Musical theatre: The Beautiful Game (★★½)

Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber
Book and lyrics by Ben Elton
Director and choreographer Meryl Tankard
Musical director David King
Set and costume designer Sallyanne Facer
Performed by WAAPA 3rd Year Music Theatre students
Roundhouse Theatre, WAAPA
August 20 – 27, 2016

The Beautiful Game is a musical about the lives of the players in a Catholic soccer team, and their friends, during the deadliest period of The Troubles in Northern Ireland.
In 2000, when Andrew Lloyd Webber and Ben Elton premiered the work, no one could be sure that Ireland’s sectarian violence had finally ended. Lloyd Webber has compared The Beautiful Game to South Pacific, which premiered only four years after WWII and was controversial for the issues it raised so close to the events on which it was based.
At the time, The Beautiful Game must have seemed just as topical and confronting.
Unfortunately, that’s the only real similarity between the two musicals. For all its sincerity and earnestness, The Beautiful Game feels like a rushed side project for two successful and very busy writers.
Meryl Tankard, who choreographed The Beautiful Game’s original West End season, returns to it as director. Her participation, supported by the Jackman Furness Foundation, is one of the visits to WAAPA by internationally recognised creative artists that undoubtedly enrich its students’ learning.
On this occasion – unusually for WAAPA – the same isn’t entirely true of the audience’s experience.

Read the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Cats (★★★)

Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber
From Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats by T.S. Eliot
Directed by Trevor Nunn
Design by John Napier
Music director Paul White
Choreography by Gillian Lynne
Burswood Theatre
until May 8

There’s little point in regurgitating the story of the gathering of a tribe of cats, the jellicles, under the kindly auspices of the wise and aged Old Deuteronomy to select the fortunate feline who’ll ascend to the Heavyside Layer and be given a new life.
It’s merely a vehicle – a thin and shaky one at that – to introduce the parade of characters Eliot versified.
Each, in turn, anchors a series of all-but-unrelated set pieces; when it comes down to it, Cats is a variety song and dance show.
It’s a snazzy one, though.
It’s easy to see why Cats has been so popular for so long, and why this season will sell its pajamas off, even if it’s a feast that is tastier than filling, and more spectacular than truly satisfying.
 
Read the complete review in The West Australian

Music: Jesus Christ Superstar

by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber

Directed by Laurence Connor

With Ben Forster, Tim Minchin, Melanie C, Andrew O’Keefe, Jon Stevens

Perth Arena

May 31 – June 2

Ben Forster and Tim Minchin

While Jesus Christ Superstar boasts the most coherent narrative of the rock operas, and comes with an ambitious political and religious insight that would have put a bonfire under Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber for most of the last two thousand years, it’s a bit of a jumble at times. It’s also often very heavy (as in metal), not the easiest musical style to bring to the stage.

That’s why, and despite the mixed reception this production has had in the UK, I think an arena staging is a perfectly appropriate way to present what is essentially a piece of music rather than the score of a theatre piece. And, on those terms, this Superstar does what it sets out to do very well.

It’s an absolutely wonderful coincidence that, forty-one years after Andrew Lloyd Webber won a Tony for Jesus Christ Superstar, Tim Minchin, the Perth kid who dreamed of being in it is, almost certainly, going to get one of his own. And much more besides.

Link here for the complete review in The West Australian.