The 2015 Turnstile Awards

Federal Arts Minister George Brandis made a surprise appearance at the glittering Turnstile Awards ceremony to announce he was giving some trophies of his own. It was a little hard to work out what they were, though. Or who he was giving them to.

There may be dark clouds on the horizon, but the WA theatre biz still delivered a harvest of both quantity and, by and large, quality, in the last year. 

The Turnstile Awards acknowledge outstanding WA produced (or co-produced) stage shows opening in Perth between September and August each year. 

There is no set number of Turnstile winners, and no attempt to rank them in order of merit: Turnstiles are a pat on the back, not a competition.

In 2014/5 there were 62 “eligible” productions (a few more than last year) reviewed in either or both The West Australian and this blog. Inevitably some others get missed, especially around festival time – apologies to them. 

Thirty of them were shows I had no hesitation in recommending; that’s an impressive proportion, and outnumbers those you’d have been wise to avoid by three to one – and a number of those were admired by people with far better judgement than mine.

Which all means that coming out to the theatre in Perth is an investment in your time and treasure you can make with some confidence. The people who make the shows need your support, more now than ever, and they will reward you for it.

Here, in chronological order, are the nine productions that take home a Turnstile this year:

• Laughter on the 23^rd Floor, Black Swan’s sparkling, handsome revival of Neil Simon’s reminiscence of radio days. Impeccably cast, with Peter Rowsthorn outstanding.
• King Hit, Geoffrey Narkle and David Gilroy took us inside the sideshow boxing tent, and plenty of other places, in Yirra Yaakin’s fine, important revival of this seminal West Australian play.
• Hipbone Sticking Out, a magnificent, sprawling story of the collision of cultures in West Australia’s North-West. Created by Scott Rankin and Big hART, inspired by, and featuring, the people of Roebourne, it had everything theatre should have, and did everything theatre should do.
• Venus in Fur, David Ives' delicious layer cake of a play-within- a-play-within-a-book, assiduously directed by Lawrie Cullen-Tait and sent into orbit by the tall, fair and heedless Felicity McKay.
• Monroe & Associates: Tim Watts, the kindiest member of wunderkind company The Last Great Hunt, created a snazzy little noir world inside a caravan, and invited his audiences of one to try to outsmart him in it.
• Under This Sun, Warwick Doddrell’s outback epic emerged from the heat and dust of the WA desert like a modern-day Burke and Wills, and was as impressive a writing debut as we saw on the Perth stage this year.
• Legally Blonde showed WAAPA’s splendid music theatre course and its soon-to-be world-beating students to perfect advantage at the Regal – and was a sell-out smash hit into the bargain. 
• Gudirr Gudirr, an extraordinary performance by Broome artist Dalisa Pigram combined tens of thousands of years of continuous cultural endeavour with the skills and confidence of contemporary indigenous performing art.
• The Mars Project: for the entire body of work by the 3^rd year acting class at WAAPA this year, but in particular for Will O’Mahoney’s intricate, coherent and moving rumination on ambition, autism and the lure of the ultimate.

And here are some other great shows that could easily have walked off with a Turnstile:

It really has been a remarkable year for The Blue Room and its associated artists and independent producers; apart from their two Turnstiles, Joe Lui’s revelatory correspondence from exile, Letters Home, the gripping rom-horredy Welcome to Slaughter (Lui again, along with Michelle Robin Anderson, Jo Morris and Emily Rose Brennan), Finegan Kruckemeyer’s sparkling fable Those Who Fall in Love Like Anchors Dropped Upon the Ocean Floor (or Twifilladutoff, as I l took to calling it) and the extraordinary Margi Brown Ash and Leah Mercer’s Joey the Mechanical Boy were all terrific. They combined with PICA to present Summer Nights as part of the Perth Fringe, and in it Claire Lovering’s touching solo stand River, Chris Isaacs and Jeffrey Jay Fowler’s razor sharp Fag/Stag and Mikala Westall’s impressive writing debut Moving On, Inc. were all great successes.A good year, too, for Black Swan, who added their pacy, accurate revival of Glengarry Glen Ross to their brace of Turnstiles; and for WAAPA, who also picked up two Turnstiles and could easily have had a third for All My Sons, a splendid revival of Arthur Miller’s near-perfect play.I didn’t share the general enthusiasm for Barking Gecko’s blockbuster The Rabbits, but Marko Jovanovic’s star solo turn in the coming-of-age drama Pondlife McGurk was a standout, as was Nick Maclaine and Isaac Lim’s sparkling Dorothy Fields bio, Exactly Like You downstairs at the Maj.

For the record, a few honorary Turnstiles to brilliant shows that would have won the real thing if they had been from WA: at this year’s Fringe, Bryony Kimmings’ high-style, fearless Sex Idiot, a sleeper with a killer twist, Alice Mary Cooper’s Waves, and Ralph McCullum Howell’s tiny triumph, The Bookbinder; at PIAF, QTC’s powerful Black Diggers; Josh McConville’s superb Hamlet for Bell Shakespeare, and, downstairs at the Maj, John O’Hara and Anthony Harkin’s surprisingly substantial cabaret, Dedications.   

My thanks to the nine Turnstiles winners, and all those that cracked an honourable mention – between them, twenty shows mounted in WA you’d be privileged to see anywhere in the world.

You can read what I had to say about each of the awarded and noted shows by clicking on their highlighted title (thanks to Steve Bevis for his All My Sons review).

Finally, thanks again to everyone who dropped in to Turnstiles over the last year – it’s well into six-figure visits now, and, hopefully, at least some of them didn’t stumble across it looking for a Neil Young album. Please fire in a comment about the awards, even if it’s just to bag them!

The Mars Project (★★★★)

Written and directed by Will O’Mahoney
with WAAPA 3rd Year acting students 
State Theatre Centre rehearsal room
Until 29 August

In 2013, at the suggestion of WAAPA’s programme director Andrew Lewis, the playwright and director Will O’Mahoney embarked on a project to devise and mount an original production with the academy’s then first-year acting class.
The result, The Mars Project, ranks among the most ambitious and impressive new works to arrive on the Perth stage this year.
It must have been a daunting exercise for O’Mahoney; seventeen young actors, a big chunk of two years of their finely honed talent – and a blank piece of paper.
It’s a cast full of enormous potential, and all of them shine very brightly in a work that, perhaps, could only ever have emerged under WAAPA’s auspices, and that we are very fortunate to see.
 Read the complete review in The West Australian

Carrie the Musical (★★)

By Michael Gore and Dean Pitchford
Book by Lawrence D Cohen
Based on the novel by Stephen King
WAAPA 3rd Year Music Theatre students
Directed by Crispin Taylor
Music Director David King
Choreographer Christabel Ellis
Set Design by Madeleine Watt
Lighting Design by Amelia Blanco
Geoff Gibbs Theatre, WAAPA
Until August 29

In 1988, the Royal Shakespeare Company was persuaded to mount a ghastly musical based on an infamous horror story that became one of the biggest flops in Broadway history. Twenty-five years later the show was given a makeover and returned to the stage. The stinger, of course, was that it was still awful. 
None of this is the fault of this cast, another marvellous herd of all-singing, all-hoofing WAAPA musical theatre students, all of whom make the most of a very bad lot.
Let’s hope the Australian musical theatre is able to support professional careers for the stampede of ability heading its way.

Read the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Latitudes (★★)

By Mark Walsh
Directed by Mikala Westall
Designed by Patrick Howe
Sound design Will Slade
Lighting design Chris Donnelly
Performed by Tessa Carmody, Jo Morris and Claire Munday
Until February 21


I have an aversion to plays – Peter Shaffer’s Equus comes quickly to mind – that insist on explaining themselves to you. No such accusation can be levelled at Mark Walsh’s Latitudes (at the Blue Room, directed by Mikala Westall).
It’s an opaque, convoluted affair that, despite strong performances and an impressive creative team, defied my best efforts to untangle.


Read the complete review in The West Australian.

Dedications (★★★★)

Written and performed by John O’Hara
Written and directed by Anthony Harkin
Musical director/piano Luke Hunter
Cello Anna Sarcich
Downstairs at the Maj
20 – 22 August 2015

Perth-born and WAAPA trained (as is his co-writer and director Anthony Harkin), John O’Hara has forged a fine career as a character principal in juggernaut musicals like Cats and, most recently, Wicked. Dedications is his first cabaret, but he and Harkin are as sure-footed, poised and nuanced as the most experienced of its exponents.
Their idea is inspired: bouncing off the real-life Dedications and Love Songs, Richard Mercer’s long-running late night show on Sydney FM radio, O’Hara plays an eclectic mix of lost souls and hopeless romantics, all calling in to empty their hearts to the unseen, endlessly sympathetic, “Love God”.
And he sings. Brilliantly. All those power ballads, from Whitney to Katy, Lionel to Huey, that make the FM world go round.
And when O’Hara dangles himself from an imaginary coathanger in a heartbreaking version of Leonard Cohen’s Bird on a Wire, and follows with a transfixing take on Annie Lennox’s endlessly amazing Why, a great little show becomes something much more substantial. Someone needs to bring it back soon.


Read the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: All that Glitters (★★★)

Devised by Gita Bezard, Adriane Daff, Jeffrey Jay Fowler, Arielle Gray, Chris Isaacs and Kathryn Osborne
Directed by Gita Bezard
Designed by Tessa Darcey
Lighting and sound Joe Lui
Performed by Adriane Daff, Jeffrey Jay Fowler, Arielle Gray and Chris Isaacs
Blue Room Theatre
Until August 29

Here come the Hunters again. Smart as tacks, sexy as all get out and prolific to the point of frenzy, Perth’s theatre’s indie darlings The Last Great Hunt return after a few nanoseconds absence with maybe their smartest, sexiest and most frenzied show yet, 55 minutes of social conscience in skin tight gold lamé to the beat of Taylor Swift.
After “All That Glitters…” we are, of course, meant to fill in the unsaid “…Is Not Gold”. Our country, they say, is doing terrible things to asylum seekers, and we are complicit by our high-life acquiescence, our casual racism and, even more, by the facile sterility of our opposition to these policies and attitudes.
Fair enough too. It’s a point worth making, and the Hunters go in pretty hard at us, and themselves, doing it.

Read the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Hamlet (★★★★½)

Matilda Ridgeway and Josh McConville

By William Shakespeare 
Bell Shakespeare
Director Damien Ryan
Designer Alicia Clements
Lighting designer Mat Cox
Featuring Josh McConville, Matilda Ridgway, Sean O’Shea, Doris Younane, Ivan Donato, Michael Wahr, Philip Dodd, Robin Goldsworthy, Julia Ohannessian and Catherine Terracini
Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre
Until August 16

The Prince is on a roll. There are all-night queues for Benedict Cumberbatch’s West End stand, and Bell Shakespeare’s short season at the Heath Ledger is a sell-out.
As it should be.
This Hamlet, with its clear and intelligent direction by Damian Ryan, should completely satisfy both aficionados and newcomers to the greatest of plays. If that’s too bold a claim for the play, there’s no doubting its hero is the first of drama’s characters. He utterly dominates his play, physically and intellectually. He speaks a third of its 4,000 odd lines; it needs no secondary plots or truly independent second lives.