Theatre: Next to Normal (★★★)

Brendan Hansen and Rachael Beck

by Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey
Black Swan State Theatre Company
Directed by Adam Mitchell
Musical Director David Young

Designed by Bruce McKinven
With Shannen Alyce, Rachael Beck, James Bell, Michael Cormick, Brendan Hanson and Joel Horwood
Heath Ledger Theatre
Until Nov 22

I’m sure we’ve all been waiting for a rock musical about bipolar depressive disorder with delusional episodes, and now we have it – Next to Normal (at the Heath Ledger Theatre, directed by Adam Mitchell).
Certainly the Americans, who are miles ahead of the game in such matters, were. When the Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey-penned show hit Broadway in 2009 it was showered with awards (including a rare Pulitzer Prize for a musical) and rewarded with record-breaking box office takings. It’s since travelled the world; this is its fifth Australian staging.
It’s a strange beast. One thing that it’s not, despite the tag and the publicity, is a rock musical; if these songs, most of which sound like scrunched up and binned attempts to write another Defying Gravity, are rock, then Angus Young wrote Jesus Christ Superstar.
I’m not even sure that it’s a musical in the accepted sense. Oh, there’s music, lots of it; there are 42 songs in the show’s 130-odd minutes, surely a record, but that leaves precious little time for anything else. The music serves no purpose other than to carry the text. Dance is discarded entirely, spoken dialogue all but. So is humour (there was originally some, I read, but it was excised in the pursuit of cohesion and a “responsible” approach to its depiction of its hard, dangerous subject).
It as if we are at two shows at once: one, a dark drama on the devastation caused by mental illness, I’ll gladly see again; the other, the one with all the watery music, I’ll happily pass on.     

Read the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: National Interest

Black Swan State Theatre Company

Written and directed by Aiden Fennessy

Designed by Christina Smith

With James Bell, Julia Blake, Grant Cartwright, Michelle Fornasier, Stuart Halusz and Polly Low

Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre

5 – 20 May, 2012

Grant Cartwright, James Bell, Stuart Halusz and Julia Blake (pic Gary Marsh)

1975 is a great swirl in the minds of Australians who lived through it. It’s unsurprising that an obscure post-colonial fracas, albeit one close by in Portuguese Timor, wasn’t high on anyone’s agenda. Or that reports that five journalists working for Australian TV networks there were unaccounted for didn’t impinge greatly on our congested consciousnesses.

Even when their deaths, in the village of Balibo, were confirmed on November 12, it was low priority news. 

In one ordinary suburban house in Melbourne, though, and for one ordinary Australian wife and mother, it was the day a world ended. The day she knew her son Tony had died.

Thirty-two years later, in Aiden Fennessy’s elegiac National Interest, that mother, June Stewart (Julia Blake) defies her own diminishing strengths and, surrounded by the shades of her 21 year old son Tony (James Bell) and his mates in the Seven Network crew who died alongside him, reaches out for peace. 

For Fennessy, who also directs the play, this must have been a voyage deep into his own heart. All these people exist, or once existed, and Fennessy is June Stewart’s nephew, and Tony Stewart’s cousin. He manages this potent mix of real life and theatre with great intuition and impeccable sympathy.

National Interest is by a great margin the most significant new play Black Swan have premiered in the Heath Ledger Theatre, and the most complete, moving and satisfying production they have mounted on its stage. 

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian