna’s well meaning maid Catherine (Sara Gleeson), going at each others throats or hatching plans to save each other’s necks.

The dialogue is steeped in Oscar Wild-ish artificiality requiring effortless delivery and barbed double-entendres. As an elegantly dressed but foul-mouthed, voyeuristic lesbian Rabe is in her element. She wrings every nuance of comedy out of the least funny words so an innocent word like ‘chintz’ becomes hysterical. As the plan backfires Rabe calculates Anna’s escalating frenzy to the smallest detail. Discovered elegantly nibbling bon-bons as the play opens, Anna is soon diving into them, guzzling them in her nervous frenzy like her modern counterpart would guzzle Valium.

Mills plays Claire as the butcher of the two, striding open-legged over Anna’s elegant furniture but creating a character reminiscent of the era’s real proto-feminists. As the maid Gleeson suggests the character’s development in the emancipated household from cringing dimwit to sexually liberated woman.

Christina Smith’s bold, glowing wallpaper set beautifully emphasises the artificiality of the play while Matt Scott's lighting provides a clean unfussy sheen over the main stage but adds a slightly Freudian, glowing, red tunnel of an 'entrance' through which the women enter and exit. Ian McDonald’s surprise musical touches emphasise how these women are not all they seem as well.

Mamet may have a limited insight into female sexuality but for play that was almost written for a bet Boston Marriage is little gem.

Boston Marriage (1999) by David Mamet
Anna - Pamela Rabe
Claire - Margaret Mills
Catherine - Sara Gleeson
Director - Aidan Fennessy
Set and Costume Designer - Christina Smith
Lighting Designer - Matt Scott
Composer - Ian McDonald
Fairfax Studio, The Arts Centre, 9 June - 24 July 2010.
Information and bookings: mtc.com.au

This is an expanded version of the review published in Melbourne Community Voice

Opera Australia Autumn Season 2010 - Bliss - Tosca - La Sonnambula

2010-02-20T23:47:00.013+11:00

Bliss
Opera Australia regularly commission new work. Usually serious subjects drawn from notable Australian literature or dealing with an event or hero from Australian history. One of these, The Eighth Wonder, even dealt with the creation of Opera Australia’s main venue, the Sydney Opera House. The most recent commission Bliss, is by Brett Dean and based on the novel of the same name by one of Australia’s most celebrated living authors, Peter Carey. Unusually it is not a serious historical work, instead it is a grotesque satire on the Australian Bourgeoisie worthy of Gogol, inspired by the author’s early life in the advertising industry.

Carey satirises the industry with the same ferocity Barry Humphries satirises the rest of Australian culture. Harry Joy heads an ad company, is rich and successful but, as the opera opens, is felled by heart attack on his birthday. Clinically dead for a few minutes Harry is convinced he has awakened in Hell. Delusional he visits his favourite restaurant and sees the place over-run with circus performers and an elephant that sits on his car. Recovering his composure Harry determines to be good and run a socially responsible business, his family, however, are far from good as he discovers. Peering through his window he witnesses his wife Betty in the throes of an affair with his business partner and, through another window, his daughter Lucy exchanging sexual favours with his son David in return for drugs.
Retreating to a hotel the lonely Harry calls an escort agency only to be bewitched by the call girl, Honey B. a part-time prostitute who lives in the country producing honey. Convinced Harry is mad his family have him committed but a colleague, Alex, visits him when the psychiatric team arrive and Alex is taken by mistake. Alex refuses to change places with the real Harry when he is finally brought in. Betty purchases Harry’s discharge and takes over the business, displaying a talent for advertising that astounds Harry. Betty is diagnosed with cancer, caused by exposure in her early life to petrol at her father’s service station. A petroleum company is coincidentally the major client of the agency and Betty ignites a can of petrol at a company meeting, immolating herself, her lover Johnny and the entire board. Harry deserts his son and daughter and goes with Honey to her bushland retreat and finds solace in planting trees.

Bliss may be Dean’s first opera but its decade long evolution has coincided with his development as a composer of international stature. His work features in concert throughout Australia, Britain, the United States and Europe and he was the winner of last year’s Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition.

The libretto is by Amanda Holden who will be known as the senior editor of the admirable Viking Opera Guide. Holden encapsulates Carey’s 1981 novel with only minor changes and creates from it many ensembles and opportunities for arioso, particularly in the opera’s most dramatic moments such as Betty’s ‘petrol aria’ and the sublimely simple – Candide like - concluding scene.

Ethereal and mystical themes prompt Dean to some of his most successful creations. Ariel's Music (inspired by Shakespeare’s The Tempest) is one while Beggars and Angels is an earlier and highly praised merging of otherworldly beauty and brutal baseness not unlike the music of Bliss. In the opening scene, when Harry briefly dies Dean creates a magical, otherworldly sound to accompany the experience. For Harry’s Hellish surroundings the music is infused with a course, satirical edge, appropriately for this Gogol-esque fantasy, sounding particularly in the early interludes, like Shostakovich at his ironic best. The multi faced score even suggest further playful references to other opera’s with similar situations. Harry’s fascination with the prostitute Honey B, for example, evokes Berg’s Lulu. Throughout Bliss Dean depicts this vulgar world but concludes the opera with a return to magical simplicity describing Harry’s new, simpler and purer life with the now angelic Honey. Scored for a coloratura soprano Lorina Gore is Lulu-like to look at and listen to, praising her favourite variety of honey in seductive, high melisma. The tranquil ending, where Harry opts to tend the garden returns the music from blustering satire to ethereal simplicity much like the brief episode at the beginning.

The role of Harry is tour-de-force requiring the baritone to be on stage and singing for most of the opera. Peter Coleman-Wright is exceptional. The present cast all have the luxury of having the opera tailored to them and the effect is rather like listening to the pioneering recordings of a Britten opera with the role creators.

An Ad Man’s dream must be to see his work illuminated on glittering sign boards like in New York’s Times Square. Harry’s surreal vision is played out in a nightmare inversion of that dream. The entire scenic design is created on a LED light screen enveloping the stage. Programmed lights achieve locations and effects, even the elephant incident and the boardroom inferno. In the asylum a violinist plays referencing the Bedlam as depicted in William Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress.
Director Neil Armfield has supervised some of the company’s most important and artistically acclaimed productions and has done so again with the careful, 10 year, generation of Bliss.

Bliss by Brett Dean
Libretto - Amanda Holden
Harry Joy - Peter Coleman-Wright
Betty - Merlyn Quaife
Honey B - Lorina Gore
Alex - Barry Ryan
David - David Corcoran
Lucy - Taryn Fiebig
Johnny - Kanen Breen
Neighbour/Asylum Doctor/Managing Director 3 - Malcolm Ede:
Nurses - Teresa La Rocca, Jane Parkin
Reverend Des/Police Officer 2/Nurse - Shane Lowrencev
Aldo/Nigel Clunes - Henry Choo
Mrs Dalton, Matron of the psychiatric hospital - Milijana Nikolic
Police Officer, Betty's Doctor - Stephen Smith
Company Directors - Sam Sakker, David Lewis, Christopher Hillier, Sam Roberts-Smith
Erkki Veltheim - Onstage Violinist
Opera Australia Chorus
Orchestra Victoria
Conductor - Elgar Horwarth
Director - Neil Armfield
Set Designer - Brian Thomson
Costume Designer - Alice Babidge
Lighting Designer - Nigel Levings
Choreographer - Kate Champion
State Theatre Melbourne, April 20, 23, 27 & May 1, 2010
This production of Bliss will also be staged on September 2 & 3 as part of the 2010 Edinburgh Festival. The European premiere, in a new production and with different singers, by the Hamburg State Opera takes place on on September 12, 15, 19, 21, 25 & October 2, 2010.

Tosca
For thirty years Opera Australia maintained a production of Tosca by John Copley, closely modelled on his famous Covent Garden production for Maria Callas. With this in mind, perhaps audiences became over familiar the “shabby little shocker” (as the music historian Joseph Kerman memorably dubbed it) its shocks predictable and its shabbiness almost literal!
Collective memories were challenged by the importation of Christopher Alden reworking of Tosca, first mounted by England’s Opera North in 2002, and which drastically modernises the opera in time and dramatic conception. Tosca has been updated before, but Alden’s interpretation goes much further. Alden cites an “aspect to 19th-century art and opera … less connected to our modern sensibility…” and so updated the setting to contemporary Italy where political corruption and the machinery of justice is, as the press regularly remind us, as rife as ever.

In his vision of contemporary Italy (the locations having been neutralised along with references to Napoleon or any other historical events and persons) Alden would also have us believe the Roman Catholic is just an extension of the State where the Sacristan now sells lottery tickets and assists in Cavaradossi’s torture and imprisonment. The entire proceedings take place in a church basement where ‘Forza Italia’ posters adorn the walls. The confessional, plaster saints and religious brick-a-brack have been put into storage here and Cavaradossi is engaged, not as an art creator, but an art restorer, mending the pictures littering this basement.

Alden has added plot twists and complications, some of them implicit in the story, others not at all. And not all of them work. Anyone knowing the libretto or speaking Italian will notice names and places still sung although they are omitted from the English translation projected above the stage. So confusion, even frustration reign as one attempts to reconcile tradition with innovation. When the Sacristan announces that the, unnamed tyrant (whose name, Bonaparte, is still uttered by the singers), has been defeated, the chorus enter in a curious slow motion walk that signifies, perhaps, that the following scene is not very real (or that Alden has not quite worked out how to incorporate the action into his new scheme). Even more confusing, they proceed to trash the artworks that Cavaradossi has concentrated so much attention, even more attention that he paid to Tosca during her brief visit, on restoring. When the Te Deum is eventually sung, the chorus are not participating in a sacred service but are buying lottery tickets!

Angelotti’s sister, the Marchesa Attavanti, actually appears and, concealing herself on top of the confessional and watches the entire proceedings including the torture and execution of Cavaradossi as well as substituting for the off–stage shepherd’s voice in act three.
When act two begins Scarpia is eating pizza. There is no elegant dinner table for Tosca to perform her knife discovering dumb show, and you certainly don’t get cutlery in take-away pizza boxes. Instead Spoletta, barely concealing his hatred of Scarpia and, by brandishing a packing knife and placing it conveniently within Tosca’s reach, sets up his despised boss’s death. In this soulless environment, Tosca is actually raped, and Scarpia is murdered ‘in flagrante delicto’.
The third act takes place as a fantasy, the traumatised Tosca only imagining her final meeting with Cavaradossi who was apparently dead even before she entered into the fatal bargain with Scarpia. Snapping back into reality by Spoletta and Sciarrone who have been present the entire time, they fake surprise and, finding Tosca cowering in the corner, shoot her.

Although details like police firing cannons to alert that a prisoner has escaped seem odd in this contemporary setting Alden connects it, as he had hoped, to our modern sensibility. As one of the most often performed operas, Tosca, despite its violence, has assumed a bizarre normality. Like cartoon violence, it is shrugged off as melo-dramatic make believe, much the same way Shakespeare’s plays, are revered and excused. Alden attempts to re-establish the horror by turning it up several notches, taking away familiar cues such as Scarpia’s dinner knife, and bring back the uncertainty and mounting tension that must have been felt by an original audience. Wearing cheap trench coats and indulging in uncensored violence the opera strays from the world of grand Italian art to the lurid world of Giallo (Italian [s]exploitation movies).

The original story is of course badly compromised. While relationship between Tosca and Scarpia remains almost unscathed, Cavaradossi’s character is drastically altered, no doubt frustratingly so to any tenor hoping to play the traditional hero. Alden’s smudging of the relationship between the libretto and Puccini’s musical setting can be frustrating too. The scurrying music, for example, after Tosca has left and Angelotti’s and Cavaradossi conspire his escape is ignored. But if one disregards these minor details, what emerges, instead, is an unforgettable account of the opera’s central crisis where a psychopath terrorises his victim with horrific results. And in the act two encounter between Tosca and Scarpia, there is as more mounting tension and catharsis as a traditional production with Tosca in gloves and tiara and Scarpia with decent catering. In act one Tosca is a self-assured, calm, sunglasses sporting woman. In act two, her self-assurance evaporates.

Despite any misgivings about the staging, the musical performance was first rate. The conductor, Shao-Chia Lü, guides the climaxes and paces the music underlining the dramatic action with great conviction, the familiar arias and scenes seeming to unfurl. Youl has an exciting voice and can apply a powerful, cutting edge. Her voice can capture the fragility of Mimi and Butterfly but also unleash the power for Tosca. It is in the middle voice, particularly in the almost spoken exchanges with Scarpia, that she impresses most with a power of declamation worthy of Tebaldi. Wegner is a gifted, singing actor. A splendid Wagnerian, he can produce a pulverising sound or project the barest whisper. His presence is as commanding as his voice and he enters into the inhuman spirit of this newly conceived Scarpia with astounding assurance. The way Youl and Wegner use the stage space speaks volumes as his sadism escalates her defiance evaporates. Rosario La Spina is challenged by the shift in Cavaradossi’s character. His voice is warm and genuinely Italianate, perfectly suited to the two famous arias but, as a less than enthusiastic ex-lover in act one and robbed of the night sky, impending death and firing squad for his death, his new role makes less impact. With the Sacristan and Spoletta transformed from stock characters to newly motivated participants in the tragedy, even the smaller parts give new insights to their singers and they are cast from strength. Fyfe, for example, sings the Sacristan with a malevolent edge, almost matching Wegner’s Scarpia.

In stripping away familiar dramatic landmarks Alden revitalised what is, after all, one of the most horrific scenes in opera. With the comfort of knowing that Tosca will be chased three times around the sofa, fall on her knees to sing “Visi d’arte”, discover the knife and use it before Scapria claims her, gone, the viewer no longer knows what to expect only that it will be something dreadful. As performed by Youl and Wegner it is hair-raising!

This new production continues to confront and occasionally confuse by its clash of naturalistic and non-naturalistic acting but in shattering this familiar work Alden delivers a shattering experience.

Tosca by Giacomo Puccini
Floria Tosca - Nicole Youl
Mario Cavardossi - Rosario La Spina
Scarpia - John Wegner
Angelotti - Jud Arthur
Sacristan / Jailer Warwick Fyfe
Spoletta - Graeme Macfarlane
Sciarrone - Andrew Moran
Marchesa Attavanti - Sian Pendry
Opera Australia Chorus
Orchestra Victoria
Conductor - Shao Chia Lü
Director - Christopher Alden, Rehearsed by Cathy Dadd
Set & Lighting Designer - Charles Edwards
Costume Designer - Jon Morrell
State Theatre, Melbourne
April 14, 17, 21, 24, 28 May 1, 4, 10 & 13, 2010.

La Sonnambula
While Tosca is mainstay of Opera Australia’s repertoire, Bellini’s La Sonnambula has not been professionally staged here since Joan Sutherland and Richard Bonynge included it in their touring company in 1965. Seizing on the success of a new I Capuleti e I Montecchi last year, Opera Australia are promoting the star of that production, Emma Matthews, in a new staging of La Sonnambula.

Recently returned from her debut at England’s Royal Opera as Janacek’s Vixen, Matthews actually possesses a formidable coloratura voice and technique and is developing her repertoire along those lines. This is her first Amina and she displays a keen understanding of the style of the role and the genre it belongs to. The high lying notes were delivered with a sense of effortlessness, high notes clear and strong without being strident. Matthews also demonstrates what bel canto is all about. Runs were executed faultlessly, the individual notes of ascending and descending scales clearly articulated, and her trill is genuine and seemingly endless. She can apply a soft focus without losing any of the clarity in her singing and, for a role where the character is asleep as often as awake, that softness of tone lends the music a ‘dreamy’ aspect.
Matthews is also a very engaging actor and, aided by a deceptively simple production by Julie Edwardson, creates a moving Amina, her dreams giving way to a melancholy perfectly intimated by the music in the two sleepwalking scenes. Both Matthews and Edwardson understand that character is created through music and both base their interpretations in Bellini’s this ingenious music.

As Elvino, Jorge Lopez-Yanez, has the kind of ‘tenorino’ voice that, we would believe, prevailed in Bellini’s time and he sang with the same softness of tone as Mathews. He and Joshua Bloom as Count Rodolfo were able to display a similar elegance of style thanks to the encouragement and beautiful shaping of the score from conductor Richard Bonynge.

In the same way Taryn Fiebig’s solo when she briefly becomes Elvino’s betrothed was made into a telling dramatic moment as her music echoed Amina’s in the first sleepwalking scene as Amina’s imagined her marriage to Elvino.

Edwardson has reconceived the opera to the early 20th century. Richard Robert has designed a single set with a central raked, revolving platform and costumes that at times look like a kind of alpine Albert Herring. Edwardson suggests, without overplaying, the Jungian and Freudian fascination with dreams happening at this time and the nocturnal palate of Matt Scott's lighting created a visual parallel to the nocturnal and dreamlike music. Other touches, like Amina slipping into a trance in the act one ensemble where the phantom that haunts the village is mentioned (and is of course, really Amina) are brilliantly subtle and dramatic additions.
Bonynge knows this opera inside out and breathed long phrases into the music without affecting the drama. The charm and intimacy of the music came through from the very start, despite the expansiveness of the large auditorium. His decisions about tempo and keys and selection of embellishments for Matthews’s key arias added to the success of the production.

La Sonnambula by Vincenzo Bellini
Amina - Emma Matthews
Elvino - Jorge Lopez-Yanez
Count Rodolfo - Joshua Bloom
Lisa - Taryn Fiebig
Teresa - Elizabeth Campbell
Alessio - Andrew Jones
Notary - Kanen Breen
Opera Australia Chorus
Orchestra Victoria
Conductor - Richard Bonynge
Director - Julie Edwardson
Set & Costume Designer - Richard Roberts
Lighting Designer - Matt Scott
State Theatre, Melbourne April 30, May 3, 6, 8, 12, 15 & 17, 2010
Sydney Opera House August 5, 7, 9, 11, 14, 17, 19, 21 & 24, 2010

CD Review - Marc-Antoine Charpentier: David et Jonathas

2009-12-27T18:35:00.008+11:00

Anders J. Dahlin, Sara Macliver, Dean Robertson, soloists of Pinchgut Opera. Cantillation. Orchestra of the Antipodes. Antony Walker, conductor
ABC Classics 476 3691 (2CD)

Having lived with William Christie’s pioneering account of this opera since its release in 1988 on the French Harmonia Mundi label (no longer available), and listening to this new account, I can only register my astonishment at the achievement of the Australian ensemble. The annual offering from the Sydney based Pinchgut Opera is a greatly anticipated event and in less than a decade has reached such high musical and theatrical standards. The sense of period style and performance in the ABC Classics recordings is so thorough that it’s difficult to distinguish this recording from Christie’s, even though Christie is leading one of the world’s pre-eminent early music ensembles. Both performances derive from the critical edition of the score made in 1981 by the musicologist Jean Duron and both display continuing insights into early music performance.

The conductor, Antony Walker, has a keen sense of how the music should flow. Tempos are always well judged; the marches and other musical interludes spring along, as do the conclusions of arias and ensembles that propel the drama. In the travesti role of Jonathon, the femininity of Sara Macliver’s pure, silver soprano perfectly suggests the teenaged boy hero. The Swedish tenor, Anders J. Dahlin, matches her with an exquisitely controlled voice. All of the singers demonstrate the same degree of understanding and preparation in their roles and approach to the music.

In the great scene of Jonathan’s death, the instrumental and vocal writing is so restrained as to be almost chilling and Macliver and Dahlin are most moving in this painfully spare music, the subtle vocal ornamentations beautifully judged. Another great scene, in which the Witch of Endor summons up the ghost of Samuel, is performed with similar understatement. Christie uses a more characterful counter-tenor for the Witch but Pinchgut’s Paul McMahon more straightforward account makes the scene more chilling.

The Cantillation choir, with their radiant sopranos, sing with the intimacy of a madrigal group while the orchestra, with recorder and lute/theorbo/guitar consorts beautifully highlighted by the recording engineers, make this an early music performance that deserves worldwide distribution. ABC Classics has released each of Pinchgut Opera’s productions on CD. Judging from the generous selection of illustrations in the accompanying booklet, Pinchgut has hit its stride in its staging of David et Jonathas and future productions should be recorded for both CD and DVD release. Going from the booklet photographs the production looked very hip-historical-chic and with a heavy awareness of the homoerotic potential. Oversized wall paintings based on Caravaggio's butchest paintings loom large over the proceedings.

It’s hard to believe that the recording derives from live performances; incidental noise is non-existent until - well-deserved – applause at the end of each disc. The intimacy of the performance venue makes an enormous impact on the recording. The sound is constantly sharp and clear, voices and instruments are never “off mic” and the balances are so well judged that it would be little improved if recorded in the studio. In addition to copious production pictures and a background essay the CD booklet includes a full libretto with the original French text and English translation.

This review appears in the May-July 2010 issue of Music Forum

Review - A Streetcar Named Desire - Opera Australia

2009-12-06T13:16:00.015+11:00

But 'cha Are Blanche!
Musically, Australia looks to Britain and Europe, especially for its operatic diet and America’s considerable operatic output has been overlooked. Despite the sensational impact Menotti’s The Consul had when it premiered in Australia in 1953 – making a star out of Marie Collier - it was revived professionally only once more in 1985. Even Menotti’s perennial Christmas favourite Amahl and the Night Visitors has had few professional productions. Consequently the 2007 production of André Previn’s A Streetcar Named Desire was a significant event.

Previn has composed vocal music and music theatre often during his long career but for his first, fully-fledged opera, he has approached the task from an area he knows better than most other opera composers. When the work premiered in 1998 commentators considered the music and approach, with its many jazz references, to be more akin to cinema in style and form. Listening to the way Previn’s score fits the stage action and libretto it is indeed very cinematic and works in the same way a skilled screen composer (which Previn is) underscores action, giving the visuals a musically dramatic undercurrent equal to the emotional content of the scene. Previn uses a riding motive, a couple of jazzy chords, to open the opera and which come to represent Blance's tragic nymphomania and sexual destruction, That motive returns in the scene when her nympho tendencies come to the fore when the young collector calls. When she entices him to stay, starting the conversation with "Don't you just love rainy afternoons like this" the chords slyly appear, and then return purring as she kisses him and finally the same chords wail in the orchestral outburt as Blanche is raped by Stanley. Musically it is very approachable, with overtones of Copland, Barber, Menotti, Britten and Previn’s very knowledgeable synthesis of American jazz in its make up but never as derivative as some commentators would make it out to be. There are even some moments of great humour such as when Stanley announces that Stella is pregnant and a tuba and piccolo play in unison; the ferocious bellow of the tuba and the petite whine of the piccolo suggesting their very unequal coupling! Very soon one becomes accustomed to the music and style and it appears that vocal lines are created out of the musical undercurrent rather accompanied by it. Not that Previn does not create arias per se. There are many solo moments or aria and arioso, the earliest being when Stella (Antoinette Halloran) describes to the astonished Blance (Yvonne Kenny) her unconditional love for the brutish Stanley (Teddy Tahu Rhodes). Cradled in music of great beauty and lyricism Previn creates a mood within the orchestra as an arching and aching commentary under Stella’s attempt to make Blanche understand her love. As important as the sung music are Previns’s preludes and interludes. The prelude includes jazzy chords that recur and represent, like a motive, Blance Du Bois doom. The interludes, like those in Menotti’s The Consul, hold or develop the action of a scene and seamlessly develop it into the next.

Tackling such a landmark drama as A Streetcar Named Desire was a brave and almost heroic undertaking but Previn’s confidence and skill have made it one of the better American operas of the last twenty years, if not one of the best since Samuel Barber’s Vanessa of half a century ago. Like Barber, Previn has the compositional nouse to make time stand still, even when the imminent tragedy is piling up. Blanche’s “I Can Smell the Sea Air” - in the play just another Blanche’s hopeless and self-deluding rambles - appears in the opera as moment of stillness and beauty (as well as a tragic indicator) and not surprisingly started to gather as much popularity as a stand-alone concert item as the more outgoing “I Want Magic”.

Blanche may be the opera’s tragic protagonist but, as in the play, her antagonist, Stanley Kowalski almost overshadows her. Teddy Tahu Rhodes has made a name for himself in the role both physically and vocally since first singing it for the Washington Opera then in the Viennese premiere in March 2007 followed by the Australian premiere later that year. His physical credentials as ‘barihunk’ are well enough know and discussed* (often in in alarming detail) throughout cyberspace. Vocally Rhodes has a deep and well-focussed baritone. Here he lessens that focus to give a blunt edge to Stanley’s frequent and violent outbursts. Philip Littell’s libretto follows the play text with often slavish faithfulness and Little retains enormous amounts of the original text in, what can sound when it sung rather than spoken, rather banal. In his earliest appearance, and already displaying his contempt for Blanche’s pretentious mannerism, Rhode’s voice sounds almost cavernous in darkness and depth. That their relationship will end in one of the most frightening assaults in theatrical literature seems almost pre-ordained from the moment Rhodes opens his mouth. In the scene leading to Blanche’s assault he goads and threatens her while Previn’s music, now keenly integrating the vocal and orchestral fabric into an explosive scene with the same cathartic power as the verismo operas of the early twentieth century. These final two scenes are disturbing to watch and, even the though the opera has been served well by a recording taken from the premiere, it really needs to be re-recorded to preserve the boiling, aggressiveness of Rhodes’s interpretation.

Blanche is rightly the opera’s heroine and Yvonne Kenny achieves her best work in the many introspective moments. Only the most dramatic moments appear to tax her voice but her interpretation of “I Can Smell the Sea Air” is ravishing. Mad women and mad scenes are noting new to opera and the pathos of Blanche Du Bois’s final scene is as good as any of them. Caressing the final floating high notes of “I Can Smell the Sea Air” she is minutes later pinned to floor by the madhouse nurse and finally lead away in final scene as disturbing in its pathos as the brutality of the rape scene that precedes it.

Stuart Skelton is another singer of international status. Fresh from a recent triumph in Sydney as Peter Grimes, he brought the same naivety to his interpretation of Mitch. The hopeless desire for and then cruel rejection of Blanche even harks back to the scenes between Grimes and Ellen Orford in Britten’s opera.

As Stella Antoinette Halloran is in the same vocal league as her internationally known colleagues. Her singing is constantly subtle and is beautifully supported soprano. Halloran features in a disc on the Australian label ABC Classics of Puccini arias and duets and which is worth seeking out, hers is a voice to listen out for.

The opera’s hothouse atmosphere is well captured by John Stoddart sets; seeming to be mouldering through years of damp and neglect although there is no suggestion of Blanche’s cramped and curtained sleeping quarters. The State Theatre stage is larger than its more famous Sydney counterpart and the revolving set sits within the larger area concentrating the attention to stage action. The director, Bruce Beresford, has, (like Previn) a long career in motion pictures and, as a film director, understands the importance of a musical undercurrent. He achieves many detailed effects despite working on a large stage and even employs film projections in key moments to clever effect.

This current revival is a significant event in the company’s repertoire development and hopefully signals that the production will now remain Opera Australia’s permanent repertoire.

André Previn – A Streetcar Named Desire
Libretto – Philip Littell after the play by Tennessee Williams
First performance - 9 September 1998 San Francisco Opera
First Australian performance – 2 August 2007 (Opera Australia)
Blanche DuBois - Yvonne Kenny
Stanley Kowalski - Teddy Tahu Rhodes
Stella Kowalski - Antoinette Halloran
Eunice Hubble - Dominica Matthews
Steve Hubble - Andrew Brunsdon
Harold ‘Mitch’ Mitchell - Stuart Skelton
A Young Collector - Stephen Smith
A Mexican Woman - Jacqueline Dark

Orchestra Victoria
Conductor - Tom Woods
Director - Bruce Beresford
Set & Costume Designer - John Stoddart
Lighting Designer - Nigel Levings
Vision Designer - Michael Gruchy
State Theatre, The Arts Centre, Melbourne. December 2, 5, 8 & 12 2009.

*The barihunk phenomenon was recently discussed by Irene Lacher in the Los Angeles Times.

Vale Elisabeth Söderström

2009-11-30T19:25:00.002+11:00

As signed photograph of her first assumption in the 1960s of Emila Marty in The Makropulos Case

Review - Cosi fan tutte - Opera Australia

2009-11-20T22:30:00.011+11:00

Like most opera companies, the Mozart/da Ponte trifecta of Figaro, Don Giovanni and Cosi fan tutte are central to Opera Australia’s repertoire. Like his production of Don Giovanni, the staging of Cosi fan tutte by the late Göran Järvefelt served the company well for decades before being replaced in September by this new take on the story by Jim Sharman. Sharman is one of Australia’s most invigorating stage directors whose earliest work was with Opera Australia (then called The Australian Opera) when, in 1967, as a twenty-one year old, he produced Don Giovanni, setting it on a huge chess board and calculating the Don’s progress to Hell like chess strategies. Sharman’s biggest claim to worldwide fame, however, is as director of the original Rocky Horror Show and it’s subsequent film adaptation. In Australia he is counted among the country’s foremost directors with laudable stagings of classic and contemporary plays, musicals and occasionally operas. His staging of Britten’s Death in Venice was mounted for the 1980 Adelaide Festival, eight years after it’s premiere where it garnered favourable comments from local and international critics before being taken into Opera Australia’s repertoire where it still holds sway nearly thirty years later.

Like than early Don Giovanni, Sharman’s Cosi sadly seems to be trying too hard. But by most accounts Cosi is a difficult opera to pull off. The partner swapping shenanigans and misogynist sentiment have stranded it as a kind of antiquated boulevard farce like Georges Feydeau set to music!Using a contemporary setting, Sharman reveals during the overture a wedding party, the couple, a Japanese Bride and Groom, arriving at the reception before freezing the action and transporting the Bride and Groom to either side of the stage where they watch the opera unfold before being transported back at the end of the opera to their nuptials as the cast sing the opera’s moral. Don Alfonso’s (José Carbó) bet appears to be a the result of a locker room brag as Ferrando (Henry Choo) and Guglielmo (Luke Gabbedy), under stylised showers, compare their respective fiancée’s virtue (rather, as one would imagine in a locker room situation, their physical or sexual attributes). The action unfolds in a white walled set, designed by Ralph Myers, with an arched floor where the stranded wedding organisers and guests act as chorus and occasional prop movers. Occasionally the wedding photographer appears with a live video camera to zoom in on characters during their principal arias and relay their image to a huge curtain interminably pulled back and forth throughout the long opera.

While the concept may be puzzling it works well enough until the second act where these directorial high jinks gloss over the searing bitterness as Fiordiligi (Hye Seoung Kwon) agonises over her situation and the two men agonise over the swiftness of their lovers infidelity. Unlike Brad and Janet in Sharman’s notorious Rocky Horror Show, the partner swapping and sexual humiliation is far from funny. In fairness the fault lies with the opera itself it’s sexual attitudes are as infuriating to modern audiences as those of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew and even the best directors have a tough job with either.

The opera is also sung in a modern English translation by Jeremy Sams that almost matches the famous, mid-twentieth century, Ruth and Thomas Martin translation for its lumpiness. While getting plenty of laughs for its up to date casualness (“I might forget myself or even wet myself” sing the men after Guglielmo’s ‘mustacchi’ serenade sends the ladies packing), Sams’s choice of words robs the open-vowelled flow of da Ponte’s Italian text. Nor does Sams even try to be literal about translating the original words, let along consider their singability “I have sinned my best beloved” is his substitution for Fiordiligi’s “per pieta, ben mio perdona”. Sams even suggests that the opera's ‘motif’’ “Cosi fan tutte”, when sung by Don Alfonso should be “That’s how God made them”. The obligations of a translation - should it be as literal as rendition of the original as possible - and other concerns about the act and art of translating make an essay on its own but, if an opera company must perform a work in translation (and spend good money on royalties for it) it should at least be better than this.

To their credit, the young cast sing even the most difficult passages clearly, nearly every word of the unfortunate text is audible. Henry Choo is a most stylish tenor; his voice has the heft to carry into the big auditorium without apparent force. He establishes a beautiful and limpid line through ‘Un’aura amorosa’ and is spot-on in the difficult runs in the act one finale. As Guglielmo, Luke Gabbedy’s light baritone could almost be mistaken for a tenor and a darker colour might be wished for in the duet with Dorabella (Sian Pendry) and the act two aria. The same applies to José Carbó’s as Alfonso, the voice seeming lighter than one would expect for the role. Of the ladies the most accomplished is Tiffany Speight as Despina. I first heard Speight in a production of the Brecht/Weill piece Happy End in a suburban theatre in Melbourne before she joined Opera Australia. Already the operatic potential of her voice was apparent and, a decade on, Speight is one of the company’s best Mozartians (think of Leslsey Garrett's 1980s voice and presence and you'll have an idea of what I mean). Speight's voice is silvery and her charming stage presence carries with the same clarity. Hye Seong Kwon handled Fiordiligi’s big moments with breathtaking ease, long phrases, octave jumps and embellishments all perfectly judged despite the impositions the English words placed on her. Sian Pendry handled Dorabella’s music with similar ease; hers is a high, light mezzo, rather like Gabbedy’s high, light baritone. Kwon and Pendry also make their first appearance in swim suits and spend the rest of the opera equally revealing costumes and both have catwalk figures.

Some of the embellished vocal lines occasionally depart from the more familiar resolutions (this is presumably the Bärenreiter Mozart edition). Ollivier-Philippe Cunéo coaxed a period sounding performance from the orchestra, the strings occasionally emphasising that wiry sound that passes for authentic. Cunéo also adopts that peculiar practice of breathlessly playing the two opening chords of the overture (as evidenced in Arnold Östman's 1986 recording of the opera) and generally rushing things where a little restraint might have been better. The woodwind were often given a difficult time and the big moment when Fiordiligi finally succumbs (Mozart’s delectably sudden change from lurching chords to gorgeous runs on the strings) passed without the attention it deserves.

With chic costumes and attractive singers to wear them, this Cosi will certainly appeal to younger audiences. Sharman is obviously at his best when dealing amorous absurdities but the deeper musical and emotional content that is so unique in the Mozart/da Ponte operas are left buried.

Cosi fan tutte (1790) Opera in two acts by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte
First performance - 26 January 1790, Burgtheater Vienna
First Australian performance - February 17 1953, Princess Theatre, Melbourne
First performance of this production - 17 September 2009
Fioriligi – Hye Seoung Kwon
Dorabella – Sian Pendry
Despina – Tiffany Speight
Ferrando – Henry Choo
Guglielmo - Luke Gabbedy
Don Alfonso - José Carbó

Conductor - Ollivier-Philippe Cunéo
English translation of the original Italian text - Jeremy Sams
Director – Jim Sharman
Set Designer – Ralph Myers
Costume Designer – Gabriela Tylesova
State Theatre, The Arts Centre, Melbourne
19, 21, 24, 27 November 3, 5, 9 & 12 December 2009

Review - The Apocalypse Bear Trilogy - Melbourne Theatre Company

2009-10-11T21:11:00.022+11:00

...Your'e Sure Of A Big Surprise ...

Lally Katz's transitional object from Hell, the Apocalypse Bear, began 'bruin' (sorry brewing) in her mind after seeing a shelf of motley teddy bears in a suburban chemist shop. The beast that emerged, a spectral figure clad in the dodgiest-looking of panto teddy bear costumes, began it's reign of subtle terror in miniature films where the Bear made nocturnal visits to suburbia, interrupting a woman's late night call from a public phone box and a young man's post-fellatory hallucinations in a public toilet. The Apocalypse Bear seems to enjoy traumatising gay boys the most as his next incarnation was in Katz'z The Fag from Zagreb, Katz's contribution to the portmanteau of plays for White Whale Theatre's Melburnalia.

The Melbourne Theatre Company are rightly profiling Katz at the experimental Lawler Studio where she, and many more emerging writers to come, will hopefully flower. Reviving the first Apocalypse Bear play, The Fag From Zagreb with two new pieces which can stand alone or, as here, be joined in a delicious sequence of vignettes of maturity from adolescence to adulthood.

In The Fag From Zagreb, teen-aged Jeremy (Luke Mullins) arrives home to find his mother and sister gone and replaced by the Apocalypse Bear (Brian Lipson) who prepares his afternoon snack, listens supportively to the gay teen's secret desires, cautioning him against becoming too familiar with his on-line acquaintance (a desperate, older, Croatian, gay man) before menacingly probing Jeremy about his nocturnal visit to the woods of darkest Kew.

In the second play, the Bear shares a table in a high school cafeteria with unpopular Sonia (Katherine Tonkin) who sadly predicts her failed marriage, describing it as a past event before the Bear, toys, as he did with Jeremy, with her insecurities.

The final play introduces a childless and childlike couple Sonia and Jeremy (are they the same people, older, not much wiser and definitely still insecure?). Afraid to go out in the dark to put the bins out, Sonia relates to Jeremy her Alice in Wonderland-like dream where she is transported through a hole in a wall behind a coat rack. The delayed appearance of the Bear gives the final play an extra tingle and when he does appear he is comforting and supportive.

Katz's brand of surrealism is loaded with Jungian shared meanings and, while the original staging of The Fag From Zagreb should be cherished by all who saw it, the new version recreates its impact just as well. Mullins and Tonkin deliver the dialogue with hilarious or fearful naturalness. Originally the Bear was played by young actors, giving it a sort of a doppelganger presence, part of the psyche of the person he was visiting. Casting Lipson gives the Bear a paternal side to the often adult-child exchanges between him and Sonia or Jeremy. Lipson also brings a sinister hilarity to the Bear's words and movements all of his own, hitching up his baggy trouser fur to sit down or delicately opening salt, pepper or sauce packets with his clumsy paws he makes what was once a child's dearest companion into a delightfully menacing presence.

Lipson and Mullins share the direction. To what extend is any one's guess but the feeling is that Lipson fuelled the responses to the bear while Mullins orchestrated the Bear's to Jeremy and Sonia. The Lawler Studio, he smaller of the two theatres in the MTC's new premises is a cracker venue. The heavy and, for once, effective black drapes mean that the theatre can plunge into total darkness, even the bilious glow of exits signs don't spill into the dramatic space for once. The effect of our first sighting of the Apocalypse Bear emerging out of total darkness kick-started the proceedings. The three playlets are separated by scene changes also in total darkness and punctuated only by lightening flashes of the Bear seeming to dance in triumph over the trauma he's just wreaked. Great contemporary writing in a great contemporary performance space.

The Melbourne Theatre Company in association with Stuck Pigs Squealing Productions
The Apocalypse Bear - Brian Lipson
Jeremy - Luke Mullins
Sonia - Katherine Tonkin
Directors - Brian Lipson & Luke Mullins
Sound Designer - Jethro Woodward
Lighting Designer - Richard Vabre
Artistic Adviser - Chris Kohn
Set & Costume Designer - Mel Page
Producer - Lucy Evans
Video Designer - Martyn Coutts
Lawler Studio, Southbank
8 - 24 October 2009

90 minutes ( no interval)

CD Review - Emma Matthews in Monte Carlo - ABC Classics/ Deutsche Grammophon

2009-08-10T11:33:00.014+10:00

Emma Matthews in Monte Carlo

Leonard Bernstein

Candide - Glitter and Be Gay

Leo Delibes
Lakme - Ou va la jeune Indoue (Bell Song)
Friedrich von Flotow
Martha - The Last Rose of Summer
Gaetano Donizetti
Lucia di Lammermoor - Ancor non giunse...Regnava nel silenzio...Quando rapito In estasi
with Catherine Carby mezzo-soprano
Vincenzo Bellini
I Capuleti e i Montecchi - Eccomi in lieta vesta...Oh! quante volte
Charles Gounod
Roméo et Juliette - Air de la coupe: Dieu quel frisson … Amour, ranime mon courage
Ambroise Thomas
Hamlet - A vos jeux, mes amis… Partagez-vous mes fleurs... (scène de la folie d' Ophelie)
Jaques Offenbach
Les Contes d'Hoffmann - Les oiseaux dans la charmille
Heinrich Proch (arr. Richard Bonynge)
Deh! Torna, mio bene, Theme and Variations
Calvin Bowman
Now Touch the Air Softly
Richard Mills
The Love of the Nightingale - The Nightingale's Song
Emma Mathews, soprano
Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo
Brad Cohen, conductor
ABC Classics/ Deutsche Grammophon 476 3555

A co-production between ABC Classics and the owners of the fabled Deutsche Grammophon label, Universal Music, the well-known DGG logo featuring on the cover and presumably sharing a European release of the disc as the soloist, Emma Matthews, launches her international career. The project is a luxurious one, instead of an Australian orchestra the Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo is employed and even a second singer (mezzo Catherine Carby) has been brought over to sing the ‘pertichio’ role in the Lucia di Lammermoor scene.

In her work with Opera Australia Matthews projects a big, secure voice in lyric and coloratura roles but also in less likely assignments including the title role in one Opera Australia’s finest achievements, Alban Berg’s Lulu, using that light, lyrical voice to revelatory effect.

The disc opens with a restrained account of “Glitter and Be Gay” from Bernstein’s operetta-inspired Candide. Eschewing the histrionics that often negate the song’s effects Matthew’s equates the coloratura passages to the type of musical laughter familiar from Manon Lescauts' laughing song in Auber's opera or the best known example, Adele's laughing song in Die Fledermaus. The result is immensely satisfying and encourages multiple hearings.

The folksy “Last Rose of Summer” from Flotow’s Martha reveals Matthews’s beautiful legato but the bulk of the disc is a 60 minute ‘potted’ history of the Bel Canto era before ending with a return to simple serenity. Instead of the celebrated mad-scene from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor comes the equally dramatic fountain scene is chosen which introduces Lucia (and subtly indicates her mental breakdown is already beginning). The featured mad scene is Ophelia’s scene and ballade from Thomas’s Hamlet. Given in full it the best demonstration of Matthews’s impressive technique as she incorporates the higher and more florid passages introduced by the singer Marie Carvalho and incorporated into the original vocal scores. Matthews then gives an even more elaborate account of the ‘Doll Song” from Les Contes d’Hoffmann and then just enough of an arrangement (the entire thing overstays its welcome even for coloratura fanciers) by Richard Bonynge of Proch’s Theme and Variations (presumably with his wife Joan Sutherland in mind) and which Matthews sings with the same power and agility as Sutherland.

The recital closes with two Australian compositions, and orchestration of a song by Calvin Bowman that has a folksy simplicity and even a beguiling Scotch rhythm in places. The Nightingale’s song from Richard Mill’s opera The Love of The Nightingale is sadly too brief an excerpt from an opera Matthews is so closely associated with. Sounding like a classical vocalise and orchestrated in a lush Ravel-ian manner it brings some beautiful playing from the orchestra. The conductor, Brad Cohen, has a personal interest in this 19th French operatic repertoire and the orchestra, as expected, are a world class band who respond to the familiar items, bringing some very Gallic and incisive playing to the scene from Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette. The recording is demonstration class, Matthews’s voice given an immediate presence with the strings, in particular in the Bowman item, sounding luscious.

Review - Strangers in Between - The Store Room

2009-08-02T11:28:00.023+10:00

Ghost Buster

Tommy Murphy’s Strangers in Between was written and produced prior to his adaptation of Tim Conigrave’s Holding the Man whilst he was resident the Sydney’s Griffin Theatre Company. Like Holding the Man, Strangers in Between contains some of the adolescent magical realism of Griffin’s great Away by Michael Gow which (or at least I wish) had been a major influence on play writing. The turmoil of adolescence, trying to shape the love and hate felt towards family into the love (and hate) of adult relationships, the angst of youthful, burgeoning sexuality and its subsequent waning and merging into a greater whole is universally appealing subject matter.

Murphy is a prodigious young writer (he is only 30) and his script has an urgency in the way it deals with its central adolescent passion. Shane (Aljin Abella) has run away from Goulburn to Sydney after being beaten up by his brother who caught him kissing a schoolmate. That turmoil of burgeoning sexuality, and now sexual ostracism, is compounded with the turmoil of finding his feet alone for the first time. The early scenes are characterised by delicious humour underlining Shane’s social skills are as naive as his sexual skills. We see his him nervously blathering with his first sexual partner Will (Cameron Moore) so much that Will kisses him just to stop his endless chatter. Shane's domestic skills are even worse; washing his clothes for the first time is as baffling as sex. Badly in need of friendship as much as mentorship he initiates a conversation with a middle-aged man, Peter (Bruce Kerr) in a bar. But no sooner are they talking than he innocently asks him where to buy coat hangers and, almost in the same breath, about the mechanics of anal sex.

Murphy’s writing is very well crafted with a sophisticated feeling for comedy. As his friendship with Peter develops, for instance, Shane is treated to dinners at the epicurean Peter’s house and samples brie cheese and terrine. Back in Shane’s home town Bree and Tarrine are the names of his brother’s successive girlfriends. The script abounds with this "easing comedy", as David Berthold notes in his introduction to the Currency Press edition of the play, to negotiate around the mounting drama and the director Ben Packer and his actors respond to them unforcedly.

The more dramatic second act is more complex. Shane’s despised brother Ben (Cameron Moore) appears, seemingly responding to a letter from Shane. Ben’s appearance is doubly surprising as the same actor playing Will plays Ben. After a fleeting introduction as the play opens Will’s establishing scene - firstly as an object of Shane’s love and then hate - is also the scene that sets him up to re-appear minutes later as Shane’s brother. Shane is constantly distressed by the violence of Sydney’s King’s Cross and fearful of being attacked. In his room, he also feels a ghostly presence. When Ben initially appears his reality is assumed. When he next appears his doppelganger similarity to Will better understood. The same actor plays Will and Ben, as Berthold explains, “for an important reason: Will is the form of Shane’s yearning for Ben”. Far from unconscious incestuous desire, Shane yearns, rather, to resolve his love/hate relationship with Ben as much as he is trying to resolve his love/hate relationship with Will. Both have hurt him and then rejected him and both appear in the second act their Gestalt presence is, in Ben’s case, a powerful climactic moment while Will’s is a gentle resolution.

In the first act Shane’s relationships with Will and Peter break down when, as Berthold says, “sex is confused with intimacy”. In a chapter entitled 'Staging A Culture That Insn't Just Sexual"A in his 1992 study Acting Gay: Male Homosexuality in Modern Drama John Clum discusses how a gay character forges "relationships that meaningfully and honestly connect him to other people - lovers, friends, family. Like the self, relationships and the language of relationships must be forged anew out of words that have limited or negative meanings for gay men". At the conclusion of Strangers in Between the erotic thrall between the trio has been replaced by the more rewarding intimacy and language of trust and friendship. Naked and vulnerable, Shane is there for the taking but instead Will and Peter are surrogate brother and father.

As Shane Abella balances the comedy and pathos of the character, never letting you forget the desperation of his situation.
In the dual roles of Shane’s lover Will and brother Ben, Moore delineates both characters exceptionally well. As Ben his gaunt, stiff-limed and spectral appearance suggests both the troubled stoner that is Shane’s brother and the memory-stirring ghost of Shane’s unconscious. In staging Ben’s second scene Packer even has Moore walking backwards, retreating into the darkness after its purpose has been served like a proper stage ghost would. Perhaps the casting of actors of different ethnicity for Shane and his brother was a means of delineating the real presence of Will and the imagined presence of Ben.

Bruce Kerr is an unlikely choice as Peter, more grandfatherly than the intended 50-ish and fatherly character penned by Murphy but uses his terrifically long theatrical experience to mine the script for new depths, creating a kind of Quentin Crisp-ian character. Even more than Abella and Moore Kerr wrings every possible drop of humour out of Murphy’s text.

Packer’s production is valuable in these aspects. Apart from being a further production of a play (which is a luxury in this environment where plays have no life after a first production), being able to further explore the ways of signalling the important shifts of reality in the play. As originally written Shane’s brother first appears at the end of the first act. In the current staging director Ben Packer runs the play without a break and drawing tension out of Moore's sudden appearance as Ben. The text is meticulously supervised on its many levels in this production. The play’s sense of humour comes through subtly and the dialogue and scenes flowing effortlessly. Lighting, simple array of suspended, coloured fluorescent lights suggesting the cheap, nocturnal glamour of King’s Cross while scenes are punctuated with a sound scape of trains in motion. Back in business after a few years’ hiatus, The Store Room provides an intimate venue for this imaginative play about intimacy.

Strangers In Between (2006) by Tommy Murphy
Shane – Aljin Abella
Will/Ben – Cameron Moore
Peter – Bruce Kerr
Director – Ben Packer
Set & Costume Design – Micka Agosta
Lighting Design – Govin Ruben
Little Death Productions
The Store Room, 1st floor rear, Parkview Hotel,
131 Scotchmer St, North Fitzroy
23 July – 16 August 2009
95 minutes (no interval)

Rufus Wainwright's First Opera

2009-07-10T11:18:00.046+10:00

Prima Donna by Rufus Wainwright premieres at the Manchester Festival tonight. It will be performed in Melbourne and Toronto, that's official.
I've heard some snippets and have to say its not as bad as people made it out to be. It is set in Paris in 1970 and is to a French libretto. Wainwright has assimilated a mish-mash of post French sounding Ravel music into what I have heard, lots of jolly woodwind a la Poulenc and Ibert. Janis Kelly, as the Prima Donna Régine sounds very impressive too. Via You Tube Rufus in Paris in June sings an aria from Prima Donna (believe me Janis Kelly is much, much better)

Update: Reviews are in...

The Guardian 12 July "The score itself comes clothed as Strauss, Massenet and Puccini; Wainwright would seem to be on a mission to drag opera back into the late 19th century. But his gift as a melodist and an orchestrator are in no doubt, having been proved on a series of albums which are mini-operas in their own right."

The Independent "Musically Prima Donna is at best banal, at worst boring. The orchestral writing is lumpy, leaden and repetitive, so that the merest flash of inspiration – a dashing musical signature for example – is welcomed with relief as an original idea. Wainwright didn't need to pay homage to all those dead composers he adores by including so many fragments of their scores in his own opera."

Jonathan Summers (left) and some piece of totty in Prima Donna

Jonathan Summers appears to have the choice part as the "sleazy, bullying, Mephisto-type butler" (all in a days work when your bread and butter consists of Scarpia, Iago and nasty Verdi baritones).
The New York Times is very insightful and - shock horror! written by someone who knows something about music! (and who agrees with me about the Poulenc influences) "As a longtime admirer of his music, I wish I could report that “Prima Donna” fulfilled his ambitions for writing a fresh and personal new opera. He certainly brings deep talents and potential to the challenge."

The Manchester Confidential Not an insightful review but it gives the best synopsis of the opera and commentary on the illustrative nature of Rufus's music.

Bloomberg Hates it!

Pity Rufus is such a nong about the artform he claims to love so much. In the slurry of interviews and advance publicity for the opera he claims that "there's no opera about an opera singer ... It doesn't exist in the repertoire.”

Yes there are operas about opera singers, Tosca and The Makropulos Case have leading characters who are opera singers although the plots feature little about their actual professions as both Floria and Emilia are caught up some heavy personal stuff. What Rufus probably means is that there is no opera about being an opera singer.

Interested parties might like to add to the list of operas about or featuring characters who are singers that we can send to Rufus.

Dominic Argento - The Aspern Papers (Juliana Bordereau) clip at YouTube [Elisabeth *sigh* Soderstrom and Neil Rosenshein]
Dominic Argento - Postcard from Morocco (An Operetta Singer, A Foreign Singer, An
Operetta Singer)

Arthur Benjamin - The Prima Donna (Olympia & Fiammetta)
Robert Russell Bennett - Maria Malibran (Maria Malibran)

Daniel Catan - Florencia en el Amazonas (Florencia Grimaldi) also at Wikipedia

Katherine Davis - The Unmusical Impresario (Madame DaCapo, a failed opera singer)
Donizetti - Le Convenienze Ed Inconvenienze Teatrali or Viva la Momma! (Daria Garbinati, Luiga Castragatti, Guglielmo Antolstoinoff & Donna Agata Scanagalli, don't ya love those names!?)
Joseph Haydn - La Canterina (Gasparina)
Paul Hindemith - Cardillac (The Lady, a Prima Donna at the local opera)

Sydney Hodkinson - St Carmen of the Main (Carmen, a Country & Western singer)

Adriana Hölszky - Giuseppe e Sylvia (Giuseppina Strepponi)
Janáček - Věc Makropulos (Emila Marty) clip at YouTube [Raina Kabaivanska]
Leoncavallo - Zaza (Zaza, a cafe singer)
Siegfried Matthus - Farinelli or the Power of Singing (Farinelli)
Mozart - Der Schauspieldirektor (Madamoiselles Herz & Siberklang, Monsieur Vogelsang) clip at YouTube [Yvonne Kenny & Judith Howarth]
Michael Nyman - The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat (Dr. P) youtube clip not from the original film
Offenbach - La Pericole (Pericole, a street singer [also featured in operas by Henri Busser and Lord Berners)

Offenbach - Les Contes d' Hoffmann (Stella)
Offenbach - Monsieur Choufleuri restera chez lui - (Henriette Sontag, Giovanni Battista Rubini & Antonio Tamburini are impersonated)
Offenbach - La Leçon de chant électromagnétique (Jean Matois, a tenor whose voice is created by the elctro-magnetic method of the singing teacher Pacifico Toccato)
Thomas Pasatieri - Frau Margot (Margot)

Inspired by the story of Helene Berg's attempt to keep the third act of her husband's incompleted opera Lulu under wraps, Frau Margot is the widow of a famous composer and was a famous singer herself.

Laurent Petitgirard - Joseph Merrick dit Elephant Man (La Colorature, Celena [this role reputedly supplants Zerbinetta in Ariadne auf Naxos as the most difficult and high flying role for a coloratura soprano])
Ponchielli - La Gioconda (Gioconda)
Jonathan Sheffer - The Mistake (Ariel)

Set during the interval of a vocal recital, the soprano Ariel is upset over having made a mistake during the first part of her recital. She is trying to work out how and why she went wrong, is reassured by her friends and vocal coach, has an agrument with her boyfriend, Sandy, regains her composure and resturns for the second half of her concert.

Puccini - Tosca (Floria Tosca)
Antonio Salieri - Prima la musica e poi le parole (Eleonora & Tonina)
Domenico Scarlatti - La Dirindina (Dirindina & Liscione)

Comic intermezzo along the lines of Pergolesi's La Serva Padrona. An old music master, Don Carissimo, overhears the soprano Dirindina and the castrato Liscione as they rehearse a love scene from an opera Didone Abbandonata. He misunderstands the situation and thinks they have actually made love, interrupts them and, thinking Dirindina will become pregnant, tries to make them agree to marriage for the sake of the child. In the closing trio he sings "Give me your hand, Liscione, give me yours Dirindina, for your little child will be legitimate. " Liscione and Dirindina respond "Stop -- I'm a capon! Stop -- I'm a hen! A pair like that doesn't get together and never lays an egg."

Richard Strauss - Ariadne auf Naxos (Prima Donna)
Richard Strauss - Intermezzo (Christine Storch, based on Strauss's singer wife Pauline)
Richard Strauss - Intermezzo (a singer)
Richard Strauss - Capriccio (two Italian singers)
Richard Strauss - Der Rosenkavalier (an Italian singer) clip at YouTube [Piotr Beczala]

Review - Happy Days - Malthouse

2009-07-08T10:28:00.043+10:00

Slaved By The Bell
The Beckett estate seem to have relaxed a little over the author's instructions and stage directions (permission for the Belvoir Street production of Waiting for Godot was nearly withdrawn when music was played at a point where the author had not prescribed it). In Michael Kantor's new production of Happy Days the famous mound of earth consuming the central character Winnie across the two acts is interpreted as a jumble of black metal plates surmounted with jagged rocks and looking as though Emil Pretorius's sets for a pre-war Bayreuth Walküre has mated with Ron Robertson-Swann's sculpture Vault . In any Beckett play(and in particular the big three dealing most with existence in a world where existence has ceased to exist, Waiting for Godot, Endgame and Happy Days) audiences look for clues and meanings about what Beckett is suggesting in his settings, let alone his words. In any Beckett play the story is clouded and the language dense and nihilistic and audiences look for clues and meanings about what Beckett suggests in his settings, let alone his words. Winnie is usually considered ‘up to her neck in it’. Here she is ‘on the rocks’ as well; another metaphor for the desperate situation she is so blissfully unaware of.

Originally Happy Days was to be a technological travesty in a technological world gone awry, Beckett even calling the set a 'battlefield' where Winnie ("one female lavatory attendant spared") and Willie were war survivors. In the current production the pre-performance mood music - popular songs from the 1930s and 1940s - and Winnie's costume reinforces the suggest the action could take place in a World War Two devastated place. Winnie's new prison of metal and rock is surrounded by yet another, and ultra-theatrical, prison; a turquoise curtain topped with an Art Deco lid which could be a scaled up version of her precious music box or even a carnival booth, with Winnie bobbing inside like a travesty of the plaster gypsy that should know all but now can barely remember the end of a sentence. As the curtain draws open a composite of mechanical, military and orchestral sounds is heard like sound scape of a civilisation under siege and which falls silent when all that remains, Winnie's knoll is revealed. The 'holy light' is a circular rack of carnival lights glaring down from inside the lid. Beckett requested a 'pompier trompe-l'oeil' back cloth depicting the desert wilderness, here he gets gigantic three-dimensional pompier prop, telling as much about Winnie's ruined society as the few props in her handbag.

As Winnie Julie Forsyth is a marvel and ought to be added to the list of actors (Peggy Ashcroft, Irene Worth, Madeleine Renaud, Billie Whitelaw and Fiona Shaw among them) who have given memorable Winnies. Forsyth is at once comical and pathetic without seeming to force either, a cross between Margaret Rutherford and Giulietta Massina in La Strada. The programme note reminds us that the text is littered with 150 pauses, all as important for the actor playing Winnie to decipher as much as the multi-layered speeches. Forsyth fills the pauses brilliantly with grimacing comedy or chilling, momentary, desperation. In the second act where only her head, like a loaf of white bread left in the rain, is visible and is though Winnie's physical world has disappeared and only her fading thoughts remain. Happy Days is a classic piece of theatre, a great existential comedy and at the same time a great existential tragedy and that feeling comes across in this production. The rampaging sexual innuendo in Beckett's text bounces off her and she speaks innuendo-laden lines like "having to give you a hand Willie" with the same innocence that masks Winnie's desperate situation with such cheeriness.

She spends her day under a glaring and relentlessly bright sky happily sorting through her handbag and going about her daily routine of prettying herself while chatting to her mostly unseen and unspeaking husband Willie. When Willie does appear it is briefly to rub his privates with vaseline, sunbath for a while and then slither into a cave behind Winnie’s mound. While being the usual Beckettian scenario of spiritual and societal desolation the play bubbles with absurd sexual connotations like these rather like an intellectual Carry-On movie.

Peter Carroll is luxury casting for such a thankless role as Willie. Mostly unseen and silent when Willie is visible it is with his back to the audience until the end of the play. When he does speak Carroll can make the most of absurd one-word utterances like 'formication'. A quick YouTube search locates some quite striking interpretations of Beckett's locale for Happy Days. Anna Cordingley's set is as good as any and the semi-circular placement of the audience around the semi-circular stage gives the production an extra intimacy (rather like watching a Punch and Judy show). Kantor's realisation of the play is very creative and perhaps disciplined by the requirements of Copyright when compared to recent productions of Public Domain works like Optimism (Happy Days makes a brilliant companion piece to the ironic optimism of Optimism), Woyzeck and Tartuffe.

Happy Days (1961) by Samuel Beckett
Winnie - Julie Forsyth
Willie - Peter Carroll
Director - Michael Kantor
Set and Costume Designer - Anna Cordingley
Lighting Designer - Paul Jackson
Sound - Russell Goldsmith
Merlyn Theatre, CUB Malthouse
3 - 25 July 2009
Belvoir Street, Sydney
4 November - 16 December 2009

Review - Affection - Ranters Theatre

2009-07-03T16:00:00.007+10:00

Affection or Affectation

Forsaking a night in sitting on the couch with a few friends, listening to music and talking about nothing much, I took in Ranters Theatre’s latest play Affection. To my surprise it consisted of little more than a few friends sitting on a couch, listening to music and talking about nothing much! Written by Raimondo Cortese and directed by his brother Adriano, Affection is set in a room where three people sit on a couch. One drinks from a takeaway coffee cup and the three make small talk for an hour or so while musician Anastasia Russell-Head plays music by François Couperin, Handel or The Ramones on a harpsichord. Occasionally all four sing, Russell-Head sings an Italian folk song and the female character twice asks one of the men if he would like a kiss and eventually gives him a massage. Relaxed (and perhaps dulled by the banal hour of nothing) he falls asleep on the sofa. All I know is that this play is not as good as Waiting for Godot because nothing happened only once.

As was the case with Ranters earlier, and highly praised, Holiday, this builds on the ideas from Holiday forming a performance ethos for the company. In a recent interview two of the actors Patrick Moffatt and Paul Lum, suggested Affection is deliberately open to interpretation and that the audience fill in the details about what is happening through the mundane conversations to create a drama from their own perceptions. Adriano Cortese suggests this approach is "not about serving the script, it's about serving the production,” his interest being “in something happening in front of an audience and for an audience to receive that rather than literature." The baroque music, according to Cortese, frames the dialogue, “abstracting the conversation and concentrating attention on the dialogue. Rather than frame the dialogue, the severe structure of formulaic classical music sits at odds with the banality of the play and the relationship between the musician and the characters, who acknowledge her presence, remains unclear.

The other musical additions and their relevance are equally up to interpretation. Where are they anyway? Is it someone’s living room? Cortese recalled that audiences for Holiday thought the two characters were in a mental home. Perhaps the setting of Affection is a visiting room in a psychiatric hospital (which would explain the appearance of a take-away coffee cup and why the conversations are so uneventful so as not over tax recovering patient), where one of the three is visited by the other two. Replacing an indisposed actor Beth Buchanan, script at hand, invests the dialogue with meaning and purpose at every point, unwittingly perhaps, defeating the Corteses’ purposes by developing her character across the play and engaging the audience by suggesting a motive. True, asking to kiss another character and giving him a massage, provide an oasis of thought and action compared with the rest of the play. As experimental writing and theatre Affection also initiates experiments in audience perception. The banality left me cold although some could argue that theatre dialogue has been banal ever since those endless conversations about the fate of a cherry orchard.
Blackbox, The Arts Centre. 1 -11 July 2009

Opera Australia Appoints Lyndon Terracini as Artistic Director

2009-07-01T21:02:00.034+10:00

Not since Eberhard Waechter controlled the Vienna Staastoper have baritones held so much power in an opera company. Two baritones now hold the highest creative and administrative posts in opera in Australia with Opera Australia’s appointment of baritone and administrator Lyndon Terracini to the newly created post of Artistic Director. The company’s CEO Adrian Collette is also a baritone singer by training. As an administrator Terracini has been artistic director of the Queensland Music Festival and more recently the 2006, 2008 and 2009 Brisbane Festivals.

As a singer Terracini (pictured left sometime in the 1970s as a member of the Sydney Conservatorium of Music Renaissance Players and displaying an impressive pair of nakers) made his operatic debut with Opera Australia (then called The Australian Opera) as Sid in Benjamin Britten’s Albert Herring and sang a variety of roles with them as a career baritone ranging from Strephon in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe to Tarquinius in Britten's The Rape of Lucretia. One of his last roles with the company was Lord Byron (doubling with the role of the Monster) in one of their most impressive contemporary commissions Mer de Glace by Richard Meale. An early example of barihunk Terracini had respectable career singing the standard repertory with the national and state companies but it is his contemporary music performances that established him here and overseas. At the 1976 Adelaide Festival and subsequent Melbourne, Perth, Barossa and Darwin Guitar Festivals he gave outstanding performances in Hans Werner Henze’s solo theatre work El Cimarron. He was invited by the Henze to create the role of Sancho Panza in the world premiere of his adaptation of Paisiello’s opera Don Quichotte at the first Montepulciano Festival in 1979. Terracini stayed in Italy for over a decade but returning to Australia to perform and create new work including the lead role in Brian Howard’s adaptation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis in 1983. Other important premieres included The Ghost Sonata by Aribert Reimann after Strindberg's play for the Opera Factory, Zurich in 1983. Terracini (third from right) still in knee high boots but tighter tights in Opera Australia's production of Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia)

Terracini returned to Australia taking the title role in the Australian premiere of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd for the State Opera of South Australia, one of the earliest stagings of the 'opera house' version of the musical. He continued to sing overseas, still working with leading composers and theatre makers. The most notable was the title role in the world premiere of ROSA - A Horse Drama by Louis Andriessen and Peter Greenaway in 1994 for the Netherlands Opera in Amsterdam where, performing nude, he displayed his nackers in earnest.

In 1993 he founded Northern Rivers Performing Arts (NORPA) and in 2002 was awarded the Myer Foundation Group Award. Terracini's appointment is an inspired and inspiring one. As a performer he has worked solidly and, to me, constantly as a musician looking all the time for interesting and unusual music to perform rather than follow the beaten path of - for want of a better word- a hack baritone (have Don Giovanni will travel!). And as a member of the Australia Council’s music committee of the Performing Arts Board and his commitment to securing performances of contemporary music would enable Terracini to have a keen understanding of the issues surrounding the commissioning, creation and performance of new 'performance' works. Interviewed on ABC Radio National the following day Terracini spoke of new works being part of the company repertoire at a modest rate, suggesting one new opera per season. He also enthused about digital technology being applied to opera production. Terracini's appointment commences in October.

Happy Birthday Hugues Cuénod

2009-06-26T12:31:00.015+10:00

Hughes-Adhémar Cuénod (born Vevey Switzerland, 26 June 1902) is 107 today.

His ancestry is Swiss, with links to the English - the Marlboroughs no less - nobility. Cuénod lived his entire life at his family residence, Château de Lully. In later years he shared the home with his sister, who tended the estate orchards which provided fruit for a well known local liqueur.

Cuénod still resides there, supported by his life partner, Alfred Augustin (41 years his junior, you cradle snatcher Hughes!). In 2007, at the age of 104, Cuénod and Augustin signed a civil union after the changes in Swiss law giving same-sex couples legal recognition.

Cuénod made very famous Metropolitan Opera debut at the age of 80 (as the Emperor in Turandot) and continued to perform, more often as narrator of works like Poulenc's Histoire de Babar.

Cuénod can also be glimpsed here as the Emperor in his Metropolitan Opera debut in the 'riddle' scene between Eva Marton (Turandot) and Placido Domingo (Calaf).

Monteverdi's chaconne for two voices Zefiro Torna is sung by Paul Derenne and Cuénod, when he was a mere 35 years old. Cuénod's young voice is so free and responsive to this music, and already shows the interest in early music he carried his entire life. The famous composition teacher Nadia Boulanger is the pianist (!) in this endearingly inauthentic performance (notice that Derenne comes in too early at one point). Recorded in 1937 it comes from a set of 78 rpm recordings of Monteverdi madrigals and vocal ensembles that regenerated interest in his music. Cuénod continued to perform and record early music. One of most famous recordings was of the Couperin Leçons de Ténèbres (Stravinsky owned a copy of the recording and wrote his Cantata specifically for Cuénod's voice).

Review - The Man from Mukinupin - Melbourne Theatre Company

2009-06-12T10:28:00.010+10:00

A Friend of Dorothy's

I first saw The Man from Mukinupin when it was new in the late 1970s and everyone in the cast was white. Since then I don't recall seeing another play by Dorothy Hewett and, like so many other playwrites whose names are not David or Williamson, her work seems to vanished from the boards.

Hewett’s 1979 musical play was an unlikely way of celebrating Western Australia’s 150th birthday. Set around the time of the First World War it shows the ugly side of the Anzac legacy, with the local war hero Harry Tuesday (Craig Annis) becoming a shell-shocked and public disgrace. Even more controversial is Hewett’s inclusion of the worst aspect of colonial behaviour toward Aboriginals. Hewett evokes this mythical town by referencing Dylan Thomas’s own celebration of town life Under Milk Wood and like Thomas’s her dialogue is richly poetic so that even sudden outbursts of song seem logical. Mukinupin has a nocturnal, subconscious, counterpart and in that nether-world the characters have alter-egos played by the same actors. The righteous Eek Perkins (Max Gillies) alternates with a crazy hermit dwelling in the bush. Eek’s pious wife Edie (Kerry Walker) wanders as her community’s guilty conscience. Hewett brilliantly adapts the sleepwalking scene from Shakespeare’s Macbeth making Edie guiltily lament, instead, the slaughter of the local Aboriginal community by the townsfolk.

Director Wesley Enoch begins this almost surreal play in a highly artificial manner, all the characters wear clown-white make up and act in front of a false curtain. Within this artifice indigenous actors Suzannah Bayes-Morton and David Page also play the white townsfolk, Bayes-Morton as Perkins’s daughter Polly and Page as her suitor Cecil Brunner (ironically, the name of a variety of pale pink rose!), emphasising the black-white relationships more successfully than in previous productions.

I seem to be a lone voice in saying that I really enjoyed this play and production. What a great piece of theatre it is. It's steeped in references to other writers and never quite declares what form it really is, play with songs, musical, vaudeville or even Brechtian Epic thingy. Its also steeped in Theatre references, the spectral spinsters Hummer sisters are former theatre workers - one was a high wire artist the other a costumer. A faded and actress dominates the subplot, the hero Jack Tuesday has showbiz ambitions and even the righteous Mrs Perkins has a penchant for recitations (inspired no doubt by Under Milk Wood's Reverend Eli Jenkins). Director and designer emphasise the plays theatricality in the opening scene. The gaping stage of the Sumner Theatre is masked by false curtain forcing the action downstage. The cast sport clown white faces and appear and disappear behind the curtain until it opens on the second scene, revealing a false stage complete with velvet curtain and old-style footlights, where the 'celebrated' Montebellos perform "The Strangling of Desdemona" to the townsfolk. Jim Cotter’s songs in creepy new arrangements have the subtle but savage bite of The Threepenny Opera and perfectly match Hewett’s subtle but equally savage satire.

The Man from Mukinupin (1979) by Dorothy Hewett A co-production with Company B
Jack Tuesday / Harry Tuesday - Craig Annis
Polly Perkins / Lily - Suzannah Bayes-Morton
Eek Perkins / Zeek Perkins - Max Gillies
Edie Perkins - Kerry Walker
Mercy Montebello - Amanda Muggleton
Cecil Brunner / Max Montebello - David Page
Clarry Hummer - Valentina Levkowicz
Clemmy Hummer - Melodie Reynolds
Director - Wesley Enoch
Set Designer - Richard Roberts
Lighting Designer - Rachel Burke
Original Music - Jim Cotter, arranged by Alan John
Musical Director - Alan John
Choreographer - Jack Webster
Sound Designer - Steve Francis
Sumner Theatre
6 June - 19 July 2009

Review - Lobby Hero - Red Stitch Actors Theatre

2009-06-10T11:03:00.020+10:00

Foyer Pleasure

As with Kenneth Lonergan’s earlier success This Is Our Youth, his Lobby Hero is another affectionate comedy about a nerd who, despite the odds, overcomes his nerdiness, scores a moral triumph and even impresses a girl. Set in the lobby of a Manhattan apartment building, wherein resides Mrs. Heinvald, a woman of generous affection beloved of the local cop Bill (Daniel Frederiksen), who visits her each night while doing his beat. The apartment security guard Jeff (Tim Potter) is the most insecure security guard ever! A would-be conversationalist Jeff only stops talking long enough to put his foot in his mouth. Try as he may, he only says the wrong thing, putting Bill’s rookie assistant Dawn (Eryn-Jean Norvill), who Jeff fancies, offside during one of Bill’s nocturnal calls to the Heinvald apartment. Jeff also blabbers his way into the confidence of his boss William (Christopher Kirby) and uncovers some potentially embarrassing secrets.

Jeff's innocent attempts at winning people's admiration and confidence lead to moral dilemma for everyone in the play. William, despite his officiousness and constant proclaiming of his fair-mindedness commits an act of dishonesty as does his buddy Bill. Their juniors, Jeff and Dawn, see things more plainly. Jeff wrestles with the potentially disastrous information while Dawn wrestles it out of him.

Not strictly laugh-out-loud comedy, the play derives its humour from exposing the hidden motives in the situation rather than the situation itself. The scenes are not particularly funny in themselves. Potter flinches like a scalded puppy each time his attempts at camaraderie backfire and suffers agonies of self-consciousness. Denis Moore’s production mixes the table-turning farce with more serious comedy. The scenes between Jeff and William as Jeff's jokes backfire build up the pathos of the poor schlemiel and are intensified when Jeff is intimidated by Bill. The faint glimmer of romance between Jeff and Dawn brings a feeling of relief as well as an actually funny scene.

Dropping his voice half an octave and appearing ten years older Frederiksen is amazing as the gruff, old cop hiding his duplicity behind his badge. Norvill gives the impression, by often avoiding eye-contact with Bill, of insecurity different from Jeff''s and creates with Potter some convincingly 'low-voltage' sexual tension between the anxious pair. Lobby Hero poses a few problems in genre definition, how much of a comedy is it intending to be? The production, however, was highly polished and cleanly focused - of the the case with Red Stitch due to the intimacy of the acting space.

picture: Jodie Hutchinson

Lobby Hero (2004) by Kenneth Lonergan
Jeff - Tim Potter
William - Christopher Kirby
Bill - Daniel Frederiksen
Dawn - Eryn-Jean Norvill
Director - Denis Moore
Designer - Shaun Gurton

Red Stitch Actors Theatre, St Kilda
10 June - 11 July 2009
130 minutes (including 1 interval)

Review - August: Osage County - Melbourne Theatre Company

2009-05-29T10:24:00.033+10:00

A Family That Flays Together Stays Together
Even before the play begins Dale Ferguson’s impressive set imposes itself on you, like the doom-laden palace of a Greek tragedy. A shambling, three storied old house, which has undergone theatrical open-heart surgery, opening it up to reveal the chambers where so much blood has flown. Written for one of the world’s great acting ensembles; the Steppenwolf Theatre Company this is a play in the great American pedigree of family tragedies of Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Eugene O'Neill on the stage and the family melodramas played out in television soap opera. This has the feel of a piece of writer's theatre, actor's theatre and designer's theatre. It unfurls like a chronology of classic, 20th century American theatre. In the opening scene there is a homage to O'Neill's James and Mary Tyrone in the Beverly and Violet while Mattie Fae (Deidre Rubenstein) browbeats her husband and son with the ferocity of any one of Tennessee Williams' mothers and even the sleazy Steve (Sean Taylor) is reminiscent of a David Mamet sleaze.

The play has a sense of fatalism; even the gentle seeming opening scene where the family patriarch and one-time famous poet Beverly Weston (George Whaley) muses about his idol T. S. Eliot having committed his wife to an insane asylum has deeper meaning. As soon as Beverly’s drug-addled wife Violet (Robyn Nevin) enters we realise those musings were tinged with regret that he didn’t do the same to Violet. Violet is revealed as one of the cruelest wives and mothers, a woman outrunning anything Tennessee Williams or Edward Albee could have imagined. Love in this family is more like Stockholm Syndrome. Each of the cankers that gnawed at Beverly and Violet throughout their marriage is inherited by their three daughters, one canker each. To reveal what they are would would spoil the deliciously mounting horror of the second and third acts.

August: Osage County lives up to the plaudits as one of the most compelling plays of recent history. It is made more compelling by Fergusson’s visually (and metaphorically) multi-layered set and Simon Phillip’s detailed direction of the many full-blown arguments and introspective scenes, often on the middle level of the set, where a few characters gather to debrief after a catastrophe. But no matter where they go onstage either en-masse or in pairs, Phillips directs the focus on any part of the set they dwell. Similarly Matt Scott's lighting seems to illuminate without spotlighting the action anywhere and suggests the heat and gloom of the house where Violet has banished air-conditioning and boarded up the windows. Even when the play begins and the set has been on view as the audience arrives and take their seats, the opening scene instantly rivets your attention to Beverly, picked out in his gloomy study explaining the household set-up to the new housekeeper Johnna (Tess Masters). Another moment is a family dinner, where the extended family are assembled around the table so that the focus is on Violet’s face as she connives yet another family squabble. As Barbara, the eldest of Violet’s three daughters Jane Menelaus captures the image of a woman carrying shards of both her mother and father and which begin to assume her own personality. "All women become like their mothers," said Oscar Wilde, "that is their tragedy" and that tragedy is writ large in Barbara.

An actor himself, the author, Tracey Letts, has bestowed on every member of the large cast a memorable personality, no matter how briefly they occupy the actual stage. Beverly looms like Agamemnon's spectre over the House of Atreus and even an incidental character like the local Sheriff (Tony Nikolakopoulos) is made familiar long before he appears. In one of her most protean characterisations Nevin is through-and-through the cantankerous, pill-popping matriarch. Whether shambling around in a barbiturate fog or assuming vicious command of her family as they cower before her at the dinner table, it is a compelling performance. Letts’s equally compelling script and well-drawn characters brings out the best in the other actors. August: Osage County deserves the accolades it has received its inherent brilliance all of which are made abundantly clear in this production.

August: Osage County by Tracey Letts (2007)
Karen Weston - Heidi Arena
Jean Forham - Kellie Jones
Johnna Monevata - Tess Masters
Barbara Forham - Jane Menelaus
Bill Fordham - Robert Menzies
Violet Weston - Robyn Nevin
Sheriff Deon Gilbeau - Tony Nikolakopoulos
Charlie Aiken - Roger Oakley
Little Charles Aiken - Michael Robinson
Mattie Fae Aiken - Deidre Rubenstein
Ivy Weston -Rebekah Stone
Steve Heidebrecht - Sean Taylor
Beverly Weston - George Whaley
Director - Simon Phillips
Designer - Dale Ferguson
Lighting Designer - Matt Scott
Sound Designer - David Franzke
Playhouse Theatre, The Arts Centre 23 May - 4 July 2009 (season extended to, ironically, American Independence Day!)

pictured: Robyn Nevin (picture Jeff Busby)

Review - Optimism - Malthouse

2009-05-28T11:29:00.026+10:00

2009 marks the 250th anniversary of Voltaire's hilarious satire, published in 1759 and Malthouse have coincidentally mounted an adaptation by Tom Wright. Wright sets the story in the present and makes very few changes to Voltaire's plot and characters. For some reason the famous but unnamed and mono-buttocked Old Woman (Alison Whyte) is christened by Woods as Emily and the kindly Anabaptist becomes a Salvation Army lady who meets her death, not in the Lisbon earthquake but being thrown from a plane attacked by terrorists. In this modern analogy Candide's lonely wanderings involve a lot of air travel. A real lot! Every second scene seems to take place on an plane - Candide's preferred airline is no doubt Volt-Air - (Boom-Boom!).

Pangloss (Barry Otto) is dressed as a Pierrot clown and manically espouses his sham philosophy in contrast to the memorably melancholic French clown depicted by Watteau in Voltaire's own time. Candide (Frank Woodley) is dressed as a Grimaldi clown, the the chattering, ad-libber beloved of Dickens and the precursor of his own stage persona. In Voltaire's story Candide is made to suffer horribly while the rest of the characters live and die (often more than once) with comic book unreality. Pangloss is cured of syphilis and resurrected from the dead, as is Candide's beloved Cunégonde (Caroline Craig) and her brother (interesting that with all these curings and bringings-back from the dead mean old Voltaire couldn't grow the Old Woman's lost buttock back!). Instead of Candide's bitter reflections as he tries to apply Pangloss's absurd 'chin-up' reasoning to the log-jam of misfortunes that befall him Woodley indulges his well-known clown character in stand up routines.

Nearly all of the interpolated songs don't work in the same way contemporary pop songs had been used in previous Malthouse music theatre. Often they are delivered in a very low-key manner, often emphasising the irony. They like Candide's stand-up routines and a lot of the jiggery-pokerery of the production seem to gloss over a hollowness which has been pointed elsewhere as possibly an intentional comment on the hollowness of the ludicrous philosophy Voltaire set out to satirise. What shows up the hollowness of the optimistic philosophy most is the speech by the Old Woman as she relates her story (including how she lost one buttock). As acted by Whyte it is a supremely well realised mono drama. The Old Woman has suffered long and hard and, unlike Candide, stared at her misery and contemplated suicide. Only the instinctive will to live, that still sparked somewhere inside her, made her go on. That sharp smack of pragmatic reality works as well as any of the other and better remembered silliness in Voltaire's story and worked as well in this production.

Optimism (2009) by Tom Wright after Candide, ou l'Optimisme (1759) by Voltaire
A Malthouse, Edinburgh International Festival, Sydney Theatre Company and the Sydney Festival production
Director - Michael Kantor
Candide - Frank Woodley
Cunégonde - Caroline Craig
Cacambo - Francis Greenslade
Paquette - Amber McMahon
Cunégonde's Brother / A Slave - Hamish Michael
Doctor Pangloss - Barry Otto
The Old Woman - Alison Whyte
Martin - David Woods
other roles played by the cast
Original Music - Iain Grandage
Merlyn Theatre, CUB Malthouse
22 May - 13 June 2009 followed by productions at the 2009 Edinburgh International Festival and the Sydney Theatre Company during 2010
135 minutes (including 1 interval)

Review - Melburnalia No 2 - White Whale Theatre

2009-05-24T21:17:00.024+10:00

In 2007 White Whale Theatre commissioned Melburnalia, five short plays about various Melbourne suburbs. The idea was good and the plays, although disparate in style, sat well against each other. Five more plays Melburnalia 2 have been commissioned with a unifying theme of trams and again the styles vary from almost sketch comedy to a purely vocal evocation of place based on Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood.

Indigenous and migrant experiences feature as well beginning with Birrarung, by Andrea James, where the spirit of a Wurundjeri man evokes a memory of public transport with conductors instead of fare evasion officers and the legendary Flinders Street Station Ballroom as a kind of White Man’s Dreaming. Hoa Pham’s Maribyrnong powerfully contrasts the post war migrant settlement camps with the severity of the modern detention centres. A visiting Vietnamese student has been detained due to her working more hours than her student visa allocated. In this suburban detention centre she meets a Greek national who has been resident in Australia since he was two years old but who had not formalised his citizenship. Between them a ghostlike, elderly migrant begs to be let into this awful place because, according to her parents, these 'holding centres' were nurturing places. That this takes place in the suburbs - the Maribyrnong tram rattles past! - instead of somewhere hidden in the outback gives this playlet a nasty edge.

Aiden Fennessy’s Mentone is a ‘choral symphony’ which cleverly incorporates Under Milk Wood into its text by way of the local drama society rehearsing the famous play. Even more so than in Melburnalia, the older history of each suburb informs the plays. Preston's 19th century origins as a pig farming and bacon curing centre underpins Kit Lazeroo's play which has a veiled attack on the modern Real Estate industry.

Danny Katz's Caulfield is a sketchy sketch where thinly drawn caricatures of squabbling thirty-somethings showing off in a desirable yuppie suburb tries to either emulate or encapsulate a David Williamson snob comedy ending with the infantilism of their pretensions given a surreal twist.

The juxtaposing the past and present and, particularly in the plays about Maribyrnong and Preston, works particularly well, pointing the way to a Melburnalia franchise with more ways of exploring our suburbia.

Melburnalia No 2 (2009)
Birrarung by Andrea James
Maribyrnong by Hoa Pham
Caulfield by Danny Katz
Preston by Kit Lazeroo
Mentone by Aidan Fennessy
Director - David Mence
Fortyfivedownstairs, 45 Flinders lane, Melbourne
20 May - 7 June 2009
120 minutes (including 1 interval)
White Whale Theatre

Melburnalia 1 on DVD and (parts thereof) in Revival at the MTC
In the past few years Melbourne's independent theatre has had an enormous boost thanks to the scripts of many of the plays written and performed being put into print. While the scripts of Melburnalia have yet to be published, the production has been made available on DVD. Filmed in performance with multiple camera angles, some fudged through trying to be discreet, but with acceptable sound and eminently watchable accounts of the plays in performance. I was very happy to revisit Melburnalia this way and re-watch the writers forum where the authors spoke about their work which is included on the DVD.
Melburnalia (1) included Lally Katz's wonderful little two-hander The Fag from Zagreb which featured one of the earliest sightings of her enigmatic Apocalypse Bear (who certainly has a thing for gay boys). That terrible teddy has now been developed into an Apocalypse Bear trilogy, including a revival of The Fag from Zagreb, at the Melbourne Theatre Company's new Lawler Studio between 8-24 October this year. Meanwhile the DVD of Melburnalia is $10.00 and is a hopefully the first example of recording the very exciting work happening in independent theatre at this time. The plays in Melburnalia were good but, like the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Review - A Little Night Music - Opera Australia

2009-05-15T23:07:00.048+10:00

My Year Without Sex

As music theatre becomes less willing to risk alienating an audience by being too eloquent or too intelligent Sondheim’s classic shows stand out like beacons. A Little Night Music is mid-period Sondheim and, like mid-period Verdi, has musical and theatrical assurance right from the start. Using operatically inspired motives and multi-layered ensembles and with an ability to write lyrics that have the dead-pan wit of W.S. Gilbert on a good day, his scores are works of genius. The songs in A Little Night Music bristle with rhyming patterns that are still unmatched after thirty years. Middle-aged lawyer Frederik Egerman (Robert Grubb), for example, is contemplating how to make his 18-year-old wife Anne (Lucy Maunder) overcome her fear of consummating their 11 month marriage, “A) I could put on my nightshirt or sit disarmingly B) in the nude,” he ponders,

"That might be effective, my body’s all right,
but not in perspective and not in the light."

Or perhaps he will read a suggestive book in her presence and give her a hint

“In view of her fancy for something Romantic,
De Sade is too chancy and Dickens too frantic.
Stendhal would ruin the plan of attack,
as there isn’t much blue in the Red and the Black."

This wittiness runs through the lyrics of every song and Sondheim’s’ score - nearly all of it waltz-time - is so detailed and polished in contrast to Hugh Wheeler’s rather stodgy book which at times is very saggy and appears beyond the help of director or cast. Sondheim's best work is founded in musical pastiche. The quasi-operatic Sweeny Todd is based on Victorian melodrama and its musical form is derived from 19th century music theatre like Michael Balfe'sand vincent Wallace's sentimental ballad style operas, certainly Gilbert and Sullivan's complicated patter solos and ensembles, Music Hall and even at times thunderous Verdi-esque arias. Pacific Overtures dips into Japanese music and, with the approach of the Western Powers, nationalistic music parodies. Assassins too frames each of its episodes in the popular musical style of the era. A Little Night Music is the first of his shows to recreate music of another era rather than to recreate the formulaic style associated with a Broadway musical. Madame Armefeldt’s song reminiscing about her many liaisons is a stumbling waltz, as though it were an old lady too, dominated by a plaintive oboe but the song shimmers like a golden memory due to a celesta underlining the melody. Only a few minutes long but it has such detail and individuality that compares with Ravel again or Sibelius’s Valse Triste. Another ingenious device is the Liebeslieder quintet that appear and sing memories and unspoken thoughts of the other characters.

The programme reproduces Scandinavian landscape paintings from the time the story is set and these appear to have influenced Roger Kirk’s sets, gauzy curtains painted to look like pallid watercolours that accentuate the sumptuous and detailed costumes. The melancholy of Scandinavian Symbolist art is an apt influence on the melancholy in so much of the story. At the end of the 19th century too, the sexual/social order, as Madame Armfeldt laments, was breaking down; sexual anxiety in Scandinavia was the order of the day too as the proceedings in A Little Night Music are unashamedly erotic. Actress Desiree Armfeldt (Sigrid Thornton) and her coterie fuss and flounder about trying to organise their sex lives and pipped to the post by the Egerman’s no nonsense maid Petra who gets it on with Madame Armfeldt’s footman Frid (Byron Watson) within a few hours. Carl Magnus and his wife even have a mildly Strindburgian love-hate relationship, the musical comedy equivalent of Edgar and Alice in The Dance of Death.

The cast is best in the central and outermost roles. The vocal quintet (Julia Malczewski, Jacqueline Dark, Jane Parkin, Benjamin Rasheed and Andrew Moran) are drawn from the company ranks and give a magnificent account of their Brahms Libeslieder Waltz-inspired music. The rest of the cast is variable as it ascends toward the principal role.

As Madame Armfeldt Nancye Hayes adopts a Euro-pudding accent that when not French or German tinged is fruity in the same way Hermione Gingold’s (the roles creator) was. Her character and even appearance also bears an uncanny resemblance to late career Maggie Smith. Katrina Retallick’s interpretation of Countess Charlotte was effective enough but the bitterness and self-reproach in her lines were glossed over and, as with most of the spoken dialogue lagged and lumbered along. Grubb, in a Trotsky beard and, at times a Trotsky voice sings/speaks a lot of his songs, often off the beat and only sounding and holding notes at the ends of phrases where he displays briefly an attractive voice.

One of the best, if perhaps not the best, performances is Matthew Robinson as Henrik. In his bitter introductory song he shaped the words and the music with astonishing clarity. Kate Maree Hoolihan as Petra was in the same league, her song done with a earthy tang and brassy vulgarity, right against, as Sondheim might have intended, the charming but ineffective waltzes that accompany everyone else’s sexual frustrations. Both WAAPA graduates too, they must put something in the food at the canteen there; everyone comes out of the place with such so polished and assured voices.

As Desiree Sigrid Thornton does carry the show with her winning interpretation. Famous as a role for an actress who can sing it is still a difficult part to bring off and Thornton makes Desiree a minor Arkadina with ‘actressy’ mannerisms; pouting and purring (with the same voice she used for the actress in The Blue Room) to Egerman and acidic to her domineering mother. But as the complications set in her Desiree is a deeply anxious and vulnerable woman. Her famous “Send in the Clowns” is an admission of failure and needs to be her final breakdown. The famous song is the antithesis of the big number, an introvert moment coming from an extrovert and yet it has all the impact of a traditional show-stopper. Thornton handles it exceptionally well, self-effacing then distraught and finally tearful and all without overplaying or milking the sentiment. "Send in the Clowns" also tries to become a waltz number but because Desiree is just too unhappy to launch the waltz rhythm, instead she repeats a halting - almost sobbing - and repeated phrase that sounds like the beginning of a waltz. "Isn't it rich!" ... "Aren't we a pair?" ... that introduction to the songs is similar to the introduction to The Blue Danube theme but Sondheim lets it fall away each time as Desiree tries to sing what should be the big 'sob' number and achieves so much more with, instead, a brilliant understatement. Thornton is right on the money in the way she sings this ingenious number.

There is a good body of strings in the orchestra of about twenty players and the richly employed and varied instruments are heard to their best advantage. Conductor Andrew Greene leads the majority of songs in the manner of Victor Silvester, a 'strict-tempo', one-two-THREE waltz beat which gives a forward, even fast sounding momentum to the songs. This is a lavish production, with perhaps and uneven cast but in any case the real star is Sondheim's incredible score.

A Little Night Music (1973)
Desiree Armfeldt - Sigrid Thornton
Madame Armfeldt - Nancye Hayes
Anne Egerman - Lucy Maunder
Fredrika Armfeldt - Erica Lovell
Petra - Kate Maree Hoolihan
Fredrik Egerman - Robert Grubb
Henrik Egerman - Matthew Robinson
Count Carl Magnus - Ben Lewis
Charlotte Malcolm - Katrina Retallick
Frid - Byron Watson
Mrs Anderssen - Jacqueline Dark
Mrs Nordstrom - Julia Malczewski
Mrs Segstrom - Jane Parkin
Mr Lindquist - Andrew Moran
Mr Erlanson - Benjamin Rasheed
Orchestra Victoria
Conductor - Andrew Greene
Director - Stuart Maunder
Designer - Roger Kirk Lighting
Director - Trudy Dalgleish
Choreographer - Elizabeth Hill
19 - 30 May 2009
State Theatre, The Arts Centre
165 minutes (including 1 interval)
sildeshow via Australian Stage Online

Pictured: Erica Lovell, Sigrid Thornton & Nancye Hayes. Picture by Jeff Busby

Vale Heather Begg

2009-05-15T22:51:00.009+10:00

Heather Begg
1933 - 12 May 2009
New Zealand mezzo soprano Heather Begg died in Sydney at the age of 76. Born in Nelson, Begg moved to Australia and studied at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and joined the National Opera Company of Australia making her professional debut with them in 1954, sharing the role of Azucena in Verdi's Il Trovatore with (the recently deceased) Margeta Elkins and singing the role when the National Opera of Australia toured to New Zealand. In 1955 she won the Sydney Sun Aria contest and in 1957 travelled to London to study at the National School of Opera.

Begg joined the Royal Opera at Covent Garden in 1959, her debut role in Die Walkure and was made a resident principal in 1972 until she returned to Australia in 1976. In Australia she sang with The Australian Opera regularly and sang her last role with them, in 2006 as Grandmother Buryjovka in Janacek's Jenufa.

She married a Canadian, Johnnie King, in 1964. King died in 1979 a few weeks before Begg, now a widow in real-life, undertook the role of the widow Popova in William Walton's opera of Chekhov's play The Bear. Although she was mostly cast in comic roles - the operatic equivalents of Margaret Dumont in any Marx Brothers movie - Begg also played the occasional heavy dramatic parts including the Princess in Cilea's Adriana Lecouvreur and Mother Marie in Poulenc's harrowing Dialogues of the Carmelites.

Heather Begg was awarded the OBE in 1978 and in 2000 became a Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to opera.
The Government decided in March to restore the titles of knights and dames to the honours system and Begg was awarded the title Dame last month.

A beautiful thing

2009-05-10T12:02:00.004+10:00

I listened to Radio France last week broadcasting a song cycle by Henri Dutilleux Le Temps l'Horloge, the world premiere of the definitive work. At the end of the performance soprano Renée Fleming and conductor Seiji Ozawa repeated the entire work as an encore.

Review - The Role Model - BOOBook Theatre

2009-05-08T07:37:00.020+10:00

The Role Model is a rough diamond that has been progressively polished since its first draft in 2004. A few workshops and staged readings later, including a two week workshop at NIDA under the guidance of none other than Edward Albee, the play is turning into a little gem. The central plot of a disgraced sports hero using even more disgraceful means of recovering his bankable public image is immediately appealing.

Former Olympic gold medalist Scott Sumner (James Doolan) is a compendium of all that has gone bad in Australian sports. Self absorbed and a compulsive womaniser he has fallen from favour for sleeping with his best mate's wife and his only defence is that "he wasn't my best mate". Desperate to get him onto the motivational speaking circuit his ex-swimmer manager Wanda (Denise Kuchmar - pictured left with James Doolan) plans his come back as a mentor to depressed adolescents at the Beating the Blues Foundation where, as soon as he helps his first kid to beat the blues, she will leak the story to the national media and cash in on his sympathetic image. Too inept and self-interested to care about other people, especially the depressed and pimply 15 year-old Adam (William Ridley) assigned, him Scott strikes a deal with him instead; $10,000 for a glowing account of Scott's life-changing effect on him when the story goes public. In the classic tradition of farce, it goes horribly wrong at first. The tables are turned on Scott and Wanda but, after a plot twist that involves someone coming out on a cliff top on national television it has an amorally happy ending.

pictured: William Ridley & James Doolan [pictures: Naomi Wong]

The play is a cynical satire, very reminiscent of David Williamson at his early best. The main characters of Scott, the corrupted Australian icon and - even more so - his corrupt manager, are a kind of aquatic Faust and Mephistopheles. The swimming and Olympic in-jokes like the difference between an Olympic gold medal and the less important Commonwealth gold medal are all part of a script that is very promising although it needs the final polish a good farce requires. That central trio of Scott, Wanda and Adam already show great promise as comedy characters. In particular the unscrupulous gold medalist turned gold digger Wanda is a gift of a part for a comedienne.

The Role Model by Bruce Hoogendoorn

Scott - James Doolan
Wanda - Denise Kuchmar
Louise - Stephanie Osztreicher
Adam - William Ridley
Jack - Angus Brown
Kate - Anuroop Sabhawrwal
Director - Sue Lindsay
Set and Costumes - Naomi Wong
Lighting Designer - Patrick Gooden
7 - 16 May 2009
Cromwell Road Theatre, Cromwell Road, Prahran
90 minutes (including 1 interval)
Boobook theatre

This is an expanded version of the review published in MCV/Canvas

Review - Leaves of Grass - Red Stitch Actors Theatre

2009-05-04T13:35:00.021+10:00

Glass Houses
Philip Ridley's play is another example of the world as known by 'in yer face' dramatic standards. Every strata of life right down to familial and personal life is dysfunctional. He is also maintains a multiple artistic practice, working as a children's author and photographer. The second of three plays about brothers this is less the futuristic, nihilistic fable of Mercury Fur and set, instead, in contemporary London. Steven (Dan Frederiksen) and his younger brother Barry (Johnny Carr) are both a mess. After their father committed suicide when they were 15 and 10 respectively Barry spiraled downward while Steven inherited his father's deep depression. At his worst Steven is near comatose for days but through seemingly sheer will-power gets on with life, career and marriage but at the cost of being switched off emotionally. Ridley touches on the semi-autobiographical in the depiction of of Stephen the survivor and protector, although Ridley's own childhood circumstances were very different to those of the play. With each scene Ridley peels back the layers of family complicity and denial to have us presume that childhood abuse is the cause of the brother's problems but even with that a more terrible complicity is revealed at the plays conclusion.

Peter Mumford's set echoes the seeming transparency of Ridley's play and like the play has a red herring of its own. In the same way the viewer may conclude what caused the two brother's lifelong damage from what is said, the set - multiple layers of clear plastic curtains drawn back and forth to differentiate scenes, would appear to lay the story transparent. In addition it serves to highlight Steven's need for compartmentalising so much of his psychical and emotional life. Mention of houses, rooms and the importance of spaces seem to form a sub-text, whether it his mother's boxed-up belongings (and family history).

The sudden pulling back toward the end of the first act of the front curtain dividing the actors from the audience and which had remained untouched until then even signified a metaphorical opening up and clarification of the ambiguous events so far. But like Ridley's red herring, this device is a visual red herring that plays along with the presumption not the truth until the plays climax where a new environment is revealed. The clever and contrasting sound-scapes also added to the internal and external life of Steven. The orderliness expressed by the rigid and formal baroque music was sharply contrasted by the organic, groaning of the sounds surrounding his solitary appearance. In this semi abstracted environment the characters have abstractions of their own. Steven's inherited depression has incredible visual impact as does his mother Liz's ambiguous complicity in his control over the family. This is one of Frederiksen's best performances internal as well as external; emotionally dead and even the lights in Steven's eyes appear to be turned off. Ridley's brothers are just as disturbing, and even as creepily co-dependant as the brothers in so many of of Sam Shepard's plays. Leaves of Glass is a good play and as it is the creation of a writer with a interest in visual art, the intensely visual aspect of the production makes it more fascinating thanks to Simon Stone's direction and Mumford's ingenious set.

Leaves of Grass (2007) by Philip Ridley
Steven - Dan Frederiksen
Barry - Johnny Carr
Liz - Jillian Murray
Debbie - Amelia Best
Director - Simon Stone
Set Designer - Peter Mumford
Lighting Designer - Kim Kwa
29 April - 30 May 2009
Red Stitch Actors Theatre
2 Chapel Street St Kilda
130 minutes (including 1 interval)

picture: Jodie Hutchinson

This is an expanded version of the review published in MCV/Canvas

Outstanding Actress Kat Stewart Wins Logie for Outstanding Actressness

2009-05-04T10:19:00.009+10:00

Theatre goers have known she was an outstanding actress for years but Red Stitch stalwart Kat Stewart was awarded a Silver Logie last night for 'Most Outstanding Actress' for her appearance in Underbelly. And Kat does great frock, even La Blanchett would have to concede.

Review - Tom Fool - Hoy Polloy

2009-05-04T09:05:00.033+10:00

Unpopular Mechanicals

German theatre literature from the 1970s has less currency outside of Germany than the era's literature and cinema. English versions of Franz Xaver Kroetz's plays were taken up most notably by British companies like Scotland's Traverse Theatre and Traverse supporting new writing. Naturally, as Alison Croggon has pointed out in her opportune interview with Kroetz, new writing focused theatres like La Mama have hosted productions of his plays.
His plays in the 1970s which include Tom Fool adopt a popular theatrical form volksstück or folk piece, a genre which focuses on the lives and situations faced by ordinary people and presented in a style accessible to them; a form of 'soap opera' if you will. Kroetz's method is to write mundane seeming plays about these 'jedermench' trapped in economic and social conditions about which they cannot effectively communicate to each other (and the audience) about. The dialogue instead is cliched - a kind of Teutonically un-satirical Joe Orton - and written in a way that makes it seems unshaped and as it would appear in an ordinary conversation. The characters are invariably miserable and unable to articulate their misery, except, it would appear here, through violence. A device Richard Gilman called 'a theatre of the inarticulate'
Tom Fool appears to be one of the more verbose of his volksstück but it does have these 'hallmark' stretches of reflective silence. The story is simply the breakdown of a family. Father and mother Otto and Martha want their teen-age son Ludwig to secure a better job than Otto, a semi-skilled worker on the BMW production line. Otto is domineering father, presented as the end of the line of the traditional stern patriarch. Martha is presumably the end of the line of the traditional hausfrau, the 'Kinder, Küche, Kirche' reduced to just 'Kind, Küche'. Ludwig just wants out; he is bored and has no respect for his father. The play has an inevitability about it, part of the author's intention though. Otto looses his patriarchal grip, Martha and Ludwig defy the expectations of their class roles. Martha's folksy wisdom - as powerful a feature of her character as Otto's explosive temper - stretched by her new situation into a new life of new despair. Ludwig is a largely observing and ambiguous character and perhaps to become a hopefully socialist alternative.

The play is long and has long stretches of silence but not inactivity. The author's famous silences and lack of dramatic action may be considered tedious. The arbitrarily banal dialogue also draws divided responses. The banality also extends to the controversial nudity, Ludwig's parents attempt to have a sex a couple of times and people get naked for that. There is one scene where Otto punishes Ludwig by making him strip naked. As presented Ludwig anxiously undresses and his stance, head bowed and concealing his genitals with his hands while his father berates him, has an echo of a prison camp inmate stripping for inspection. Whether Kroetz intended this or not or, for that matter, how well the translation conveys the author's preoccupations but it was one of the many scenes that seemed to me might have pricked the conscious of the plays original audience as much as the political messages current then would have. Kroetz's political subtext is subtle but defining. Working class Otto and Martha, are excluded from the Marxist debate that caught up the classes above them. They are, instead, envious of the remaining European aristocracy and anxious that Ludwig should land himself a 'better class' of job than his father. The climax, the shattering of the family unit and all three destined to lives as labourers, is as shattering as any regal tragedy. Otto's social and personal failure is made all the more confronting by it being a graphically depicted as a sexual failure, the most intimate aspects of the family's lives are included along with their more uniform class characters.

Beng Oh's direction instills a deliberate if slow pace to the action but in which so many small details, hints at the thousands of 'bytes' of interconnected family knowledge, are given giving rise again to the thought of how much is translated (or lost) by the English version and to what extent of the stage directions in the original text. One example is the way Ludwig carefully takes down conceals a David Bowie poster and, later, how it found by Martha and concealed with equal care. The three actors give committed performances; studiously maintaining a spontaneity in the text. Thirty years on and with audiences given more exposure to ground-breaking theatrical style Kroetz's methods are more appreciable as a form of ultra-realism. Kroetz writes with with bleakness that is uncommon compared to most theatre we see here and the solemnity of this production reinforces this. The play is still a challenge and the style will either repel or invite a viewer.

Tom Fool (Mensch Meier) (1978) by Franz Xaver Kroetz translated by Estella Scmid and Anthony Vivis
Martha - Liz McColl
Otto - Chris Bunworth
Ludwig - Glenn van Oosterom
Director - Beng Oh
Set Designer - Chris Molyneux
Costumes and Properties - Mark Young
Lighting Designer - Ben Morris
Sound Designer - Tim Bright
1 - 23 May 2009
Mechanics Institute Performing Arts Centre, Brunswick
180 minutes (including 1 interval)
Hoy Polloy Theatre

pictures by Tim Williamson

Review - Cherry Ripe: Vocal Treasures of the 18th and 19th Centuries - Melba Records

2009-04-28T20:29:00.009+10:00

Cherry Ripe: Vocal Treasures of the 18th and 19th Centuries

Deborah Riedel, soprano
Arcadia Lane Orchestra. Richard Bonynge, conductor
Melba Recordings MR 301118

This release could be a continuation of Richard Bonynge’s exploration of the art and repertoire of the Prima Donna during the 18th and 19th centuries exemplified in the many recordings featuring his famous wife, Joan Sutherland, picking up where they left off when Sutherland retired. In his notes to the twenty-one items Bonynge links the composers and music to specific singers, even if not always a bona fide prima donna (as is the case with James Hook’s song "The Nightingale" which Bonynge reveals was premiered by a boy soprano, one Master Walsh).

Like Bonynge’s many recordings of 18th and early 19th century music with or without Sutherland, although obviously well informed in matters of textural fidelity, there is no attempt at creating an ‘early music’ sound or approach to the period instrumental playing. Similar recordings of vocal music from this era such as Henry Bishop’s Shakespeare settings dating from 1816-1821 and recorded by the Musicians of the Globe under Philip Pickett (Decca 470 381-2) give a vocal and instrumental sound scape more in keeping with current performance practice.

Although dealing with cancer Deborah Riedel maintained an international singing career over the last decade. Sadly she died in January this year, 18 months after recording the present album. My last experience with her as a singer was her as soprano soloist in a Melbourne Symphony Orchestra performance of the Vaughan Williams A Sea Symphony in April 2006. Riedel's early career was marked by a bright and very flexible voice that was shown to its best advantage in one of her first important assignments, Marguerite in Gounod’s Faust. That same brightness was still apparent in the Vaughan Williams, joined by a powerful thrust that made her excursions into the dramatic soprano repertoire understandable. Considering her circumstances at the time of the recording Riedel’s voice is elegantly controlled with some really nice, fine detail. Like Sutherland’s, Riedel’s voice also attained darker, dramatic colouring but retaining a pleasant sounding smoothness. Also like Sutherland, at least in the present recording, that smoothness is attained at the cost of audibility; vowels and consonants are smoothed over to the extent that it is difficult to make out the words she is singing, even in famous songs like the title track "Cherry Ripe" or "The Lass of Richmond Hill".

The selected songs too are all short, nothing is longer than 5 minutes and most tracks are only 2 or 3 minutes. Nothing is in the grander concert aria style, most are in a slow tempo and very few call for much in the way of vocal ornamentation.

A ‘boutique’ label, Melba recordings can also offer equally boutique packaging, often with booklets that resemble a pocket-sized novella. This release is modest in comparison. As the composers are largely forgotten the booklet notes, by Bonynge, are informative and well researched, if occasionally inaccurate. He claims Niccolo Zingarelli’s first complete opera was Montezuma when, in fact, Zingarelli had composed operas while still a student and which were performed. This is a minor quibble however. To have a CD coming with a booklet at all, let alone one with so many pages of tracking information, is getting to be a luxury.

this is an expanded version of a review published in the Music Council of Australia's Music Forum magazine.

Review - Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk - Opera Australia

2009-04-26T16:38:00.037+10:00

Grappling with a big one
For a couple of years Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsesnk was one of the most often performed contemporary operas. It had simultaneous premieres in Leningrad and Moscow and at one point simultaneous productions in three Moscow theatres alone. Other productions followed. In London it was given in a concert performance in 1936 followed by BBC broadcast. The young Benjamin Britten heard it and was impressed by the powerful interludes and also by one of the singers, Peter Pears, who had a minor role. After the American premiere the sensational opera was topical enough to rate a mention in the Rodgers and Hart musical On Your Toes (in the song "The Three B's"). Then came Stalin's visit to a performance in Moscow and the subsequent attacks on the opera, Shostakovich's ballet The Limpid Stream and the composer himself. The opera was withdrawn immediately. There was difficulty obtaining the music for that London concert in 1936 and after then it disappeared from every stage until 1959 when the Dusseldorf Opera managed to wrangle performance materials from the Soviet Music Publishing authority. By then Shostakovich was testing the waters - Stalin had died and Kruschev had made public the extent of Stalin's terror - by issuing a revised version of the opera. Only slowly and not until after Shostakovich's death did the original version begin to be staged again. Adelaide saw it in 1984 at that year's Festival where the composer's son Maxim was a guest.

After the initial staging by Opera Australia of the original version of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in Sydney back in 2002 the on-and-off decisions to programme it for a Melbourne season kept me drooling with anticipation. After the 2006 decision to drop it from the Melbourne season (due to the cost of mounting the opera - it requires a huge orchestra and chorus - that never gets recouped) I thought that would be the end of it. But now here it is, in all its sensational glory!

Director Francesca Zambello updates the story to the Soviet era where overbearing male sexuality is just another form of oppression. Set in provincial Russia, the bored and sexually unfulfilled Katerina (Susan Bullock) lives in an environment of rampaging male sexuality, like Chekhov meets jerkoff! Her husband Zinovy (David Corcoran) is an impotent weakling while her lecherous father-in-law Boris (Daniel Sumegi), constantly prowling around her bedroom would do the job for him.

Shostakovich’s music is exuberant and irreverent but with astonishing power in places or lyricism in others, like the cathartic interludes, that have a shattering impact. The first two acts, leading up Katerina and her lover Sergei (Richard Berkeley-Steele) murdering her husband seethe with threatening or raucous music that explode in the scenes of sex or violence that are still confronting even today. The most notorious is the on stage love making between Katerina and Sergei. In the opening scene trombones blurt slyly as Boris insinuates that she is looking for a lover and again in a later scene when he predicts her infidelity. Finally, alone in her room with Sergei their love making is described by music that is as frenzied and confronting as the stage action. Katerina’s ecstasy as she experiences the passion her impotent husband never gave her while the philandering Sergei adds another conquest; the trombones now grunting wildly along with every thrust in music that reaches a literal climax and aftermath that has to be heard to be believed!

Among the other notorious scenes is Sergei’s near rape of the cook Aksinya (Jacqueline Dark) while the near naked workmen purve and masturbate as she screams in terror. Even before it begins Zambello uses the sleazy linking interlude Shostakovich wrote to good effect beginning the scene with Sergei signalling the workmen to gather in the wash house and making it obvious the attack is well planned and that Sergei is the ringleader. The entire production reeks with sex, violence or lampooning of authority and if the men of the Mtsensk district seem to get up circle jerks or sex parties faster and more frequently than a modern day frat house it is with the same comic-book irony that is a hallmark of Shostakovich’s genius. The coarseness of the male sexuality as played here sets Katerina's ecstatic sexual awakening in sharp relief. Even though it is very confrontingly depicted it looks positively virtuous in comparison with the Boris and his worker's lechery.

Bullock is astounding in this most difficult role. A notable Elektra, her voice rides the huge orchestra in the dramatic scenes with a cut and edge that remains clean and steady at all times. Her recent success in the Chandos recording of Salome, where she scales down her tone to an insinuating whisper is no studio trick either. In the opening scene and later, in the plaintive about animals mating happily but not her, she can spin her voice into a mournful whisper. In the same way she projects the aria in the last act about the black lake out into the auditorium while draining her voice of colour to suggest Katerina numb from both cold and Sergei’s rejection. She acts the highly charged scenes with the same conviction she invests in every other scene right down to weary resignation with which she drowns herself and Sergei’s new mistress. I suspect now that the lulling, romantic and otherwise polite repertoire she chose for her recital was to show her vocal nice side.

Berkeley-Steele copes magnificently the short, jabbing vocal lines Shostakovich gives Sergei, as though he were – appropriately - a cock crowing. Sumegi, looking like Stalin and groping his crotch as often as his vodka bottle is an unashamedly disgusting Boris. All thee have excellent diction and project the text well. In the few spoken passages Bullock's gentle, Julie Andrews-ish English accent actually lends her character a hint of niceness. Sung in English the translation is by the opera producer David Pountney for his English National Opera production which is coy in places other translations are not and forthright in places others are are tamer. Katerina's aria about animals mating, for instance, uses more sexualised language than the translations accompanying either of the two commercial CD recordings of the opera.

The smaller but necessary roles have been cast from strength. Shostakovich drives his buffo tenors hard it seems; the tenor singing the Police Captain in his earlier opera The Nose is required to sing in alt and reach an E above top C. As the shabby peasant Kanen Breen is taxed by the orchestral tsunami Shostakovich sets against the scene in which he discovers Zinovy's body. As a result he is barely audible against the wild mazurka played forte by the full orchestra and resorts to a frenzied semaphore for the scene. It's also a little odd seeing a vagrant who happens to have a hammer in his pocket in order to smash the lock on the cellar door!

Richard Armstrong has apparently not conducted the work before but scored point after point of the music's Janus nature. Colouring the lyrical passages for Katerina, the quirky but sinister little violin passage as Boris eats the fatal mushrooms and, most importantly, exploding the cathartic interludes with shattering force. Over the last decade Orchestra Victoria have had the fortune to play not only the standard repertoire but some of the formative operas of the twentieth century by Janacek (Jenufa and Vec Makropulos), Richard Strauss (Arabella, Der Rosenkavalier and Salome), Berg (Wozzeck and Lulu) and Britten (Billy Budd and Peter Grimes) as well as new works like Batavia by Richard Mills. Consequently they have become a pretty fearsome ensemble and well versed in the stylistic and dramatic requirements of the composers. So on one night you can get the classical eloquence of Mozart and Bellini and then, at this, the full barrage of a young and uncensored Shostakovich.

Zambello's update appears to be roughly the same time that the opera was written. Like Patrice Chereau, who set a trend (most famously in his 1976 Ring cycle at Bayreuth) for setting an opera in the time it was written rather the time it is set, this simple action often contextualises a work in rewarding ways, even without imposing many social or political references from the time. As the Marxist overtones pervaded Chereau's interpretation of Wagner, the ruthlessness of the purges and oppressions that were beginning in the Soviet Union underpin the story, giving some idea of what was really disturbing to Stalin and his committee. The sudden sighting of a portable television in the police scene disrupts this concept and, seeing as it has little dramatic impact, would be a good thing to drop. Apart from this, and a small carp about the depth and height from the stage of the set from Katerina's bedroom which necessitates the singers to clamour up steps to the room and over the bed to get into it, the visual production is one of the most satisfying Opera Australia have ever created. If it were given a little more space Sergei and Katerina might not need to spill their lovemaking onto the fore stage. Another smaller carp is that some of the male chorus and extras sport incongruous, state-of-the-art haircuts, and what's with those orange garbage bags the convicts tote around in the last act!

The poverty of regional Russia under Soviet collectivisation is superbly conveyed and gives the Ismailova's a level of desperation not in Leskov's story of comfortable bourgeoisie. Here the sordid environment is both physical and metaphorical. Even before the rape scene, the sight of the decrepit bath house and a few grimy self-groping workmen is revolting. When the rape is underway the scene, with its central focus on Aksinya trapped in a barrel and with the men arranged on either side it looks like a travesty of a classical painting, where the beauty of the carefully arranged figures is here, made into a compelling, if disgusting, sight; your gaze following the frenzied movement of the figures as they maul the helpless woman in the same way the figure placement in a painting draws your gaze around the composition.

Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk op 29 by Dmitry Shostakovich
Libretto by Alexander Preis and the composer after the story by Nicolai Leskov (1886)
First performed at the Malay Theatre, Leningrad 22 January 1934
First Australian performance, Festival Theatre, Adelaide March 1984
First performance of this production Sydney Opera House, 11 June 2002

Katerina Ismailova - Susan Bullock
Sergei - Richard Berkeley-Steele
Zinovy Ismailov - David Corcoran
Boris Ismailov - Daniel Sumegi
Sonyetka - Dominica Matthews
Aksinya / Woman Convict - Jacqueline Dark
Teacher / Shabby Peasant - Kanen Breen
Steward / Sentry - Richard Anderson
Sergeant / Chief of Police - Richard Alexander
Foreman 1 / Coachman - Stephen Smith
Foreman 2 - Graeme Macfarlane
Foreman 3 / Mill-Hand - David Thelander
Porter - Charlie Kedmenec
Priest - Gennadi Dubinsky
Policeman - Shane Lowrencev
Drunk Guest - David Lewis
Old Convict - Jud Arthur
Opera Australia Chorus
Orchestra Victoria
Conductor - Richard Armstrong
Director - Francesca Zambello
Set Designer - Hildegard Bechtler
Costume Designer - Tess Schofield
State Theatre, The Arts Centre 24, 29 April, 2 & 5 May 2009

picture by Jeff Busby

This is an extended version of the review published in Canvas/MCV

BTW there really is a place called Mtsensk

& check out Galina Fishnetskaya as Katerina

Review - Sydney Opera House Opening Concert 1973 - ABC Classics

2009-04-26T16:37:00.007+10:00

Mackerras - Wagner
Sydney Opera House Opening Concert 1973
Birgit Nilsson, soprano
Sydney Symphony Orchestra. Charles Mackerras, conductor
ABC Classics 476 6440

The attraction of the release is the inclusion of a DVD of the opening concert of the Sydney Opera House as televised by the ABC in September 1973 which is quite a surprise. As colour television was still a few years off, the transmission was made and perhaps in black and white. As FM radio broadcasting was still to come as well the audio is limited but the grainy, monochrome and limited sonics are acceptable enough and the archival tape has surprisingly few imperfections considering its age. EMI Classics have been releasing, in their Classic Archives series, concerts by leading classical artists derived from British, European and occasionally Japanese telecasts made live or as studio recordings often in lesser quality the current recording and usually released primarily as a record of a major artist or orchestra and not an occasion. This release is certainly an occasion and a record of a major artist as well, the famous Wagnerian soprano Birgit Nilsson.

Nilsson gave a series of concerts in Perth, Adelaide and Melbourne before arriving at the Sydney Opera House for the first of two concerts (the opening event preserved here and another with the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra). She recalled that the outside “resembles an enormous sailing ship and, looking out a dressing room window you might think you were on a great Atlantic liner.” She was pleased to learn too that the distinctive white tiles on the buildings sails were manufactured near to her home Sweden but was less pleased with the compromised interiors which was very clearly the work of “a different architect with less imagination and more limited financial resources” to complete the décor. None the less Nilsson is in powerful, late career, voice if with a tendency to be more concerned with delivering the ‘Nilsson Experience’ rather than actually music making. This is more apparent in the DVD which contains the second the half of the concert.

The 1970s camera work is very competent and ensures a variety of camera angles, focus shots on various players and instrumental section, plenty of captures of the Hall’s interior and even overlapping shots of Mackerras in close-up superimposed over the orchestra. There is nothing close up - probably at the singer’s instance -of Nilsson however. Mackerras secures some fine playing from the orchestra in this all-Wagner concert. In the Tristan und Isolde Prelude the strings make searingly lovely sounds in the long, arching phrases and again in the introduction to “Siegfried’s Rhine Journey” sear into the high phrases and convey enormous weight and strength as well in the “Funeral March” where the horns make a terrific menacing sound. On the audio CD there is sense of depth and distance in “Siegfried’s Rhine Journey”, the horns sounding far off against the present woodwind, quite a nice achievement in a life capture. Audience noise is almost non-existent except at the end of each item where the applause sounds polite rather than conveying “the sense of wonder and national pride felt by all in the full house that night” alluded to in the booklet notes. The booklet notes, incidentally, are first rate, running to over twenty pages with histories of the Opera House project, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, soloist and conductor biographies, notes to each musical selection and full German and text and English translations of the vocal items.

this review appears in the Music Council of Australia's Music Forum magazine

Review - The Magic Flute - Opera Australia

2009-04-05T15:33:00.037+10:00

“Dear as is Mozart’s Zauberflöte to all musicians and lovers of melody, on the stage that opera has been only tolerated,” wrote Henry Chorley in his celebrated Thirty Years’ Musical Recollections, “The reason, in both cases, is the same,” he explains, “the stupidity of the story”. George Bernard Shaw claimed that Mozart “struck the modern secular humanitarian note” in it but Zauberflöte’s dramatic credibility came into question as the opera was taken up by other theatres outside Germany. Commentators adored the music but abhorred the plot and dialogue. Henry Robertson, reviewing the English premiere in 1811 lamented “that the pleasure that the wonderful music of this opera gives, receives a serious drawback from the almost unprecedented absurdity of its plot and language, which are so incoherent, that they can scarcely be imagined the work of intellect above that of an idiot”. Robertson continues with some xenophobic tub-thumping about the taste of German audiences and the “state of literary degradation” that their opera stage appears to be in compared with “the admirable compositions of Mr Bishop” and warns composers about “the poetry on which they bestow their pains. Without which their music can never become a lasting favourite”.

In fairness this was based on an Italian-language version which was how Die Zauberflöte was performed for most of the 19th century, garnering the same praise and condemnation, but defying Robertson’s prophesy when Bishop’s 60-odd operas have disappeared from the stage while Zauberflöte is one of the most often performed. One of its only early defenders was the poet and critic Leigh Hunt, founder and music critic of The Examiner who “did not participate in the objection made to the nature of the story, which because it is a fairy tale is thought to be frivolous. Alas, how frivolous,” he contested, “are the most grave realities of life!”

After the meanderings of opera plots throughout the 19th and even 20th centuries Zauberflöte’s dramatic shortcomings have long been overlooked and it is securely one of the most of ten performed and most accessible of opera. Opera Australia have countered the problem of continuing to make it accessible by always performing it in English. Until the 1980s, in fact, all the Mozart comedies were sung to English translations (Figaro used the Edward Dent in which innumerable Figaros’ struggled to make the line “like meteors they storm us” to not sound as though they meant women of generous physique and loose morals). Flute remained sung in English until the final revival of the Göran Järvefelt / Carl Friederich Oberle production when it was decided that the spoken text would be in English and the arias sung German. It was an odd decision and appears to be one of the legacies of the late Richard Hickox who conducted the premiere of this new production in 2006 and, although the director David Freeman had preferred it be entirely in English this bi-textural approach is again used.

Freeman was only twenty-one and still a student when he founded his Opera Factory in Sydney in 1973, literally in the shadow of the newly-constructed and grandiose Sydney Opera House. An equally insightful director of legitimate theatre Freeman was a maverick from the start, but not in the way we understand maverick opera directors these days, with little of the notoriety that some directors attract like fuzzy felt. His interpretations, like an early staging of Handel’s Acis and Galatea, where Polyphemus was a menacing old drunk in a grubby mackintosh down to his recent Nabucco (finally working with Opera Australia) where Nabucco’s outburst that he is God was met, not with a bolt of lightening, but a shower of blood in an appropriate, if sickening simile of the carnage wrought by all dictators. Instead of an apprenticeship to, what might have seemed to him a mausoleum, at the Sydney Opera House, Freeman established similar Opera factories in Zurich and then London where, according to one of the most respected and knowledgeable of British commentators Tom Sutcliffe, “his best work was liberating, influential and formative in building Britain’s operatic new world.” One innovation that paid the obvious dividends was Freeman's building an ensemble of singers, ‘theatrical tribalism’ as Sutcliffe calls it, working with them like actors and introducing them to theories from the contemporary theatre by the likes of Peter Brook, Jerzy Grotowski and even Antonin Artaud. He was not without irreverence too, relocating the classically inspired operas to modern-day surroundings and using modern-day props.

Singers are savvier about their acting and more open to re-interpretation of their repertoire these days and embrace the good, bad and the ugly for the sake of their art. Fortunately this production is mostly all for the good and the choreography and staging is jointly the work of Debra Batton and the Legs on the Wall physical theatre. Founded in 1984 Legs on the Wall specialise in aerial rope work and devise spectacular routines that can see them suspended from skyscrapers hundreds of metres above ground. Freeman and Batton begin the action with overture showing Tamino being lead by the three boys into the forest where he is, at first, enchanted by hoping frogs, butterflies and birds. Wearing mottled body stockings the Legs on the Wall troupe hover at first among the forest of ropes or manipulate the puppets including the gigantic claws and head of the dragon. Occasionally they enter into the sung music. When the Queen of the Night, suspended above the stage, begins the frenetic allegro of her first aria they twirl around her adding physical gymnastics to her vocal ones. Most memorable are the way they mime the prowling, snarling lions that guard Sarastro and his temple so that the Legs on the Wallers become so integral to the production, growing on you with each appearance, that you look for them in each new scene. They way Freeman has made these mimes and acrobats integral to the magic of the story recalls his similar use of mimes as the demons that were so integral to the supernatural horror in his production of Prokofiev's The Fiery Angel (one of his most brilliant opera stagings). Diligently Freeman allows most of the vocal music its own space in his staging. Instead of ossifying it is set in relief, Mozart’s sublimity alongside Freeman’s imagination. There was not one moment when I felt that the puppetry or acrobatics upstaged or interfered with the music. It even complimented some scenes in a way I never expected like in the fire trial which introduced some thrilling fire juggling where Pamina and Tamino were surrounded by the acrobats twirling batons of fire which Crane and Goodwin reach into to display their courage (their own as well their characters'). You can’t help thinking Mozart and Schikaneder would have been delighted by this.

With its acrobatics and occasional burst of circus-like theatricality comparisons with Julie Taymar’s abridged Metropolitan Opera production are inevitable. But where Taymar appears to have got everything wrong, Freeman seems to have got everything right. Damien Cooper’s marvelous lighting, where shafts of green, blue or amber light pick through the tangle of ropes creates a continually beautiful stage picture. The room in which Tamino and Papageno undergo the first trial spins around while disembodied arms grasp at them and the three ladies and assorted animals appear and disappear. Otherwise the orderliness of the rest of the temple with its cool, green agate walls inlaid with Masonic symbols, is equally effective.

As Pamina Sara Crane is ravishing to look at – in a costume like a princess from Edmund Dulac’s storybook illustrations - and as lovely to listen to. Her voice is rich and silvery and in her dramatic transition in the second act, warm and sensuous. Playing a human and suffering woman rather the usual girlish princess, Crane makes complete vocal sense of Pamina’s music straightaway; in her first scene she sings the heavenly duet with Papageno with a lusciousness sounding totally aware of the joy of love. Her soaring “Die Wahrheits” in the act one finale are pure and noble while “Ach, ich fühl’s” follows the heartbroken sighing in Mozart’s accompaniment. Her desperation in her near suicide gives way again to soaring nobility on “Tamino mein, O welch ein Glück!” as they begin the final trial. It’s no surprise that this Pamina is welcomed into Sarastro’s virtuous society. Crane sang Janthe in a rare staging of Heinrich Marschner’s Der Vampyr in Freiburg in 2002 and is a credible actress too. She appears to be a natural for singspiel and was the most successful among the with the dialogue, giving the same subtle weight and emphasis, for example, in her words to the silent Tamino as she gave to the following music in “Ach, ich fühl’s”.

As the Queen of the Night Lorina Gore's costume is all white, an odd choice considering her nocturnal associations. Her act one aria is sung while suspended on a huge crescent moon and is melodramatic - presumably to hoodwink Tamino and gain his sympathy – while her second act aria is sung and acted vehemently instead of with the glacial, almost mechanical, delivery that (if the singer can manage it) makes the character more sinister. Daniel Sumegi is an excitable Sarastro who sounds almost panic-stricken as he reveals the Queen of the Night’s plot to the priests at the beginning of act two. When singing his voice is warm and fatherly, not like a dark bass, but in “In diesen heil'gen Hallen”, very comforting after the Queen's hysterical outburst. As Tamino Andrew Goodwin also looks straight out of Dulac’s Arabian Nights. He has a big-sounding and pleasant voice but without the palette of vocal colours of his Pamina. He was never short of charming but the portrait aria was short on rapture and his cries when discovering Pamina is alive were more defiant than ecstatic.

Kanen Breen's Monostatos might have stepped right out of a 1970s ‘black-sploitation’ movie. Sporting an Afro wig and unexaggerated Negro make-up he is no harem-eunuch buffoon. The character’s pent up and threatening sexual menace toward Pamina is underlined giving his scenes with her a nasty edge. Breen's diction is always exemplary too; every word of his breathless, 60 second aria was audible. Freeman retains the flavour of Schikaneder’s original dialogue in these scenes allowing the equally nasty and far from archaic racism to resonate on modern audiences for all it is worth. The Three ladies look positively Valkurian (or perhaps like the college-girl warriors from Princess Ida).

As Papageno Andrew Moran is given some gimmicks and dialogue that you will either love or hate. In a red fright wig and false nose he also looks like a bad impersonation of Ronnie Barker and is given some broad and often low brow jokes. After an abrupt start where Freeman seems to be overly colloquial (“he’s a few sandwiches short of a picnic” for example) in order to attune the audience to his adaptation, his text usually stays in the spirit of Schikaneder’s except when it involves Papageno (“you blow your flute and I’ll blow me diet” and so on). In act two his song with the bells becomes a kind of 18th century meta-theatre, the character constantly engaging the audience directly. Love it or hate it, Moran does, however, know how Papageno’s music should go, especially in the second act when, despite the clowning between verses, sings with a geniality that recalls some really great recorded Papageni like Kunz and Hüsch.

When the three boys make their formal entrance they are mall rats, on skateboards or scooters. Later they sing and swing on the ropes and, in act three, when they admonish Tamino and Papageno they are just floating heads – they must be having the best time of their choirboy lives! There are dozens of incidental details; in her suicide scene Pamina caresses her cheek with the dagger as though it were Tamino’s hand (Schikaneder’s libretto has occasional merits and Pamina’s likening the dagger to a bridegroom that brings a marriage of death is one of them). The three boys smile and laugh with Pamina, sharing her joy after they tell her Tamino loves her and later two of Sarastro’s lions gently nudge Tamino and Pamina toward each other as they prepare for the final trial; all these touches bring extra dramatic point.

Musically Jari Hämäläinen oversees a small-band Mozart sound (it’s amazing how finely textured this opera is so often). The marches spring and in the water and fire trials there is forward sounding propulsion in which the suspenseful timpani strikes pound like a pounding heart-beat effect in a Bernard Herrmann score.

There are a few unfortunate glitches in the programme which attribute roles to the wrong singers but on the plus side it contains an excellent essay on Schikaneder’s theatre, the Singspiel as a genre and Freemasonry customs in Vienna at the time, including a fascinating titbit about Lodges admitting females and thus giving extra contemporary meaning to Pamina joining Tamino in the initiation into Sarastro’s community.

Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) Singspiel in two acts
Music – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Libretto – Emanuel Schikaneder and Carl Ludwig Gieseke
First performance – 30 September 1791, Freihaustheater auf der Wieden, Vienna
First Australian performance – 18 November 1948, Princess Theatre, Melbourne
First performance of this production – 20 February 2006, Sydney Opera House (unless, like Hugh Jackman you prefer calling it the Opera Center)
Tamino - Andrew Goodwin
Pamina - Sarah Crane
Sarastro - Daniel Sumegi
The Queen of the Night - Lorina Gore
Papageno - Andrew Moran
First Lady - Amy Wilkinson
Second Lady - Sian Pendry
Third Lady - Dominica Matthews
Speaker/Second Priest - Stephen Bennett
First Priest - Graeme Macfarlane
Monostatos - Kanen Breen
First Armoured Man - Andrew Brunsdon
Second Armoured Man - Richard Anderson
First Boy - James Emerson
Second Boy - Sam Bissett
Third Boy - Joshua Timewell
Animals - Legs on the Wall (Eve Fernandez Adan, Dean Cross, Catherine Daniel, Rick Everett, Lee Anne Litton, Alejandro Rolandi, Lillian May Tulloch, Darren Vizer, Tully Ward, Meiwah Williams)
Opera Australia Chorus
Orchestra Victoria
Conductor - Jari Hämäläinen
Director - David Freeman
Revival director – Cathy Dadd
Set & Costume Designer - Dan Potra
Lighting Designer - Damien Cooper
Choreographer - Debra Batton
State Theatre, The Arts Centre
4, 9, 16, 18, 21, 23, 30 April 2, 6 & 8 May 2009
180 minutes (including 1 interval of 30 minutes)

pictured: two members of Legs on the Wall taking a break between acts

Vale Margreta Elkins

2009-04-04T15:34:00.017+11:00

Margreta Elkins
16 October 1930 - 1 April 2009

Elkins (Margaret Geater) was born in Brisbane and studied piano and singing, with Ruby Dent, while at school and at seventeen won a Queensland Government scholarship to study dramatic art and music theory. In 1950 there was no conservatorium of music in Queensland and Elkins studied at the Sydney Conservatorium with the well-known concert singer Harold Williams and also with Marianne Mathy and in Melbourne with the singer Pauline Bindley. She entered several competitions including the 1952 Sun Aria Contest and the Mobil Quest in which she competed against Joan Sutherland. The two became friends and their professional paths would cross on many occasions.

She married Harry Elkins and joined the National Opera Company of Australia and - as Margreta Elkins - during 1953, 1954 and 1955 sang the roles of Carmen, Azucena in Il Trovatore Siebel in Faust and Suzuki in Madama Butterfly on tour throughout the eastern states of Australia and also in New Zealand (where the company was joined by the New Zealand mezzo Heather Begg). At one point during these tours she sang Azucena every night for two weeks!

Having won the second prize in the 1955 Mobil Quest she used the money to travel to London where she was engaged to sing Carmen and Dorabella in Cosi fan tutte for the Grand Opera Society of Dublin. In England she auditioned unsuccessfully for the Royal Opera but joined the Carl Rosa Opera Company in what proved to be the final years of its chequered history. With the Carl Rosa she toured England and Scotland singing Maddalena in Rigoletto, Rosina in The Barber of Seville, Nicklause in Tales of Hoffmann and, a considerable rarity for any company at the time let alone the declining Carl Rosa, Ascanio in Berlioz's Benvenuto Cellini.

The Carl Rosa company disbanded in 1958 but Elkins had attracted considerable attention by then. The Manchester Guardian had described her instrument, in the Berlioz opera, as "a fine, big voice which is yet cuttingly exact on intonation and wonderfully flexible in all but the very top register," and that "her singing of the difficult entr'acte aria in Act III was something to remember long after the performance." Elkins sang with Joan Sutherland in a number of the London Handel Opera Society stagings and was accepted into the Royal Opera Company at Covent Garden, where her friend and now colleague, Sutherland was also a member. At the Royal Opera Elkins's first roles were in the Ring Cycles (in which she and Sutherland sang Rhine maidens), Ulrica in Un Ballo in Maschera, the Priestess in Aida and Alisa in the production of Lucia di Lammermoor on 10 July 1959 which Sutherland was launched into super stardom.

Tartan up! Margreta Elkins and Joan Sutherland backstage on the Lucia opening night 1959.

Further roles at the Royal Opera brought wider attention including Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier, Amneris in Aida, Hippolyta in Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream and Marina in Boris Godounov and Helen of Troy in Michael Tippett's King Priam which she created in 1962. She had made a special study of the role of Octavian, travelling to Vienna where she was coached by Alfred Jerger, the famous baritone who had been a favorite of Richard Strauss's and who had created Mandryka in Arabella. At this time she also received further training in London from Margaretta Kraus and Vera Roza and in Italy with Ettore Campogalliani, the teacher of Renata Tebaldi, Luciano Pavarotti and Mirella Freni.

Elkins made her American debut in 1965 alongside Sutherland in Handel's Alcina in which she was singled out by the New York Herald Tribune as "easily the most secure stylist of the evening". During 1964 and 1965, with Bonynge's encouragement, Elkins extended her range to encompass soprano and in 1965 was one of the featured artists in the Sutherland-Williamson opera seasons returning with Sutherland to their native Australia. In Australia she undertook soprano roles such as Tatyana in Eugene Onegin.

Elkins returned to Australia in 1976 and continued to sing with the Australian Opera and was an active recitalist with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and, re-settling in Brisbane, lectured and taught the Queensland Conservatorium of Music as wekk as in Hong Kong. Her engagements continued to be varied and - in one where she sang the alto solo in Mahler's Song of the Earth at every performance of The Australian Ballet's staging of Kenneth MacMillan's choreographed version - extraordinary. An honorary life member of Opera Queensland Elkins made her final operatic appearance with them in 2002, aged 71, in Cavalleria Rusticana.

Elkins was lucky on records and her friendship with Sutherland and Richard Bonynge resulted in her selection for a number of Sutherland's recording which, despite the vagaries of the recording industry, have remained in print. She also sings Alisa to Maria Callas's Lucia in EMI's second recording of the opera featuring Callas. As a soprano Elkins is featured in the title role of Williams Shield's ballad opera Rosina (currently available on ABC Classics Australian Heritage 461 922-2).

also posted at my music and opera related blog

Vale Maurice Jarre

2009-03-30T12:49:00.008+11:00

Composer Maurice Jarre has died (obit from the Oz) and only a few weeks ago Tom Service had opened a discussion at his blog on how bad movie music is these days too

Review - Susan Bullock in Recital - Melbourne Recital Centre

2009-03-29T13:51:00.007+11:00

"It's like a velvet cushion with a sharp edge. Sort of warm and enveloping, but with a glint of steel.''

Susan Bullock describing her voice.

Ahead of her Melbourne opera debut with Opera Australia in Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Susan Bullock gave a model recital, elegantly turned out; beautifully mannered and totally unlike the Shostakovitch heroine she undertakes next month. Ever since the (then) ABC curtailed the celebrity recital programmes, and just had singers and instrumentalist perform in the main concerts, recitals have become very thin off the ground in Australia and, when they are given, poorly attended. Even this recital by a leading singer was poorly attended. The diminished status of the recital could also explain the necessity (after the first group of songs) of requesting applause be restricted to the conclusion of each group and not after each song (musical items are selected with a continuity of theme, mood, key relationships and other linking material that is spoiled by interruption).

What Ms Bullock chose might have seemed mainstream to her, but it was obviously 'hen's teeth' to a lot of the audience. Alongside Wagner’s settings of poems by his would-be mistress Matilde Wesendonk and some well chosen Strauss lieder were some lesser known of Schubert’s 600 odd songs and some of Liszt’s salon ‘chansons’. Most formulaic recitals begin a group of old Italian songs and then some Schubert. Ms Bullock rolled the two into one and selected some little known Schubert settings of Italian Baroque poets Jacobo Vitorelli and Metastasio. Although they sound like the recitatives to main arias that never arrive they show Schubert setting other languages with the same care he showed for German. The two Metastasio lyrics reveal the beauty of the poet's word assembly, long phrases composed of pure, open-voweled words which, when set to music, show why his opera libretti were set over and over again by composers.

A famous Elektra Ms Bullock’s scales her voice down. Occasionally there was a hint of how incisive and how easily it can thrust. The presentation of the Schubert group was a little plain, the words not worried too much and, although an instinctive musical line was set through the each song in the group, crescendos sounded unduly rushed as though not to unleash too much voice on such fragile material.

The Wesendonk songs displayed the dramatic qualities of Bullock’s voice although she sounded a little short of breath in the opening phrase of Stehe Still! The build up of phrases like “öde Leere nicht’gen Graus” and “Füllet bang den dunklen Raum” in the Tristan study In Treibhaus were sensuous in the first, thrilling in second and well judged in both (but strange though how bland songs like In Treibhaus sound with piano only).

There was a tentative feeling over the proceedings until the Strauss group, ‘vanilla singing’ or holding back perhaps. Then in Schlechtes Wetter, with just a touch of physical characterization she turned things around. Strauss’s oddball song about an overindulgent old mother out in a rainstorm buying ingredients for a cake for her plump little daughter snuggled at home on the sofa, has so much going on it and, without the text in front of you, can pass unappreciated. Bullock immediately set the scene, peering up at the sky as the accompaniment describes the rain hammering against the window. Smiling at the old ladies plight, a waltz rhythm (suggesting the OTHER Strauss) breaks out as the song comes to an end – Strauss loved doing this, his comic operas often end with sort of lighthearted touch - and the chuckle in the music was infectious.

The Quilter songs were sung with a rich, broad tone like in the Wagner, more thrust in the higher-lying phrases and ending with a generous, big-toned account of Love’s Philosophy.

Stephen Mould was a reliable accompanist, occasionally given to facial expressions and appearing to be singing along with the soloist, but an equal partner to the success of Schlechtes Wetter and the Quilter songs. Pity that Katerina's solo in the opening scene of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk could not have been included as a foretaste of the opera, Galina Vishnevskaya used to include in many of her recitals (probably to compensate for never being able to sing the role on stage) because in the excerpt from Tannhäuser she was on fire (and so was the audience at last).

It’s disingenuous to look a gift horse in the mouth but the complimentary programme brochures are not as professional as they should be for a venue which professes such lofty standards. Apart from occasional incorrect spellings the inconsistencies in the actual list of works performed need attention. Authors and poets are only named for some songs but not all. For the Liszt songs, even though Victor Hugo authored the poems for all of the songs selected, he is only credited for two while the other three do not mention an author. Opus numbers are also given for some songs but not others and the classifications for the Liszt songs have been incorrectly printed as 'opus' numbers instead of S (Searle) numbers.

Programme

Franz Schubert

Non t'accostar all'urna D 688 [Vitorelli]

Guarda, che bianca luna D 688 [Vitorelli]

Mio ben ricordati D 688 [Metastasio]

Da quel sembiante appresi D 688 [Metastasio]

Richard Wagner

Fünf Gedichte von Mathilde Wesendonck (Wesendonck Lieder) WWV91

Der Engel

Stehe Still!

Schmerzen

Im Treibhaus

Traüme

Richard Strauss

Zueignung Op 10 Nr 1 [von Glim]

Ich trage meine Minne Op 32 Nr 1 [Henckell]

Allerseelen Op 10 Nr 8 [von Glim]

Schlechtes Wetter Op 69 Nr 5 [Heine]

Franz Liszt

S'il est un charmant gazon S 284 [Hugo]

Enfant, si j'etais roi S 283 [Hugo]

La tombe et la rose S 285 [Hugo]

Comment, disaient-ils S 276 [Hugo]

Oh quand je dors S 282-2 [Hugo]

Roger Quilter

Fair House of Joy and Bliss Op 12 Nr 7 [Tobias Hume]

Dream Valley Op 20 Nr 1 [Blake]

Autumn Evening Op 14 [Arthur Maquarie]

Love's Philosophy Op 3 Nr 1 [Shelly]
encores

Wagner

Dich, taure Halle from Tannhäuser

George Gershwin
Blah, Blah, Blah [Ira Gershwin] from Delicious

Susan Bullock - soprano
Stephen Mould - piano
Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre
27 March 2009

Also published on the music and opera related blog here

Review - Goodbye Vaudeville Charlie Mudd - Arena Theatre/Malthouse

2009-03-14T10:44:00.028+11:00

The Music Hall has been a persuasive means of telling as well as a metaphor for some very good and even very great plays. Joan Littlewood’s Oh What a Lovely War as a means and John Osborne's The Entertainer as a metaphor are two that spring to mind. The music hall setting, music hall style songs and looming First World War nudge Lally Katz's Goodbye Vaudeville Charlie Mudd towards the Littlewood camp, but in Charle Mudd the War never comes, the music hall isn’t really a music hall and the songs aren’t really music hall songs. Mudd’s vaudeville castle is an amalgam of local references turned into an alternative Melbourne situated not geographically but psychologically. Katz’s writing becomes a more elegant Rorschach of ambiguous stimuli with each new play and this one is a doozy.

Situated on the Swanson River where the more popular Tivoli showboat occasionally passes but an actual ticket buyer never does. Every night the motley cast assemble to perform. Occasionally a important producer promises to come but, like Godot, they never appear and the show plays to an empty house. Charlie Mudd (Jim Russell ) and his performers are misfits whose routines enact violence on themselves, each other or manifest the violence enacted on them personally or their class, gender or ethnicity. This community of saltimbanques is, perhaps, a dystopian reflection of Edwardian and modern-day Melbourne and how so little has changed of the indigenous, migrant and socially and sexually disadvantaged.

Maude (Christen O'Leary) is a middle-aged child in her ‘sweet little Alice blue gown’ while her alter-ego, the foul mouthed ventriloquist doll plays the whore that Maude, a victim of incest, was made into as a child. The sight of Maude, literally trying to hold her childhood trauma at arm’s length is truly disturbing. Allarkini (Alex Menglet), the contemptuous, displaced Russian magician whose magic is a repulsive demonstration of self-vampirism. The most pointed of all is Bones (Mark Jones) the melancholy black-faced minstrel whose stage persona has assumed his identity. The new act, Violet (Julia Zamiro) enters Mudd’s castle and assumes the name Ethylyn Rarity, the name that countless ingenues before her have used. Ethylyn and Mudd are like Judith and Bluebeard (his castle even has a forbidden door like in the Bluebeard legend) and as the story progresses Ethylyn becomes trapped like a butterfly in a spider's web. There is even a spider and butterfly dance, a wonderful parody of the old variety turn danced by Violet and Mudd's mute brother Knuckles (Matt Wilson).

Jonathon Oxlade's sets and costumes are luxurious, the painted backcloth of an Australian Bush Idyll is the real deal. The songs and dances are superb. Menglet sings and dances his song damning Charlie Mudd with a pulverising authority and lends a charming elegance to his half of the panto horse and maniacal horror to his conjuring turn. O'Leary's schizophrenic ventriloquism is like Michael Redgrave's in Dead of Night. In his programme note Chris Kohn mentions that the long research time caused the nostalgia to overpower the project. The play at times looks like a purely nostalgic work like the recent Sydney Dance Company Tivoli but Katz’s script bites and scratches. Ethylyn tries to force herself sexually on Bones after first trying to remove his black face make up. Confused he doesn't know what she means but the scene suggests the unsentimental, dark side of history in the fear of miscegenation. The play is a mystery on one level which Ethylyn eventually solves and the actors can separate their lives from their theatre and, as Bones prepares to depart the stage, literally cleansing the black make up from his face, the play ends in a contemporary consciousness. The blend of dialogue, dance and song extends the play to two and half hours but rarely has a drama, song and dance informed each other so well.

Goodbye Vaudeville Charlie Mudd (2009) by Lally Katz
Charlie Mudd - Jim Russell
Bones - Mark Jones
Maude Adle (and Doris) - Christen O'Leary
Knuckles - Matt Wilson
Allarkini - Alex Menglet
Ethylyn Rarity - Julia Zemiro
Director - Chris Kohn
Set and Costume Desinger - Jonathon Oxlade
Sound Designer - Jethro Woodward
Lighting Designer - Richard Vabre
Illusions Designer - Lawrence Leung
Beckett Theatre, Malthouse
6-28 March 2009

Review - Don Giovanni - Victorian Opera

2009-03-06T00:15:00.066+11:00

White Knight
Jean Pierre Mignon’s production of Don Giovanni scales the opera down and in a production with as much farce as drama makes for an exhilarating rather than grandiose story. In a gleaming white costume, the reverse of his true colours, this Don (Samuel Dundas) looks as though he stepped out of a Mills & Boon bodice ripper. Although his voice is still young (remember though that Luigi Bassi, the first Don Giovanni, was only 21) and light toned, he uses it with great skill, projecting the text, in very good Italian and giving it shape and nuance. For a young singer he has a good grasp of the Don’s mercurial character even if it beggars’ belief that so young-looking a Don has so extensive a catalogue of conquests. Physically he is everything you could want (ie: barihunk) but also conveys the swaggering, aristocratic arrogance, arm resting raffishly on his sword-hilt and, above all, the snake-eyed charm. With only three modest solos Don Giovanni's persona lives through music involving other characters. Dundas savors the recititative passages, making them carry the bulk of his characterisation. An example is the brief scene with Zerlina (Michelle Buscemi) before their duet where his words drip like honey. Only the softest parts of the music, the opening phrase of “La ci darem la mano” and the act two serenade need a softer tone but, overall, roll over Teddy Tahu Rhodes (now there's an image!).

Zerlina’s music suits Buscemi’s silvery voice and she conveys Zerlina's gentle eroticism, ecstatically sighing the words “toccami qua” in ‘Vedrai, carino’ with same understanding as Dundas in conveying Giovanni’s lust . A terrific Zerlina in her own right Tiffany Speight steps up to the dominant female character Donna Elvira. Speight’s radiant soprano easily encompassed the music including the often-difficult lower passages (listen to her marvellous downward runs in the epilogue!) . She is a very subtle comedienne too, doomed by her unshakable obsession with the faithless Don her Elvira is like a frustrated schoolmistress and flusters about like an operatic Maggie Smith. The insistence now on either the Prague or Vienna versions of the opera (from the looks of it the über-urtext Bärenreiter edition is used here) is a pity; if Speight had been allowed her big aria ‘Mi Tradi’ it would have crowned a spectacular performance. As Don Giovanni’s sidekick Andrew Collis is another more experienced singer who creates an oily Leporello, the director relating him back to the character, Sganarelle, in Moliere's play Don Juan, clowning the part without overdoing it. He clearly hates his master but in the 'catalogue aria' there was just a hint of admiration. With no sign of stage nerves, Dundas is a natural clown too and with Speight and Collis makes the serenading scene in act two hilarious without undermining the beauty of the music.

Donna Anna is a big sing and challenged Caroline Wenborne. She managed the difficult fioritura without any compromises but the fearful drama in "Or sai chi l'onore" was less evident. She does a terrific stage faint. James Egglestone was equally adept at Don Ottavio's 'Il mio tesoro'. Pity his 'Dalla su pace' - another post-Prague addition - was omitted, his well supported tenor voice would sound nice in it. Anthony Mackey's is a really interestingly rebellious Masetto, holding back from physically attacking the girlfriend usurping Don but ultra sarcastic in 'Hai capito' (the Figaro rebelliousness again?). His voice is a little backward sounding but a genuine bass baritone. Occasionally too rigid, as in the ensembles but adding the bass weight to important ones like the act two sextet where Don Giovanni and Leporello are absent. The vocal preparation of all of the soloists was obviously thorough.

The smaller scale allows for some details that would never work in a larger theatre. The Don, for example, gives Zerlina a flower which drops suggestively from her hand at the end of “La ci darem la mano”, it is retrieved and passed again, along with the Don's come-on lines, until it ends up planted in Elvira's hopeful cleavage. Richard Roberts’s set is a marvel of economy transforming from back streets to a Moorish palace and sinister tomb. The lighting, however, could have been more varied. The overture like most of the music in general moves swiftly with the action. The omnipresent fate theme that begins the overture or the mysterious few seconds of string music that follow it was somewhat understated but, thanks to the intimacy of the production, it was like examining a masterpiece under a microscope. The ensembles ending each act shone like little gems and balance allowed the younger singers to show their potential and the more experienced singers, like Speight, to hint at glories yet to come in their careers.

picture: Samuel Dundas (picture by Jeff Busby)

Don Giovanni - Samuel Dundas
Donna Elvira - Tiffany Speight
Donna Anna - Caroline Wenborne
Zerlina - Michelle Buscemi
Don Ottavio - James Egglestone
Leporello - Andrew Collis
Masetto - Anthony Mackey
The Commendatore - Steven Gallop
Conductor - Richard Gill (3,5 & 7 March) Nicholas Carter (10, 12 & 14 March)
Director - Jean-Pierre Mignon
Costume Designer - Christina Smith
Set Designer - Richard Roberts
Lighting Designer - Paul Jackson

National Theatre, St Kilda
3, 5, 7, 10, 12 & 14 March 2009
followed by a metropolitan and regional Victorian tour between 28 March and 25 April
175 minutes (including one interval)
Victorian Opera

Review - Moonlight and Magnolias - Melbourne Theatre Company

2009-02-28T21:50:00.019+11:00

Eschewing Mother-in-law jokes, in his autobiography Ben Hecht quoted his in making an interesting observation about the disposable nature of theatre. "My mother-in-law," he wrote, "will sit in a theatre, laugh, and deeply enjoy herself. But she comes out of the theatre usually with a shrug and a sigh. 'What did it give you to take away?' she asks. 'Nothing. It leaves you nothing in your mind or spirit. An evening wasted'".

Moonlight and Magnolias is a curious piece. A few weeks into the shoot of Gone With the Wind the producer David O Selznick (Patrick Brammall) halts production, hires a new director, Victor Fleming (Stephen Lovatt) and writer Ben Hecht (Nicholas Hammond), locks the door and for the next five days the three re-write the screenplay. The play begins well enough, the impossible task of rewriting a screenplay of a massive novel by three people who respect but don’t like each other and all locked by key and contract in Selznick’s office for five straight days, gives rise to predictable comedy. Screwball one minute, serious the next, conflicting and more interesting issues arise; the racism of Scarlett O’Hara and the idolisation of the old South (and its reliance on slavery) irks Hecht. The war against Fascism is imminent and that Selznick is producing a celebration of America’s fascist past at the time when it was (or a least Hecht was) beginning to galvanise against it’s racism and anti-Semitism makes for an interesting parable. But this is Hecht not Brecht.

The only food Hecht and Fleming are allowed is a plentiful supply of bananas and peanuts, after a few days the shells and skins litter the stage reminding me of David Pownall’s fantastic Master Class, set in Soviet Russia where Stalin and his minister of Culture Zdanov terrorise the composers Shostakovitch and Prokofiev over one nightmarish evening into composing socially responsible music. In a brilliant coup de theatre that ended act one, Stalin shows Prokofiev shelves of recordings of every piece of music Prokofiev had written and asks him to choose his favourite. After a long search Prokofiev selects a record which Stalin calmly smashed, followed by another and another. Zhdanov joins him, smashing records by the armfull as the lights fade. The second act began with Stalin and Zhdanov still smashing records and the stage strewn with broken gramophone records which remained, crunching underfoot, for the rest of then play.

I think peanuts says it all. Moonlight and Magnolias is an awkward and often unconvincing piece that nearly breaks down when Selznick conveniently goes catatonic in order for Hecht and Fleming to have a private discussion. The irony, if not the moral, is that the movie business is fickle and even seasoned pros cannot predict let alone make a hit. Hecht and Fleming constantly predict the film will be a turkey while Selznick merely panders to popular taste. If Hecht's mother-in-law were to see this play with its heavy handed social message, she might well regret ever wanting something to take away.

David O Selznick – Patrick Brammall
Ben Hecht – Nicholas Hammond
Victor Fleming – Stephen Lovatt
Miss Poppenghul – Marg Downey
Director – Bruce Beresford
Set & Costume Designer – Shaun Gurton
Lighting Designer – Nigel Levings
Playhouse, The Arts Centre
26 February – 28 March 2009

Review - I Love You, Bro - Three To A Room Productions/Malthouse

2009-02-12T11:57:00.045+11:00

La Chat Noir: A (B)romance in One Act

I Love You, Bro is a creepy little black comedy that is becoming justifiably famous since its debut at the 2007 Melbourne Fringe and subsequent season at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Set in England the eighty minute solo act is told by Johnny (Ash Flanders) who recounts how, as a lonely fourteen year-old, he began a chat-room relationship that nearly cost him his life. Bored and frustrated Johnny spends his nights at his computer talking to equally bored and frustrated strangers until he meets by chance another boy in his town who goes by the chat tag 'Marky Mark'. Mark mistakenly thinks Johnny is a girl and Johnny at first is attracted by the opportunity of chatting with one of the most popular boys in the neighborhood but something else begins to take hold of him. Although both boys are straight, Johnny becomes fascinated by Mark’s mistaken attraction to him and spins a web of lies to encourage his on-line suitor, "like fag love", he explains, "between two non-fags."

The situation escalates into a barely believable black farce as Mark, convinced Johnny is a girl, the pair become a 'cyber-couple'. The director Yvonne Virsik wondered how Johnny’s victim could be so completely fooled but all the more surprising is that the play is based on a real incident in which the real-life Johnny's deceits were far more extensive. That real Johnny was called at trial a ‘virtual Scheherazade’ but, unlike Scheherazade, who spun her nightly stories to postpone execution, Johnny ultimately welcomes death because life cannot match his fantasy.

Johnny compares his passion to Romeo and Juliet's, reminding us that he was the same age as Juliet. But the better Shakespearean parallel is Iago, particularly in his post-Freudian guise, unconsciously in love with Othello and so jealous as to destroy him. This kid is such a mess that he plays his own Desdemona too! Flanders has had the rare luxury of playing Johnny in various revivals of the play since the original run. His performance is beautifully nuanced with a great handling of the dialogue, the regional English accent and, disturbingly, Johnny's touchy-feely sensuality as he relives the affair as though the adrenaline and testosterone were really pumping through him. Desperate for love and desperate to keep his lover online, Johnny becomes a weird modern counterpart to Jean Cocteau's 'elle', desperately trying to keep her lover on the phone in La voix humaine.

Told after the events there is a sense of withheld conclusion to the story. The script might have returned to the present, where it began briefly with the older Johnny, for a postlude explaining what happened to him after those 170 or so crazy days of online espionage and leaving us wondering if we could - or should - believe him. Nonetheless I Love You, Bro is one of those plays that make its effect by taking its audience into a dark and scary place. Cass's script exploits the improbability of the story, creating the same effect you get watching a thriller film. And like a good thriller, that thrill is in wondering how far it will go and to what dark and scary places it will take its audience. Where it takes us is into the dark side of male sexuality. Johnny is overtaken by an unstoppable and inexplicable homoerotic obsession. His heart pounds with fear and desire as his virtual boyfriend strips on cam and, even though he is physically sickened by that arousal, he determines to make Mark love him. The staging is reduced to a minimum. Occasionally a crescent moon or the chat text is projected against the wall, but an office chair is the only prop on a darkened stage surrounded by half-lit junk. Barely discernible amongst the junk are abandoned children's toys lending an additionally creepy feeling of abandoned innocence. Because it is told in a single voice it would make an equally thrilling short story or, as it depends on deceit and not even being seen, a great radio play.

I Love You, Bro (2007) By Adam J Cass
Johnny - Ash Flanders
Director - Yvonne Virsik
Designer - Jason Lehane
Composer - Nick Wollan
Three To A Room Productions
Tower Theatre, Malthouse
10 - 28 February 2009

This is an expanded version of the review in Canvas

Review - Yellow Moon - Red Stitch Actors Theatre

2009-02-06T22:36:00.029+11:00

Highland Fling
It must be a Russian thing in that, Russian born, Alex Menglet runs an ironic current through David Greig’s beautiful tragi-comedy Yellow Moon. The stage has been fitted out with red plush curtains like in a grand old theatre and when the dinner-jacketed narrator (Dion Mills) steps out to introduce the teen-aged hoodlum and his unlikely accomplice it becomes apparent that the curtain is one of the many theatrical artifices in the play. One side of the curtain parts revealing Lee (Martin Sharpe) behind over sized bars, and as the narrator rattles of Lee's list of criminal activity, it becomes obvious he is prison fodder in the making. The curtain on the other side parts revealing Leila (Erin Dewar). Wearing a Muslim woman’s black burka, she is also behind bars. Her prison, Lee suggests, cheerfully taking over the narration and with the popular misconception about Muslim society, is a cultural one. Leila's prison is also self imposed. A studious but deeply troubled girl, she never speaks or socialises. Her only outing is a weekly excursion to the all-night grocery store where she buys razor blades, celebrity magazines and, in the toilet, pours over the glamorous pictures while cutting her arms.

Lee has stolen the engagement ring his mother’s latest boyfriend Billy (Dion Mills) intended to give her and when provoked by Billy, Lee accidentally kills him and with Leila goes on the run, to hide out with his long absent father in the Scottish Highlands.
Intended for younger audiences, the play is written in a narration, the characters narrating each other's as well as their own actions and thoughts. It is also narrated in third person and the irony in the device is magnificent. Having the shy, even self-loathing Leila speak in third person suggests how a person with such low self-esteem would view themselves. For Lee, whose ambition is to become the local pimp, it intensifies his swaggering and over-inflated sense of himself. Being told at second hand it could also be a parody of trial, or even coroner's inquest. The section where they journey by train to the Highlands is done as a vaudeville turn with Lee and Leila singing, complete with piano accompaniment. Then, like Hansel and Gretel they become lost on the mountain where, like babes in the wood are found by a Forester. This forester (Dion Mills) is no hero but they stay on learning from him and each other, undergoing whatever the inland equivalent of a sea change is called.

Sharpe and Dewar are actors definitely worth watching out for. Sharpe has a natural ability to shape a sentence and get every meaning out of it. In a short scene where he speaks to his unseen, drunk and unconscious mother the words are infused with concern and anger. Dewar's face each time the 'silent Leila' fails to speak resembles Giulietta Masina in La Strada. Quickly ranging from a railway station to mountainside hut where a deer is slaughtered the staging is ingenious in its simplicity. A lot happens in the second act (including a climactic scene worthy of a Jacobean tragedy) and so perhaps the ultimate ending is abrupt. But the story telling, particularly in the reflective and beautiful development of Leila’s character is so entertainingly told. It is up-front and confronting about the most fearful issues young people can encounter but the nature of its style disarms without defusing the way it presents them. It has the feeling of Brecht's English disciple, Joan Littlewood and her Theatre Workshop about it.

Yellow Moon – The Ballad of Leila and Lee (2007) by David Greig
Leila - Erin Dewar
Lee - Martin Sharpe
Narrator/Billy/Frank – Dion Mills
Holly - Ella Caldwell
Director – Alex Menglet
Set Design – Peter Mumford
Lighting Design – Stelios Karagiannis
Red Stitch Actors Theatre
2 Chapel Street, St Kilda
4 February – 7 March 2009

Review - Woyzeck - Malthouse

2009-02-05T11:57:00.027+11:00

Army Fatigues
Woyzeck by George Büchner, the science geek who also wrote plays and stories in a style a century ahead of his time, is one of those watersheds in European art that, usually after a long time become hailed as a masterpiece. Büchner was by training a scientist; studying medicine, languages (becoming fluent in French, Italian and English) then specialising in animal anatomy and what we call Biology. His treatises on the nervous system of fish landed him, at 22, a Doctorate and a teaching position at the University of Zurich. His twin love of literature, especially drama, (although no account of his life uncovers a visit to a theatre) took up the rest of his time. Büchner died at 23 but had he lived and settled into his dual academic/dramatic existence, the form or content of Woyzeck would definitely not have appealed to a Biedermeier audience. His two completed plays, Danton’s Death and Leonce and Lenya, were never staged in his lifetime. Danton’s Death was published at the time, Leonce and Lenya was was staged in 1895, Danton’s Death was finally staged in 1902 followed by Woyzeck (after being assembled by guesswork and published in 1879) in 1913 to mark the centenary of Büchner’s birth. When Alban Berg composed his 1925 opera Wozzeck (the corrupt title taken from an incorrect edition of the play that had misspelled the title character’s name) the story was given an international boost and, thanks to the mostly ‘expressionist' styled productions of the opera, hailed as the precursor of the movement. In his introduction to his Oxford University Press translation of the three plays, Victor Price warns that Woyzeck “in method is not slice-of-life naturalism, nor larger-than-life expressionism, though it has been claimed as forerunner of both. Nor is it an anti-militarist tract … it is something far more complex than any of these, a unique work, organically conceived, which defies any attempt to put it in a category.” Bear in mind too that Büchner would have had little conception of ‘naturalism’, ‘expressionism’ or the artistic movement that claim Woyzeck.

The further away from Büchner’s time the more praise Woyzeck, with its brief, blunt dialogue, scenes and action, gets. In our own time that poverty of dialogue, but so essential in its poverty, have elevated it to a template of style. Add to that some magnificent imagery as he describes people and scenes; "you rush through the world like an open razor" says the Captain to the frantic Woyzeck. Music runs through the play, short snatches of folk song, marching band music, fairground music, again with an amazingly rich poverty. In this production some of the songs are set to music by Nick Cave, Warren Ellis, Peter Farnan and, as Woyzeck’s barrack companion Andres, Hamish Michael has come up with his music for his own songs which he performs, like extemporisations, on a guitar.

Even a play in an unfinished state like Woyzeck has a beginning, middle and an end. This re-working by Michael Kantor of a re-working by Gisli Örn Gardarsson has a beginning - and a good one - descending into more of a muddle than a middle before it reaches a good, if ambiguous, end. With the exception of the Drum Major's introductory song which has an awful lyric, the play and its songs goes well until the 'carnival' scene where it gets overburdened with references to office Christmas parties and karaoke and nearly doesn't recover. Scenes such as Marie (Bojana Navakovic) watching the Drum Major (Marco Chiappi) and his band parading through town emphasise, even in their heightened setting, the simple directness of Büchner's writing.

In this version Woyzeck's perilous mental state is presented (beginning with the second scene where Woyzeck is haunted by a vision of death and the gallows). Occasional bursts of gunfire from off-stage suggest too that this regiment is on active service. Socratis Otto as Woyzeck is incredibly moving with his disarmed and disarming smile of his joy when he sees his beloved Marie and their child. In the same way he is frightening in Woyzeck's terror as his psychotic visions overwhelm him. The casting and playing of the Woyzeck's tormentors, the Captain (Merfyn Owen), Doctor (Mitchel Butel) and Drum Major is good in the way they are modern counterparts of earlier theatrical expressionism. Mitchel Butel's performance as the Doctor degenerates into a drag burlesque during the Carnival scene from which it never recovers. Pity, as in his first appearance he wears a skeleton T-shirt and Mickey Mouse ears (as though 'Mickey Mouse' was used here in its derogatory sense). Changing the Drum Major's gift to Marie from earrings to roses also means Woyzeck's line about how lucky she is to find two (most people only find one earring) make no sense.The important 'cat' scene, where the Doctor demonstrates the results of his crackpot experiments on Woyzeck and when Woyzeck, his physical state beginning to crumble like his mental one, gets the shakes, is truly scary. Tim Rogers as narrator and, briefly as the Carnival Barker, becomes something like the balladeer from The Threepenny Opera. Armed with a mandolin he and the band even have a few songs that sound like they were from a Brecht play. Peter Corrigan's set also evokes German expressionism of the 1920s. Doctor Caligari-like the jagged and raised stage splits open revealing an inner chamber where the cause and effect of the play - Marie's betrayal of Woyzeck with the Drum Major and then her murder by Woyzeck - are performed, in this isolation chamber it appears to the audience in a different reality, like one of Woyzeck's visions.

Woyzeck (1837) by George Büchner adapted by Gisli Örn Gardarsson
English translation by Gisli Örn Gardarsson, Ruth Little and Jón Alti Jónasson
Woyzeck - Socratis Otto
Captain - Merfyn Owen
Doctor - Mitchel Butel
Drum Major - Marco Chiappi
Marie - Bojana Navakovic
Andres - Hamish Michael
Narrator/Carnival Barker/Knife Seller - Tim Rogers
Director - Michael Kantor
Set, costume and mask designer - Peter Corrigan
Merlyn Theatre, Malthouse
31 January - 28 February 2009
90 minutes (no interval)

Happy 200th Birthday Felix Mendelssohn

2009-02-03T17:41:00.003+11:00

... and, had she not become one of the most famous literary suicides since Sylvia Plath, Sarah Kane would be having her 38th birthday. Interestingly, if not morbidly, this coming February 20 will be the tenth anniversary of SK's death.

Review - Poor Boy - Melbourne Theatre Company

2009-01-29T11:10:00.014+11:00

A Doll(boy)'s House
“For the majority,” said Jean Cocteau, “a work of art cannot be beautiful without a plot involving mysticism or love”. Matt Cameron’s Poor Boy has a bob each way by including both and, like one of Cocteau’s elegant films (like the voice from the other side coming from the radio which was a feature of Cocteau's Orphée), creates a spirit world alongside the real world where mysticism and love are intrinsically bound together.

Daniel (Guy Pearce) has been killed by a hit a run driver whilst on a Zebra crossing. He was studiously keeping to the black lines, it was a foggy night, he was wearing a zebra mask and, we discover, was asking for it. Thirteen minutes later at the stroke of midnight a boy is born in another part of town. When the play begins it is the night before that boy's seventh birthday. He has become withdrawn, prone to fainting spells and worrisome child to his parents Viv (Linda Cropper) and Sol (Greg Stone). That that night he is nearly hit while on a zebra crossing. Then the boy announces to Sol, Viv and sister Sadie (Sara Gleeson) that he is not their son or brother but an adult man and marches off to join his wife Clare (Abi Tucker), mother Ruth (Sarah Peirce) and brother Miles (Matt Dyktynski). The families are united by the creepy boy and by the end of the first act the circumstances leading up to Daniel's death are uncovered. The second act needs to prepare every one's soul, not just Daniel's restless one, for final truth that has caused to him to occupy - Dybbuk style - the young boy for seven years.

Iain Aitken's set is a dark world. A drab, grey, house full of of generations of bad memories that haunt as much as any spectre. As the play opens the ghost of Daniel wanders through the house lifting dust sheets off the other characters as though they were ghosts themselves. In Cameron's script the grief over the physical loss of one son, the emotional loss of the other and breakdown of both families have rendered them able to speak only in aphorisms or do only things that have overtly symbolic value. The climax, for example, has Sol, like his biblical namesake Solomon, settling with his revelation, the dispute between the rival mother's Viv and Ruth. Tim Finn's songs have been slotted into the action, 'juke box musical' style, but not with consistent dramatic value. In some instances it feels as though Cameron's script purposely includes key works from Finn's songs in order to launch yet another one into the action. But, as with Malthouse's Sleeping Beauty, audiences cant help enjoying hearing familiar songs and when they clinch a dramatic situations all the better. The singing is very good, Pearce sings even better than I remember (I saw Grease) and puts across a big, heart-felt ballad, crooning high notes and all. The rest of the cast as impressive and often give startling twists to some of the songs in their new dramatic contexts. The band is great too, a cross between a rock and pit band with just a touch of strings and some really attractive mallet percussion in places.

Even with a secksay international movie star in the lead Poor Boy is only one half of the attraction; the new MTC’s ultra theatrical new Sumner Theatre in Southbank is the other. Spacious foyers, masses of glass walls allowing for natural lighting in the foyers (where you see the other kind of stars shining in the night sky as you exit the auditorium). Inside the theatre the walls are peppered with quotations in blue lights from plays while the seats in the single-level auditorium cascade down to the stage like as in a classical amphitheatre with impressive sight lines and acoustics.
Poor Boy (2009) a play with songs by Matt Cameron and Tim Finn
Daniel - Guy Pearce
Viv - Linda Cropper
Sadie - Sara Gleeson
Solomon - Greg Stone
Clare - Abi Tucker
Ruth - Sarah Peirce
Miles - Matt Dyktynski
Boy - Gulliver McGrath, Jack McKinnis-Pegg or Hunter Stanford
Director - Simon Phillips
Musical Director - Ian McDonald
Set Designer - Iain Aitken
Costume Designer - Adrienne Chisholm
Lighting Designer - Nick Schlieper
A co-production between the Melbourne and Sydney Theatre Companies
Sumner Theatre
21 January - 8 March 2009
150 minutes (including 1 interval)

Review - The Genuine Exhibition - Midsumma Festival

2009-01-27T17:16:00.008+11:00

The exhibition title, The Genuine Exhibition, as Troy-Anthony Baylis explains in the catalogue interview “is a loaded, multivalent (meaning to have many values, meanings and appeals) title. Knitting is a very traditional craft of Ireland and Western culture and Baylis’s Aboriginal and Irish heritage could be one of the many ‘strands’ that appears to ‘thread’ - to use appropriate metaphors - into his deceptively simple art.

Baylis is also gay and in the interview stresses the equal importance of his indigenous and queer identity, “identities that have gained considerable mobility for expression.” That mobility is evident in the scope of Baylis’s activity as artist, performance artist and activist. He recently assumed a drag identity based on the pulp-romance novelist Barbara Cartland which, in its artistic context explores albeit humorously gender roles, pre and post feminism (by mocking both the frilly, fluffy appearance Cartland adopted in retreat from feminism) and the Queer Theory inherent in Drag. Knitting, learned from his mother and grandmothers, was the first ‘strand’ in Baylis’s artistic life, where he explains he was “like a stitching hand, where the control of the works lay with my female elders” and, in the same way when elders, passing on a craft, instill an ingenious ability to adapt objects to any given situation and environment, Baylis demonstrates the same ingenuity adapting the works into a wider artistic practice while retaining the appearance spiritual significance of what he makes. The brightly coloured knitted and embroidered Am an animal and a plant (2008) or monochromatic It’s a grey thing (2009) resemble traditional decorated twined baskets.

Drag evolved as part of Baylis’s ‘coming out process – a fascinating paradox as the notion of ‘coming out’ would imply an unmasking of the self whereas adopting drag is to explore and undertake disguises which by their nature are insincere or patently false.

The artworks in the current exhibition are installed to compliment one another, the knitted works and painted works sit alongside one another mimicking each other’s structure in their composition. The paintings, made from rows of x’s as opposed to the more familiar dots of Central Desert paintings (and seeming to be in direct contrast in Western thinking to dots). The 'x' refers to a kiss which in turn refers to "romantic performance," the performance of the finished artworks being as important an aspect of Baylis's work as the work he physically performs. The rows of tiny x’s in the paintings flow across the canvases like row upon row of stitches in the knitted poles that hang by them. Similarly the knitted poles, made from tonally matched pink and lavender wools, echo the rows of crosses in the paintings.

Troy-Anthony Baylis, The Genuine Exhibition
Australian Dreaming Art
116 Gertrude Street, Fitzroy
23 January – 21 February 2009

Review - This Is Our Youth - Inside Job Productions

2009-01-17T16:18:00.011+11:00

The Stoned Age
Set in New York in 1982 Kenneth Lonergan's This Is Our Youth uses the dawning new conservatism in US social and political culture and its effect on the youth of that decade as a parallel with the new generation. Social commentary aside, the play emerges as one of the most engaging American comedies of the last twenty years; a three-hander with superior characterisations and situations and very permissivce as though Neil Simon were writing a comedy in the style of David Mamet. The conceits of the middle-American business class are played up with an almost Ortonesque absurdity. Escaping from his bullying, lingerie manufacturer father, geeky Warren (Ashley Zukerman) escapes (with $15,000 of his father’s shady money) and crashes at his drug-dealer friend Dennis’s (Ben Geurens) apartment. In the long opening scene these Mamet-styled bad boys in training plan a series of drug deals using Warren’s money as capital, after first having a celebratory splurge on drugs and champagne in which Dennis plans to win back his feuding girlfriend and Warren hopes to win favour with her friend Jessica (Nicole da Silva). Naturally it all goes wrong and the two hopeless stoners are left alone, the classic ‘odd couple’. Lonergan casts the play as a succession of duos for either Warren and Dennis or Warren and Jessica. In doing this he gives more emphasis to Warren's character as sap to the overbearing Dennis or opening up to the catalyst provided in the first scene with Jessica and then closing down again in their ‘morning after’ encounter. As the play ends Warren is symbolically adrift in the adult world, having lost his precious childhood toys - and prized 'toaster amazing' - and ill prepared for adulthood. There is the feeling that Warren and his kind will not survive oncoming 'Reaganomics' generation. Lonergan’s script is very good and detailed however; filling two well balanced acts where everyone’s back-story is filled out in the dialogue with the same unforced detail.

Andrew Bailey’s set for Dennis’ grungy apartment is practical and detailed down to a packet of Aunt Jemima’s pancake mix in the cupboard while Govin Ruben’s lighting bathes it the hazy light of unwashed globes. As the self-important Dennis Geurens sports an amazingly consistent accent, as do the rest of the cast. Zukerman uncovers every facet of the wounded and vulnerable Warren in a beautifully detailed performance that exploits the intimacy of the acting space. In the scene with Jessica, one of the funniest wooing scenes written, her brittleness and Warren’s sensitivity unfurl in a most impressive display of acting and direction.

Produced by a newly established company Inside Job Productions, comprising Zukerman, Geurens, director Nicholas Pollock and producer Martina Murray, the play is mounted and performed down to the smallest detail and is a very impressive debut work.
This Is Our Youth (1996) by Kenneth Lonergan
Dennis – Ben Geurens
Warren – Ashley Zukerman
Jessica – Nicole da Silva
Director – Nicholas Pollock
Set Designer – Andrew Bailey
Costume Designer – Mel Page
Lighting Designer – Govin Ruben
Sound Designer – Robert Stewart
Fortyfivedownstairs, 45 Flinders Lane, Melbourne
15 January - 1 February 2009
140 minutes (including 1 interval)

Review - Rosalie Gascoigne - Ian Potter Centre

2009-01-16T13:59:00.012+11:00

Fame came late to the New Zealand born artist Rosalie Gascoigne (1917–1999). Emigrating to Australia in 1943 as a war bride she settled in Canberra as the wife of astronomer Ben Gascoigne raising three children and practising nothing more artistic than flower arranging. She progressed to more rigorous Japanese flower art of Sogetsu Ikebana and achieved such individuality to be praised by the creator of the discipline, Sofu Teshigahara. With more time to spend on art she began to experiment with the now familiar assemblages of scrap iron, packing crates and other found objects.

The retrospective exhibition covers her short but very productive professional career beginning with her whimsical assembalages similar to, if not inspired by, her near contemporary, the American Joseph Cornell. As her profile increased her work lost some of that fantasy as she worked toward a more abstract use of found material. The most important of these experiments were the work created from wooden packing crates, cut up and re-assembled with her natural eye for the beauty and potentional of such material. She progressed into an ability to place pieces of warped sheet metal alongside each other with a feeling for form, space and placement that, knowing her skill with the rigourously simple Ikebana, is hardly surprising.
It is a pity that she never returned to the whimsy and nostalgia of her earlier assemblages with their more powerfull manipulation of such banal material as the Arnott's parrot or scraps of art-deco linolium but, constantly refining towards kind of "less in more" visual Zen, she achieved a great deal in a short time.

Ian Potter Centre

Federation Square, Melbourne
19 December 2008 - 15 March 2009

Review - Grace - Melbourne Theatre Company

2009-01-09T11:09:00.016+11:00

Mother, Son and Holy Ghost

"Above all, do not attempt to use science (I mean, the real sciences) as a defence against Christianity. They will positively encourage him to think about realities he can't touch and see."

C S Lewis The Screwtape Letters

For a jointly written play (by theatre boffin Mick Gordon and “the public face of British atheism” philosopher A C Grayling), Grace is a well devised piece of theatre. Grace (Noni Hazlehurst) is a science professor, eloquently demolishing Intelligent Design in her lectures as succinctly as she demolishes, albeit less eloquently and 'graciously', all trace of religious belief amongst her family; non-observant Jew and retired teacher Tony (Brian Lipson), their son Tom (Grant Cartwright) and "daughter-in-law elect" Ruth (Leah Vandenburg). Tom and Ruth are lawyers and we see him with Ruth studiously rehearsing a defense, unconsciously - Freud gets thrown literally as well as sub-consciously into the textural mix as well - striving to emulate his mother's verbal precision. When Tom abandons Law for the priesthood Grace is outraged. Priests to her are another species of lawyer that encourage and defend fanaticism.
The play has ironies; Grace is the daughter of an aggressively religious father and, after defending Islamic militants as a lawyer, Tom’s religious ambition is cut-short by them. With less talk that irony could be strengthened. Instead it has the feel of one of Ibsen’s philosophical/religious tracts reworked for the 21st century, Brand perhaps, but in reverse, and suffused with Kierkegaard’s atheism confronting the need for religious experience. Instead of going up into the icy mountains like Brand, Grace participates in a scientific experiment to simulate religious experience with unsettling (for her) results. Unlike Ibsen and other writers who pit their firebrand against society Grace remains firmly within a domestic setting. Apart from Ruth (a reference to the Biblical character?), who is quickly absorbed through pregnancy and then tragedy into the family, no outsiders enter to challenge Grace. We glimpse her, again, in another of her eloquent lectures condemning the place of bogus religion in US politics, but her impact on the world is not the stuff of this play. Instead it steers into the domain of a domestic tragedy. It is well written but ultimately becomes another study of loss amongst the upper middle class like Ninety or Love Song.

The play’s ‘preachiness’ runs the danger of becoming a secular sermon and is at odds with the more obviously theatrical parts that try to give it momentum and personality. That is considered a kind of Atheist tract blots out the plot. In its closing scenes it is beautifully acted. Ruth, after suffering Grace’s intellectual barrages for so long retaliates in a beautifully arced speech that rises and falls as precisely as a good lecture, even trailing off for a few beats into silence that prepares for Grace’s lament, this time with a different and illogical passion magnificently contrasting with her clinically calculated speeches. Perhaps if the play were skewed a little more to this story of woman who appears to have blocked out more than just her religious feelings, but how right the worthy devil Screwtape was.
Grace (2008) by Mick Gordon and A C Grayling
Grace Friedman – Noni Hazlehurst
Tom – Grant Cartwright
Tony – Brian Lipson
Ruth – Leah Vandenburg
Director – Marian Potts
Designer – Adam Gardnir
Lighting Design – Matt Scott
Composer – Darrin Verhagen
Fairfax Studio, The Arts Centre
2 January – 14 February 2008
95 minutes (no interval)

London buses are saying it more succinctly

Review - Billy Elliot

2009-01-02T15:07:00.017+11:00

Billy Lyre

This musicalised version of the popular and populist 2000 Billy Elliot film is by the original screenwriter (Lee Hall) and director (Stephen Daldry). Perhaps it is their continuing involvement in the production that saves it - and in some parts actually intensifies it - from the bad choices that plague other films-turned-into-musicals. The first act is the most effective although the early 'establishing' scenes, chiefly the one introducing Billy’s home life, father (Richard Piper), Grandmother (Lola Nixon) and brother (Justin Smith), are often awkward and overly long. Other scenes such as Billy’s hated weekly boxing lesson introduce the perpetual course language and character of Billy and his community. The crucial scene where Billy is first exposed to dance at Mrs Wilkinson’s (Genevieve Lemon) weekly ballet class is, conversely, an excellent example and the first of several scenes combining dance, drama and singing inventively. Even more successful are the subsequent scenes depicting the clashes between the striking miners and the police which are juxtaposed with Billy’s determined attempts to master Mrs Wilkinson shonky interpretation of the RAD syllabus. Rows of tutu wearing ‘coal miner’s daughters’ weave around alternating rows of miners and police who move in determinedly ‘un-danced’ looking choreography. These scenes are highly effective and reach their zenith in the act one finale when Billy, forbidden to attend a Royal Ballet School audition, bellows through the streets where the strike has spilled into a riot, his anger riding him over picket fences and riot shields. This thrilling fantasy sequence echoes the power and theatrical effectiveness of the famous ‘rumbles’ from West Side Story.

Act two makes less of an impact. Another fantasy sequence where the young and older Billies dance together resembles a circus wire act while a song and dance when Billy is asked at his Ballet School audition ‘what it feels like when he dances’ is corny and carries little of the urgency of the act one scenes where dance thrillingly energised the inarticulate child. Unlike the film, where Billy’s ultimate success as an adult dancer is briefly glimpsed, the stage show ends quietly with the defeating miners returning to work and Billy, after bidding his dead mother farewell, leaving Durum for London and the Royal Ballet School. Fearing leaving the audience with such a downbeat ending an all-singing, all-dancing curtain routine has been devised where the cast, including the miners, sport tutus and tap-dance. This well-meaning 'encore' unfortunately annihilates the melancholic mood and everything that has gone on before.

Ian MacNeill’s sets and particularly Paul Arditti’s lighting scheme convey the gloom of Billy’s home town. A high brick wall and cable wheel both blackened with centuries of coal dust and surmounted by the ominous initials NCB (National Coal Board) dominate the stage. The mechanism that rises and lowers the multi-storied set for the Elliot household, however, does become a trifle tiresome in its unnecessary elaborateness. This grimy set provides a continuing reminder of the shows proletariat back-story, even if the script - swear words aside - is little advanced on the genteel agit-prop of British pre-war dramas like Love on the Dole. There are few breaks from the oppressive gloom, one in the opening to the second act with the Miner's Club Christmas Show, reminiscent in its ramshackle way of the troop show in South Pacific, but even then the jollity is only comprehensible to anyone familiar with the history surrounding the 1984-85 strike. The other is the sudden and surprising appearance of the ten-year-old crossing dressing Michael, who tries to entice Billy into the world of pre-pubescent transvestism in a dance routine backed by a chorus of larger than life, tap dancing frocks. It is so over the top in its gaudiness to make any of the numbers in Priscilla Queen of the Desert pale into insignificance.

Elton John’s musical imprinture is apparent in many of the ballad songs. The choral songs for the miners have the same feel as the popular politicised songs for genuine miners penned by the likes of Hans Eisler and made famous by Paul Robeson. They are introduced in a marching song “The Stars Look Down” that sets the scene of industrial chaos as sentimentally as the 1940 film of the same name. At other times songs and routines echo shows like Chicago or John's own popular ballads but ultimately the music remains forgettable. It is the purely danced moments that provide the most immediate and lasting impressions, saving the show, as it does the title character, from his routine fate.
Her Majesty’s Theatre, Melbourne
Production and booking details at the Billy Elliot website

Vale Harold Pinter

2008-12-26T10:24:00.003+11:00

Tributes and commentaries will flow more expansively and eloquently elsewhere but the Australian premiere of Harold Pinter's No Man's Land at the old Playbox in Exhibition Street was a defining moment for me.

Happy 100th Elliot Carter and Vale Dorothy Porter

2008-12-11T10:21:00.006+11:00

Today is the 100th birthday of American composer Elliot Carter who has composed music for his centenary concert.

Sadly the Australian poet Dorothy Porter has died at the too young age of 54.

Review - Anatomy Titus - Bell Shakespeare/Queensland Theatre Company

2008-12-01T11:58:00.021+11:00

Titus Androgynous
With Anatomy Titus and even the recent Just Macbeth Bell Shakespeare are tapping into a tradition of 350 years of adaptations and re-interpretations of the plays. Titus Andronicus has long been criticised as the weakest of Shakespeare’s tragedies but has undergone a miraculous rehabilitation in the Twentieth Century. Perhaps it was T.S. Eliot writing in 1918, after the horror of World War One, that Titus Andronicus may be farce (followed by Kocher's appraisal of it as "more a malicious comedy than anything else"). Anatomy Titus: Fall of Rome: A Shakespeare Commentary by German poet and playwright Heiner Müller who was considered the most important German writer since Brecht (and from 1970 was associated with the Berliner Ensemble, the theatre Brecht founded). Like Brecht he adapted Shakespeare and classic plays into contemporary statements and in Anatomy Titus edits Shakespeare's play adding new dialogue in places and punctuating the scenes and acts with commentaries of his own on the themes inherent in the play such as violence and racism. One of his additions, having the fly killed by Titus in the 'family dinner' scene sent on to Chiron, Demetrius and Aaron, is even an improvement of sorts in its metaphoric potential. The commentaries are as long or longer than the Shakespeare's important soliloquies and, judging by the translation, Müller is an eloquent poet in the Brechtian tradition.
In a traditional performance of the play, the violence would unfold, each new atrocity to be dreaded more than the last (in Peter Brook's landmark staging in 1955 audience members regularly fainted despite the fact that the violence was abstracted and no blood was seen). In Gow’s production, which Eliot would deem a farce as well, the blood and gore from weeks of previous performances has soaked into the set. The violence is enacted ritualistically; stage blood scooped from a bucket and smeared across heads and limbs or poured over bodies. All roles, including Tamora, Lavinia and the Nurse are played by male actors. In the prologue which eliminates Shakespeare's act one the back story and events which lead up to the vengeance motive are played by the actors as actors who allocate and workshop the roles. The solution with the women, one actor (Thomas Campbell) applying lipstick and adopting a flouncy pose for Lavinia while another (Peter Cook) does little more than smear makeup (that Duck Egg blue favoured by Ancient Britons and 1960s Pan Am air hostesses) across his eyes. Neither is a true indicator of these particular characters and neither embody the requisite femininess required for the character. Tamora is one of Shakespeare's first bad women who's lust for power and sex - which was discussed in part in Germaine Greer's Doctoral thesis - destroys the social order. The mutilation of Lavinia (unseen in Shakespeare) is given onstage by Müller as one of his commentaries.

As Titus John Bell creates a character as complicated as Hamlet, even to using his assumed madness to wreak revenge. Müller's script and Gow's production deny the traditional tragic depth to Titus (I have become too familiar with the corny Argo recording of the play made in the 1960s with William Devlin making every line more tragic than the last and Jill Balcon, similarly making every one of Tamora's line more evil than the last). The 'I am the Sea" speech is cut and the 'Banket' scene with the black fly is played with Bell rattling out his lines like a man demented rather than a man fixated by grief. Despite its obscurity Melbourne has seen three stagings of the play via Melbourne Festivals but all as adaptations. Bell's concept of the title role was so tantalisingly complex a more conventional staging of the Shakespeare with him would be very great experience (with Robyn Nevin as Tamora and perhaps Alsion Bell as Lavinia?). Aaron the 'moor' is referred to more often in Müller's version a 'negro' and racism of Shakespeare's is magnified by a few more centuries of racist stage representation with the actor (Timothy Walter) with Christy Minstrel make-up and stock gestures (when he says 'O Tamora' his gesture evokes 'O Susanna'). The set is a vast open box, not unlike an Elizabethan stage, made of plywood and stained with layers of stage blood. The single entrance is blocked by wall mounted with books which are used as weapons (ingeniously in the archery scene where the books, smeared with gore, are flung at the back wall) or displaced reason when one is symbolically burned. The racism and horrendous and irrational violence by one civilisation against another remain as the most obvious and perpetual points of the play. The opening scene, with actors playing at acting, provide, if anything, are new elements of farce or malicious comedy that may require a new Eliot to explain but make for a difficult transition into the serious intentions that follow them.

Anatomy Titus: Fall of Rome: A Shakespeare Commentary (1984) by Heiner Müller after Titus Andronicus (c 1594) by William Shakespeare.
English translation - Julian Hammond
Director - Michael Gow
Designer - Robert Kemp
Lighting designer - Matt Scott
Composer and Sound Designer - Brett Collery
Titus Andronicus - John Bell
Marcus Andronicus - Robert Alexander
with Thomas Campbell, Peter Cook, Scott Johnson, Nathan Lovejoy, Steven Rooke, Christopher Sommers and Timothy Walter.
A co-production of Bell Shakespeare and the Queensland Theatre Company
CUB Malthouse
26 November - 6 December 2008
Malthouse Theatre
130 minutes (no interval)

Review(ette) - Orlando - Opera Australia

2008-11-28T16:42:00.008+11:00

The stage action begins with the overture and at its conclusion it has set in place an incredible magical/psychological landscape. General Orlando's office, with its looming map of the Middle East and Africa is suddenly crowned by a starlight sky. The magician who is controlling Orlando's most dangerous mission ever - to fall in love and battle with his own jealousy - enters holding a naked flame in his hand. Justin Way's production sets the opera in a unspecific HQ somewhere during World War Two and (unlike Harry Kupfer's disappointing Otello, which relocates the story to the mid twentieth century but proceeds to ignore the fact and cause more dramatic problems than it sets out to solve) refers, humorously to dozens of wartime romance films and various jingoistic wartime propaganda. The clever and canny self-referencing is like Dennis Potter only using Baroque opera instead of popular songs from the era. The wall that shatters into many columns is especially effective, becoming a maze for the love-struck and love-lorn characters to wander around. The magician, in silver military dress and modest walrus moustache, looks a little too much like the soviet propaganda images of Stalin 'defender and savior' suggesting he may not be as benign as we would think.
The shepherdess Dorinda is a cross between a land-girl and Red Cross volunteer, perpetually knitting socks. The Princess Angelica (Emma Matthews) appears to be a mysterious, border-crossing but glamorous refugee (a spy?). Orlando is in red leather throughout and with his tendency to violence, that he is mad for most of the opera and that his staff wear black shirts - one even sports a eye patch - could even suggest that the hero and army are Fascists.

The sheep become a bit of a problem, was there a special deal on novelty sheep statues and Way couldn't help himself and bought the lot?

Musically it is utterly gorgeous, the singing especially by Matthews and Tobias Cole (as Medoro) is crystalline (considering the size of the theatre). The trio that ends act one is one of Handel's most beautiful creations and, despite its languidness, creates the dramatic tension of the rivalry in love between the protagonists. Matthews deals valiantly with the relentlessly low tessitura, occasionally singing a passage up an octave just to give it some variety. As with her performance in Hoffmann last year she has a very special ability to declaim and her voice projected into the big house easily and tirelessly. If you only see one thing by Handel this Christmas, don't make it Messiah, see this.
State Theatre, The Arts Centre
December 10 & 13 2008

Review - The Work of Wonder - Red Stitch Actors Theatre

2008-11-27T13:02:00.023+11:00

In a director’s note André Bastian offers a premise for Danish author Christian Lollike’s play as “theatre about art, faith and terror”. More importantly Bastain explains that The Work of Wonder is a project as much as a production and the characters in the play are actors played by actors. The performance begins while the audience are still in the foyer, the actors enter dressed in 18th century coats and miming to Baroque opera while, like the manager in the prologue for the theatre from Goethe’s Faust, one of the actors reads the play’s ‘argument’ to the crowd as well as warnings that it contains ‘adult themes’ and various material considered offensive. The original Danish title is Underværket, which could be translated as ‘undertaking’ and is subtitled "The re-mohammed –tv show", was inspired by an essay by the philosopher Slavoj Zizek on the destruction on the World Trade Centre and which refers to Karlheinz Stockhausen’s notorious if misquoted statement that the attack on the World Trade Centre was “Lucifer's greatest work of art”.

Lollike’s play takes Goethe’s and just about every other philosopher’s and creative artist’s thoughts on the purpose and effectiveness of art right up to Stockhausen’s comment which provides an opening for the play where the actors evaluate, among other things, how media savvy the events of 9/11, the Russian School and Theatre sieges and the Rwandan Civil War were. In an interview in The Age Red Stitch's Artistic Director David Whiteley referred to the play as "almost burlesque, contemporary and irreverent" which describes the stylistic mix of the first part, parodying as Mark Ravenhill did with the self-centred artists in Pool (no water), artists pretentiously responding to catastrophe as high or low art (in that same Age interview Bastian says the artists "try out different ways to make a performance about terrorism but end up always talking about themselves"). Populist art forms like cinema are bagged as are most of the social, religious and economic philosophies that underpin how our society evolved into one that responds, however cynically, to events like 9/11 the way that it does.

The mass media is in turn critiqued for its inability to concentrate for more than three minutes, even when it is dealing with the biggest news item of the millennium. The play unfolds in a succession of smaller scenes that thrash out an idea only to be overtaken by another and even includes danced sections. These shifts in style subvert any idea taking shape. The first part of the play is schizoid, full of repeated catchphrases and inconclusive statements, like the media jumble of visual and audio grabs that have come to represent the collective memory of 9/11. One section is acted to suggest that it is improvised, the actors laughing at and responding to one another's telling of the text and at most times the cramped space is full of very physical acting. In the second part the physicality subsides and in stillness collective memories of 9/11 and other recent acts of terror form scripts that the actors flesh into more substantial character vignettes.

The dance interludes that tumble in and out of the play are initially disruptive but it is dance that supplants words and images in final and beautiful closing moments. Donning dust masks the four dance a minuet as grey dust falls around them, finally producing the artistic response to the catastrophe that the players set out to do. With the sense of orderliness and grace that the dance brought to the conclusion of classical theatre - think of the final scene of any Gluck opera - the play ends in a choreographed synthesis of beauty and terror. Theses last few scenes; if somewhat incongruous from what has gone on before provide an intellectual and emotional jolt in the substance and continuity, so different from the irreverence of the earlier scenes. The staging matches the fragmentary nature of the performance. A metal ramp leading to a dead-end rather than higher plane as does a wall of steel mesh which provides a theatrical barrier between performer and audience and which leads nowhere but the distancing barrier is broken when the actors stand in front of it making the latter scenes more dramatically compelling.

The Work of Wonder or The Re-Mohammed-Ty Show (2005) by Christian Lollike
English translation by Greg Hanscomb
With Dion Mills, Meredith Penman, Tim Potter & Chris Saxton
Director – André Bastian
Choreographer - Peta Coy
Set Design – Peter Mumford
Lighting Design – Stelios Karagiannis
Red Stitch Actors Theatre, Rear 2 Chapel Street, St Kilda
19 November – 20 December 2008
Bookings: Red Stitch or 03 9533 8083
70 minutes (no interval)

picture: Jodie Hutchinson

Vale Richard Hickox

2008-11-26T09:29:00.008+11:00

Conductor and music director of Opera Australia Richard Hickox has died suddenly in England. While the coverage here in Melbourne's The Age has been to dust off the recent dust up over musical standards let's not forget some of the positives. Without Hickox's influence OA would probably not have mounted Prokofiev's Love for Three Oranges, Shostakovitch's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (one of the most extraordinary operas ever written!), Strauss' Arabella, Previn's A Streetcar Named Desire, Dvorak's Rusalka and that fascinating concert version look in on Ralph Vaughan Williams's parable of middle twentieth century and wartime angst A Pilgrim's Progress and not to mention the ressurection of the two Britten productions Billy Budd and Death in Venice.
Hickox did not cause the same boardroom flare-ups as Simone Young, whose repertoire choices were similarly offbeat, not were the productions in the same class as, say, Young's of Alban Berg's Lulu but the variety of repertoire, the profiling of 20th century and even recent work is a step towards internationalism not appreciated as much as the internationalism of star performers and artists.

Trevor Nunn's RSC King Lear on DVD

2008-11-21T11:19:00.004+11:00

For those who enjoyed (or missed, or couldn't get tickets for) the Royal Shakespeare Company road tour of King Lear last year, the production was adapted for and filmed for television and is now available on DVD.

Pity the radical, reworked Seagull was not filmed. Frances Barber was the ultimate Arkadina.

Review - The Hypocrite - Melbourne Theatre Company

2008-11-20T16:57:00.017+11:00

The rich but foolish Orgon (Gary McDonald) and his mother Madame Pernelle (Kerry Walker) have fallen for the religious zealot Tartuffe (Kim Gyngell), who nearly seduces Orgon’s wife Elmire (Marina Prior) and robs him of his estate before he is unmasked. Justin Fleming’s translation is faithful to Moliere’s original, even to the improbable final scene where the King intervenes to apprehend Tartuffe (the widely known Richard Wilbur translation morphs the character into a bailiff's officer who is revealed to be acting on the King's order). The verse, with its short, deliberately rhymed phrases, is retained too creating an artificiality that, under Peter Evans’ tilts from satire into farce. As scenes ride towards their climax Fleming’s witty rhymes escalate with them often clinching the situation hilariously. Elsewhere there is a lighter touch such as the speech by Orgon’s brother Cléante (Nicholas Bell), where he tries to warn him about Tartuffe’s hypocrisy by describing how a truly good person would behave.

The play may be a 17th century but the style is like a French farce from two centuries later. Stephen Curtis’s set creates its own artifice. Created to look too short on either side of the proscenium, with wooden supports visible on either of the walls between where the set ends and the proscenium begins. It is masked, however, so that actors are not seen before or after they enter or leave the acting area. It signifies the obvious deception that underlines the plot as well as well 'framing' the artificiality better than a gilt proscenium arch. The costumes, also by Curtis, mix 18th century and contemporary catwalk fashion and continue the artificiality.

As Madame Pernelle Walker sets the pace in the opening scene with such ferocity her disappearance until the final scene is hardly noticed. McDonald is in his element; with a well-executed set of double-takes and repeated gestures that signal the character’s harried lack of control over his household. He darts about the stage in thigh high boots, lime green coat and a candy floss wig looking like an ostrich dressed in Christian Lacroix or a very camp Michael Horden. That green is the dominant colour of both Orgon’s and Madame Pernelle’s costumes might even be deliberate to emphasise how ‘green’ they are at being duped by someone like Tartuffe. Orgon’s son Damis, daughter Mariane and future son in law Valère have less stage time but are given a chance for a flamboyant moment or two. Damis is a sulky, baroque emo, quick to judge like his father and who puffs with self importance – part like his father and part like Rik Mayell - when he discovers Tartuffe’s first attempt at seducing his mother.

The overly emphatic verse adopts the pace of a limerick which suits the predictability of the plot in which Moliere has held off Tartuffe's entrance until nearly the half-way point, after everyone but Orgon and his mother have roundly bagged him so that we have doubt about his double-faced character and just follow the rhythm.
The Hypocrite, adapted from Tartuffe by Moliere
Cléante - Nicholas Bell
Mariane – Sara Gleeson
Tartuffe – Kim Gyngell
Orgon – Gary NcDonald
Dorine – Mandy McElhinney
Elmire – Marina Prior
Damis – Chris Ryan
Laurente – Martin Sharpe
Madame Pernelle – Kerry Walker
Flipote/Monsier Loyal – James Wardlaw
Valère – Ashley Zukerman
Musician/King – Bert Labonte

Director - Peter Evans

Set & Costume Design - Stephen Curtis

Lighting Design - Matt Scott

Composer - Ian McDonald

Playhouse, The Arts Centre. 8 November - 13 December

170 minutes (including 1 interval)

This is an expanded version of the review published in Melbourne's new arts,
entertainment and lifestyle publication Canvas magazine

Interview - Dominica Matthews and Tobias Cole on Handel's Orlando

2008-11-14T15:32:00.017+11:00

CaStraight

In 1994, a controversial collection of essays in a book entitled Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, brought some very famous musicians and their music out of the historical closet. One of the authors, Gary C. Thomas, gathered enough evidence about lifelong bachelor George Frideric Handel to come up with a ‘homotextual Handel’ who gravitated toward the most homo-centric places in Europe at the time: the Italian and London theatres, where he wrote operas especially for the famous Italian castrati. These castrati – men castrated before puberty in order to preserve their high voices – dominated the opera houses, attracting legions of both female and male admirers. Nearly 300 years later, Handel’s fantasy operas seem camp inversions of male heroics: particularly an opera like Orlando, where a castrato sang the title role while the other male lead, Medoro, was taken by a female singer!

In Opera Australia’s new production of Orlando, director Justin Way bends the gender the other way, with the title role being sung by a woman: mezzo soprano Dominica Matthews.“There were two types of castrato,” Ms Matthews explains, “soprano castrati and alto castrati. They sang both female and male roles; the soprano castrati sang female characters while the alto castrati specialised in male ones, boys on the verge of manhood. “These days mezzo sopranos sing the roles that are young men, and Orlando is one of these characters, so his music is way down in my boots. I’ve had to put away my mezzo soprano voice for the time being to concentrate on the lower contralto music.”

Queering the Pitch claims that because castrati sang male and female roles and women sang male roles the audience at the time did not automatically associate high-pitched voices with women. In some operas they “were confronted with men who sang their love for each other in similar registers, regardless of the gender assigned them by the libretto” Baroque opera gave rise to a kind of 'aural homosexuality'. Tobias Cole, who sings Medoro, knows one of many examples of this. "There is an opera, Marc'Antonio e Cleopatra by Hasse and the great castrato Farinelli was in the first performance of it singing the role of Cleopatra," he says. "I suppose to the ears of people of that time the idea of a male character being sung up high was not as peculiar as it is to us. Life was so different, think of the camp costumes men wore! I feel there must have been a very wide spectrum of what it means to be male. How strange and challenging the castrati must have been. It was a freak show certainly and people thought they must see this. Audiences now expect quality of story and a certain truth of character so there is more pressure now to make the love scenes more sexy and even show a bit of flesh. That expectation of audiences today for verismo in theatre makes it necessary to have the lovers as male and female. Of course you could also go for the lesbian bent but it does make a difference and more importantly gives a director more opportunities to consolidate that by having a male in a male role. I was in a production in Perth, the revival of Lindy Hume’s for OzOpera where both Medoro and Orlando were sung by men. The funny thing was when she did it originally for the Melbourne Festival she had two women in the roles but in the Perth revival she had men and could take it further; she had Christopher Josey (as Orlando) taking off all his clothes for the mad scene, as he does in the Ariosto Orlando Furioso.

Cole is a counter tenor, a male voice type which can extend into the soprano range creating a sound similar to the extinct castrato. Like Handel's and other operas from the Baroque, the modern interest in the counter tenor voice began at about the same time in the mid-twentieth century. One of first important singers was the male alto Alfred Deller. Deller came to prominence just after the Second World War and began to make recordings and give performances and experiment in early music performance practice with his ensemble of singers of musicians, the Deller Consort. Such was the impact of Deller's voice that composers began to write again in earnest for that voice, Britten amongst them with the role of Oberon in his opera of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Audiences soon began to appreciate the sound of the counter tenor, if not fully understand it - a French woman, upon hearing Deller sing, asked him "Monsieur, vous êtes eunuque", to which Deller replied "I think you mean 'unique', madam".
But even to Cole himself, that sound is still surprising. “Whenever I sing," he laughs, "I think ‘Oh! I wasn’t expecting that,’ a high voice coming out of a man,’ so what we have to do is create that ‘sound scape’ that the audience accepts. In performing a Baroque opera now,” he explains, “the first aria is used to ease people into that world and often it takes the first act to take people into that sound scape.

Handel took the story from the epic poem Orlando Furioso about the medieval knight Orlando and his adventures in exotic and pagan worlds but Way’s production uses twentieth century references.“The idea that he wanted,” says Cole, “is to capture a time when going off to fight in a war was a good thing. You couldn't do that today so he sets it in the Second World War when people felt that going to fight was a necessary evil. There is a brilliant design idea starting it in what looks like Churchill’s’ War Room with a map on the wall. The room flies out and a larger version of the map is revealed which begins to fracture and becomes the forest. At the end it goes back to the War Room and people feel that the opera is Orlando’s dream”.
“Orlando is a great military general,” says Matthews, “who spent all his life fighting and who has no experience in sexual matters. Now he is in love for the first time and does not know what to do.” In Way’s production Orlando is a very masculine war hero, looking like a fighter pilot and Matthews is perfecting masculine attributes to do that conception full justice. “I’m getting used to the idea of walking like a man,” she laughs. “When a woman walks she takes small steps, putting one foot in front of the other, men, particularly Australian men, don’t, they take wide steps. And just this morning,” she adds, “I asked three different men how I should put my hands on a table because I know it would be done differently.”

Orlando (1733) by George Frideric Handel is at the State Theatre, The Arts Centre on November 27, 29 and December 2 & 10
Now in its second edition Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology is published by Routledge.

pictured: Senesino, the castrato who created the title role in Orlando

This is an expanded version of the interview published in Melbourne's new arts, entertainment and lifestyle publication Canvas magazine