2010, You’ve Been Good To Me

A Thank You, and the obligatory Best Of Worst Of lists

o everyone who has supported me and my blog and my other writing this year: thank you.  This year has been truly magnificent, and getting so much respect for my writing has played no small part in that.  When I decided to not pursue my Honours degree I knew I was making the right choice; I could have never grasped just how right that choice was.  To everyone who has read, commented, subscribed, or talked to me about something I’ve written, you blow my mind.   To the companies and artists in particular who have taken me on as part of the community, in my strange hybrid of administrator / writer / reviewer / blogger / fan, I am eternally grateful.

Even those of you who have given me bad feedback, the overestimation of the impact of this blog warms my cockles.  Those of you who got here by searching for naked pictures of actors or Plain Janes, you creep me out a little and don’t get my thanks, sorry.

After much hemming and hawing over how (and if) to do a Best/Worst of The Year, I eventually decided to just go for the traditional top and bottom five.   Not necessarily the best and the worst, but in a completely subjective analysis my favourites and my biggest disappointments.  I loved 54 of the 88 productions I saw, and most of the rest leaned towards the love over the hate side, so it’s been a pretty fine year.

Review: Hairspray (and Paragraphs: Mary Poppins)

o be a total cliché and miss-quote a song title in the review of a show: Hairspray is big, bold, and beautiful.  And LOUD, in every sense of the word.   Loud music, loud voices, loud costumes, and above all, a loud set.  It is a fantastic melding of musical theatre and the performing arts, with ultra modern digital screen technology, leading to a hybrid which shows off the best of both the performance on stage and on digital screens.

You Can't Stop The Beat. Photo Ros O'Gorman.

Premiering on Broadway in 2002, this is the first Australian production, and it is an Australian production.  Taking the book and music from the original, Australian director/conceiver David Atkins has brought together an Australian creative team to deliver a product which makes the eight year gap more than worth it.   The team has delivered a production that is both so technically ambitious and achieving to have been given anything less in past years would have been a great loss.

Review: Tusk Tusk

raduating from the Drama School at Flinders University at the end of 2010, for her final student piece director Nescha Jelk has directed Polly Stenham’s Tusk Tusk in an outstanding achievement.

The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind, and another, his mother called him ‘WILD THING!’ and Max said ‘I’LL EAT YOU UP!’ so he was sent to bed without eating anything.

The summer day after the family moves into their new London flat, siblings Elliot (Andrew Thomas) – fifteen, Maggie (Alyssa Mason) – fourteen, and Finn (Walter Buckley) – seven, find themselves alone, again, surrounded by boxes, and a  £70 train-ride from their old home and friends.  Mum has left, they have only the money they found in boxes, and they have no choice but to turn off the lights, turn down the noise, turn on the phones, and wait to know she will come back for them, and everything will be okay.

As Mason alternatively bounces with energy, then lies with lethargy, Maggie almost bursts with insatiable energy until she does burst, and collapse.  Maggie feels the loss of her mother more acutely than her bothers: where Elliot escapes, and Finn finds his parents in his siblings, Maggie must stay and be the “adult.”  Mason shows the jubilance, and mainly the weight, that being alone and scared – scared of what will happen if mum doesn’t return, and scared of what will happen if she does – and fourteen does.

Review: 12th Night

hile travelling on a boat from London in the 1920s, twins Sebastian (Alex Possingham) and Viola (Lucia Ven Sebille) are separated and shipwrecked, finding themselves on the island of Illyria.  There, believing each other dead, the pair go on their separate journeys.   Our path primarily follows Viola, who, masquerading as a page to Duke Orsino (Max Garcia-Underwood) establishes a new life as Cesario.  We follow as Cesario falls for Orsino, who is in love with Lady Olivia (Carolyn Duchene), whom also has a crusher in the form of steward Malvolio (Guy O’Grady).   Lady Olivia, however, has her eye on Cesario.  Or is that Sebastian?

Promo image, or what you will.

This production by Urban Myth Theatre of Youth, as a part of their biennial Shakespeare series, has found itself a very strong young cast.  While Duchene tends to delve a bit too far into hysteria, Lady Olivia’s hysterics – both in love and in loneliness – are given beautiful form.  More likely to be laughed at than laughed with, Duchene’s Olivia is nonetheless a sympathetic character with whom the audience rallies to find her match – something which is true of (almost) all characters.

Review: Boxing Day Test

est anyone be scared off by the title, no more than your absolute basic knowledge of cricket will be required when watching Boxing Day Test. My knowledge perhaps only just extends to the finer points of tippy go, and believe it is best experienced by playing on a sand bar.  I have absolutely no idea of how the scoring works, and to be honest I don’t much care to know.

After I couldn’t go to the Opening Night, or the following night, I was offered tickets to the preview performance: a night I could go to, but I wouldn’t have any time following to write about it.  I also felt strange about going and reviewing on a preview.  I have no problem with going to preview performances, and have done so frequently, but I also feel if I’m reviewing “professionally” then these shows should be untouched.  And they’re probably glad I didn’t review it: I heard the show went for four hours, had five stops, and twice actors were left suspended from the ceiling for eight minutes.  Oh, wait, no, that was Spiderman! The Musical!

This review originally appeared on  www.australianstage.com.au.

Christmas. It’s that time of year again. For some, a time for families, celebration, and looking forward into the future of a new year. Or for others, just the day before Boxing Day, and with it, the glory of the Boxing Day Test. For brothersPatrick (Tim Overton) and David (Nic English) and the Christmas approaching the one-year anniversary of their mother’s death, this test is going to be tougher than most.

Michael Hill’s Boxing Day Test is an often dark and tense look at a particularly hurt family, with damage traipsing back fourteen years finally coming out. Around the holiday,Dave flirts and connects with Patrick’s crush and fellow law student Sophie (Renee Gentle). To try and save from eviction, Patrick asks their father, John (Patrick Frost), to buy the house: he doesn’t realise this will mean his father coming back uninvited into Dave’s life.

Floating around for at least eight years, in an earlier incarnation, entitled Poor Brother, Hill was shortlisted in the 2002 Jill Blewett Playwright’s Award, awarded at Adelaide Writers Week biennially. Despite these early accolades,Junglebean (a young company established and run by English, Overton and Gentle) is giving the script its world premiere production. It is a terrible sign as to the state of presentations of new works by South Australian writers that an accomplished piece of text has taken so long to reach the stage.

But through Junglebean, and under direction and dramaturgy by Duncan Graham, audiences are finally getting the chance to discover the script. While slightly uneven, where the piece tends to get unnecessarily bogged down in verbalisation rather than simply allowing the strength of character to come through, Boxing Day Test is a crafted portrait of four human and flawed characters, some more than most, and it is the final destination of each of these characters that truly creates the production.

Such characters cannot be brought to the stage without a strong cast. Here, English is the standout. While Dave is often unlikable in his actions, English strikes the balance between tortured soul, sexy bad boy, and a hint of brains, to create a thoroughly engaging character.

Frost is in fine form in the most narrowly written of the characters, yet this is a play that belongs to its young cast.Overton and Gentle truly come into their characters towards the last third of the play, as their characters are drawn in to the conflict. Gentle as Sophie in the last scene in particular left my heart beating. Overton does his best turn not as the straight-laced-student Patrick, but the drugged up Patrick. Where Gentle finds her best performance asSophie finds great strength, Overton finds his best as Patrick falls apart.

In an interesting directorial choice by Graham there is minimal physical contact between all characters on stage. While violence and sexual relationships are spoken about and are the overall themes of the piece, when onstage they are never extended beyond a short grab or a skimming embrace. While emotions run raw in a play that is so much about physical mistreatment, Graham never expands these emotions physically. This interestingly serves to create a level of frustration in these restrictions placed, yet highlights the tensions which are already present in the text, and do not need to be literalised.

Even in the one scene of overt violence, Graham maximises on the skills designers Tammy Boden, Andrew Howard and Ben Flett, as a fight is created with a single actor, strobe lights, and frantic music. It is simultaneously a brutal exploration of violence and an exploration of the power of theatre to create images and ideas where there are none.

Playing around in the bleak, near squalor, of Boden’s simple, pared back and realistic set, Flett’s lighting design is tight, quickly changing between scenes in interplay between an abrupt change in Howard’s sound design. Within the frenetical world of the characters (particularly when under the influence of drugs or beer) these abrupt changes and high energy add to the tension of the construct.

As a counterpoint to these moments of high energy, Flett’s lights in the moments of tension and near quiet highlight the menace and pain within the script and the characters. Within the already small forum of The Bakehouse this extreme tightening serves to constrict focus onto the best parts of English’s performance.

Howard’s sound, primarily used in the scene changeovers and for snippets of commentary from the actual Boxing Day Test on the television, but also as more of a sound track to scenes veering on montage, provides a palpable energy and helps build the humour and the tension within the script.

The piece, while a fully contained story about a single familial conflict, also satisfyingly feels as if it fits into a much larger framework: there is a clear trajectory of where the characters have come from to get to this point, and an ambiguous yet present trajectory that these characters and relationship continue off the page beyond the confines of Hill’s script.

Yet, while Hill, Graham and Junglebean are tackling tough subjects that take a risk, overall it almost veers too much on a side of caution. Deliberate ambiguity in the set up led me to concoct a much darker storyline in my head, ultimately incongruent with the conclusion of the piece. The production would benefit from being pushed just a bit further into darkness and over that edge it sits on. Nonetheless, Boxing Day Test is a strong, new Australian work, from a young Australian company, which deserve to be seen.

Junglebean presents Boxing Day Test by Michael Hill.  Directed by Duncan Graham, set and costume designer Tammy Boden, sound designer Andrew Howard, lighting designer Ben Flett.  With Nic English, Patrick Frost, Renee Gentle and Tim Overton. 

Sometimes, I write about film.

here was a discussion on twitter today about the validity of star systems in reviewing (#gamescore).  It seems to me that the consensus was they’re generally not liked, but some people see them as being, if not strictly necessary, helpful as either a “fall back” position, or an “entry point” for the reader.

A week ago I managed to grab the ear of a theater director friend for a few minutes, and ask him for his criticism on my criticism, to which he said he had the complaint that sometimes I take too long to get to the point.  He wants it there: first paragraph what was it about, second paragraph what I thought.  To that I said I’m not sure it is exactly “my job” to make it that easy for anyone.  I take the position that in my 800-odd words I try to explore the piece, and certainly reflect on what I thought the merits or downfalls were, and then out of that should come an overall picture of what I thought.  For me, my reviews are not “consumer advice.”  While of course they can be seen as such, and I hope that when I see a good play I can convince others to see it, it’s not my job to say “buy tickets” or “don’t buy tickets”, and so I don’t necessarily want to be able to give all of my opinions in the second paragraph, let alone in stars.  Sometimes my view is glaringly obvious, and sometimes it’s not, and I think that’s okay.  Your mileage may vary.

So I am very glad I’ve never had to use a star system.  Maybe one day I will have to.  Knowing me, I will be very methodological about the whole thing and start grading in percentages and then convert it to stars and that will just get messy.  But this rather long introduction is really just to let you know I wrote about the star system in film reviews.  You can read all about it here.