Cabaret: Little Death Club

You could not ask for a more delicious summer evening to enjoy the intoxicating delights of the Fringe's Garden of Pleasure.  Amid the fireballs and fairy lights, alluring semi-clad performers roam free in this delectable optical feast.  It is no wonder the impressive queue awaiting admission to De Parel Spiegeltent were well primed to submit wholly to the many charms of the supremely seductive Bernie Dieter.   

Dieter, bedecked in glossy black feathers, shimmering sequence and bejewelled stilettos, had ensured there wasn’t a “starfish” among us. Her sultry voice and clever wit rang clear and true in her delightfully funny musical tales. In particular, her online dating foray with her “kinky uber geek” who dressed her as a wookie to “do” her like a “6ft dog” had us all crying with laughter.

The line-up of guest artists this night was pretty solid too, There was Marcel Lucont’s deadpan delivery about Australian capital city greeting signs, and wine that should not be served at the “temperature of balls” along with his poetry on animal sex,: “You said, let’s go wild, so why can’t I put this in there?”.  

The Party Time Ghost duo wowed us with their physicality and remarkable balances. Next up was Leah Shelton, a pole-dancing, wine-swilling tribute to bogan subculture, pelvic thrusting the crowd with a ‘goon bag’ golden shower. 

Completing the line-up was the velvety baritone, Le Gateau Chocolat who asked us to imagine Sandy from Grease as a “black man with a beard” who enjoyed “a steady diet of KFC”, and impressed us with his crowd pleasing rendition of Hopelessly Devoted to You.

From the moment Dieter greeted us with popcorn as we filed in, we knew we were in for a treat and we were not disappointed. We quickly wanted to participate in this enjoyably sexy jaunt that climaxed with us out of our seats, jubilantly dancing in the aisles to Dieter’s finale, "Let's Drink Like it’s the End of the World".   

A truly enjoyable and entertaining evening that left an after-glow of satisfaction and a desire for more.

Hermione Gehle

Theatre: Power Ballad ★★★★½

Julia Croft
Blue Room

Until Saturday 3 Feb 

It’s quite something. Patti Smith’s Pissing in a River, a left field power ballad par excellence, danced by Julia Croft, half naked, face obscured by rock chick hair. A mike stand. A mike.
It’s a sudden insight. Rock ’n’ Roll has two phallic symbols. Those guys and the hot guitar are at one end of it; those women and the microphone at the other.
Croft, whose prescient, Hollywood-busting If there’s no dancing at the revolution I’m not coming was a highlight of last year’s Fringe, and this show, simpler in structure but even more entertaining and fierce, surpasses it.
In its finest moments – an extraordinary, distorted play on the word “theatre” and the horrible threat of “feminist theatre”, and some over the top karaoke (We Belong to the Night, How Can I Get You Alone, the hilariously-impossible-to-sing-along-to No More I Love You) the mood of the audience went past mere exuberance to genuine euphoria.
It was a truly exciting experience, even for a straight white male who was, I guess, the target, or at least the butt, of both the ferocity and the gags.
I understand that Croft brings her own microphone to performances. It must be made of titanium, because it gets a fair hammering as she uses it as chalk, beats it on the floor and all parts of her body, goodies it, swallows it whole and produces - with the aid of some self-manipulated electronica – some of the wildest sounds your going to hear on a stage.
Last year I compared Croft’s ferocity and humour to Bryony Kimmings’s Fringe smash, Sex Idiot, from 2015. Even more so this time around. Hopefully, like Sex Idiot, tickets to Power Ballad are going to be impossible to get by Saturday night’s last show. Make sure you’ve got one of them.

Cabaret: Slap and Tickle ★★★★

iOTA

STC Studio until  Feb 3

The director Mel Cantwell and Pinjarra-boy-making-good iOTA combined to much acclaim last Fringe in The Average Joe, and they team up again, joined by Russell Leonard and a 12-piece WAYJO orchestra, in Slap and Tickle (iOTA is Slap the clown; Leonard his gimp) in the STC Studio.

iOTA, who's made quite a name for himself over a 20-something-year career, operates in the disputed territory between drag and clownery, and he's awefully good at both. What's much, much more, though, is that he's a witty, quality songwriter with a mighty, flexible voice, and the dozen or so original songs he crams into a very busy hour are instantly accessible and surprisingly memorable.

But wait - there's more! His sidekick Leonard is an inspired casting. He's a big bloke – vertically and horizontally – more Canterbury Bankstown than Cabaret Ballet, but he moves that impressive bulk of his with rhythm, athleticism and quite some grace. 

Cantwell's done a terrific job packaging the whole affair up, and Mace Francis and his hot 12-piece WAYJO orchestra is a luxury I'm glad the show could afford. 

This is a show that would knock 'em dead at the Rooty Hill RSL (haven't times changed), but, in the meantime, you should let it beat you up good and proper right here and now!

The Comedy Lounge Perth City

The comedy business has had a somewhat chequered career in Perth, despite producing some big time comedians and much terrific material (Minchin, Creasey, Armadale, Eagles supporters).

For a while the Perth Comedy Festival, based in and around Mt Lawley, looked like it would be the springboard for an ongoing comedy scene, but, for one reason or another, it has subsided into a spin-off of the Melbourne Comedy Festival with no particular local character or sense of place.

That’s left rooms in suburban pubs like the estimable Lazy Susan’s, squeezed upstairs at The Brisbane, and the Charles Hotel carrying the can. Comedy badly needed a place a wider demographic of Perth pleasure-seekers would want to come out for.

There’s no denying comedy’s popularity in Perth – the bulging comedy programme at Fringe World attests to that ­– but, somehow, it has struggled to find that vital ingredient - a home that’s an attraction in itself.

It’s early days, but it looks like that room has arrived.

The newly-opened Comedy Lounge has a lot going for it. It’s got genuine date night black-is-the-new-black style, some sexy lighting, cute little tables (which you can book) on raked levels, and a bar you don’t have to go downstairs to get to that you can mill around in, and even slip out to during the show (choose your comedian carefully). There’s a decent, albeit uneventful, snack menu at reasonable prices and a maître de who seems to get everyone sorted and seated more than satisfactorily.

Which is a long way of saying that this is a fairly cool place to be, located in an increasingly hot part of town among the jazzed-up laneways around Murray Street West.

Which brings on the comedy, and, on the six-pack stand-up night I went, it was well and truly up to scratch.

The great thing about stand-up comedy, of course, is how easy it is to get to you. A change of clothes and a single seat on a Tiger Air red-eye flight and a funny person can be delivered all the way to Perth without the usual logistical impediments to such an outcome.

The other great thing about stand-up nights is that, at ten or so minutes a stand, you can ease your way through the unmemorable, or even the truly awful (though none of this night’s bill, which included Damien Fleming’s little brother Justin, Shayne Hunter, Sean Conway and Marty Bright were anything like that) while you wait for inspiration.

You didn’t have to wait long. Greg Fleet anchored the show, and was as erudite, thorny, self-battering and hilarious as always. I suspect we’re going to see a lot of Fleet and his fellow senior laughmeister, Pete Rowsthorn, at the Lounge, and that’s not a bad thing at all.

On the bill proper, Perth export Rory Lowe’s is droll and dreadlocked with the sort of insights we fondly imagine only a stoner could have. He’s got that greatest of assets a comedian can have – we all know someone who’s just like him. Only he’s funny.

And then along came Townsville’s Danielle Walker. She’s that rare beast, the comedian you don’t know what to make of. For my humour, which runs most to the likes of Neil Hamburger and Paul Foot, Walker is the ant’s pants. She sniggers at her own jokes (so she should), she draws pictures of pigs with amputated legs. She’s just a little bit demented and, like I said, it’s hard to know what to make of her.

And I don’t know if any of us know anyone quite like her.

The Comedy Lounge gets underway in 2018 on January 11, and will have a strong presence during Fringe. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it becomes a place to be as the year cranks up.

The Comedy Lounge Perth City is upstairs at 403 Murray Street, Perth. Shows generally run from Thursday through Saturday, and tickets seem to range from $20 to $35.

Theatre: Master Class (★★★★)

by Terrence McNally
directed by Adam Spreadbury-Maher
starring Amanda Muggleton
and featuring Dobbs Frank, Kala Gare, Jessica Boyd, Rocco Speranza
Subiaco Arts Centre until December 17

There’s a transfixing moment late in the first act of Terrence McNally’s Master Class where the great diva Maria Callas stands caught in the spotlight, arms outstretched, with the balconies of La Scala, the opera house where she reigned as queen for a headstrong, headlong decade from 1950, projected behind her.
Transfixing, because the actor caught in that spotlight is the star Amanda Muggleton, and she is the queen of the stage she is playing on – the Hole in the Wall Theatre (now, prosaically, the Subiaco Arts Centre) – and has been since 1988, when Raymond Omodei (who was in the opening night audience) brought her to Perth to play Shirley Valentine.
And that is the hook of this show, and what makes it such a joy and a celebration despite what is often an overwrought and factually unreliable script.
Off the page it is a master class by the great soprano, now faded and maudlin, combative and overbearing. But it’s another master class as well. Muggleton’s.
She may have already outlived her character by, oh, a decade or so, but she is not faded, not a bit, and remains one of our most generous and formidable stage presences.
So it’s a sort of double act, Callas and Muggleton, and the actor displays her great gifts, an ability to both capture a character, to show us its height and depth, and to concurrently run a commentary on it in a kind of conspiracy with her audience. So a Callas aside, or a Callas trip into the audience looking for victims, is Muggleton’s as well. You can almost hear her whispering in our ear.
The mechanism for this removal of the fourth wall between us and her/them is the director Adam Spreadbury-Maher’s literal reading of the master class – so we are at it, not at a play about it; we are characters, albeit passive extras, in the story.
Thus rendered defenceless, Callas/Muggleton have their way with us, cajoling and pleading, skewering their unfortunate students, the sopranos Sophie De Palma (Kala Gare) and Sharon Graham (Jessica Boyd and the tenor Tony Candolino (Rocco Speranza and Callas’s peers, including, and with particular relish, our own monumental Joan Sutherland.
The singers hardly get a note in edgeways, and the accompanist Manny Weinstock (Dobbs Frank) knows better than to try.
All of which leads to two marvellous set pieces where, with Callas’s recorded voice soaring in the darkness behind the spotlight, Muggleton first speaks the translated libretto of Bellini's La Sonnambula with all the passion and drama of the sung version and, later, uses the aria from Verdi's Macbetto to tell her own tragic story, the loss of her career, her lover Aristotle Onassis and her unborn child.
The music, which also includes Puccini’s Tosca, is gloriously over-the-top (and when the young soloists get to show off their pipes in the curtain call, there’s more Puccini  – yes, Nessun Dorma for the tenor – and the ridiculously impossible Der Hölle Rache from Mozart’s Magic Flute).
Perth is always a better place when La Muggleton is on one of its stages – especially this one.
Don’t be late for class.

Theatre: My Robot (★★★½ )

By Finegan Kruckemeyer

Barking Gecko Theatre Company

Directed by Matt Edgerton

Designed by Ilsa Shaw

Lighting design by Chris Donnelly

Composer and sound designer by James Luscombe

Robot designer Steve Berrick

Performed by Arielle Gray, St John Cowcher and Sarah Nelson

State Theatre Centre Studio

Until November 28

So much of children’s theatre – of all theatre really – is about the journey from here to there, from the unbearable past to a desirable future.

One of the things that makes the extraordinarily fecund Finegan Kruckemeyer’s My Robot different and interesting is that when the play starts its hero, the feisty, ever-so-slightly nerdish Ophelia (Arielle Gray) has already arrived at her destination – and she’s not at all happy about it.

She has just moved to the seaside with her parents (St John Cowcher is her father and all the show’s other characters – we never meet her mother) and while dad is thrilled by their new surroundings, Ophelia pines for the mountains and friends of their former home.

The play’s other point of difference is right there in the title. A functioning robot character called Olivetti (designed by Steve Berrick and wrangled by Sarah Nelson) is Ophelia’s sidekick and lifeline.

She finds Olivetti – or the pieces that will make it up – in a box in a dumbwaiter that connects her room to the café below owned by the haughty, censorious Ms Ogilvie.

Ogilvie’s stink eye isn’t the only challenge Ophelia faces. There’s the town bully, Otis, who wants to cajole her into admiring the seaside town while trying to get her out of it. And there’s her neighbour, Orson, whose allergies and agoraphobia shut him up in his room away from life.

But Ophelia isn’t easily daunted, and once she puts her toolkit to work and builds Olivetti, she’s a force to be reckoned with. As is the little robot, whose powers of telekinesis elicited gasps of delight from the young (and not so young) audience.

Things proceed in typically engaging Kruckemeyer fashion, with all the real set backs and hard-won triumphs he is a master of, until Ophelia, in true Grace Bussell style, daringly affects a rescue from the wild sea and brings everyone and everything to a highly satisfying conclusion.

There’s no beating Arielle Gray if you want feist, adorability and that pinch of nerdiness, and Cowcher shows yet again what a terrific character actor he is. They are both stars, and its wonderful to see them so committed in a show for children. Barking Gecko’s award-winning production values are all on show (Isla Shaw's storybook design, with Chris Donnelly’s lighting and James Luscombe’s music and sound), and Matt Edgerton directs the whole process with precision and ease.

It would have been nice if the budget could have stretched to a second character actor to create more colour and movement (and maybe allow mum to make an appearance), and Olivetti, achievement as it was, was a little cumbersome to excite an audience used to R2D2 and its lively successors.

Those minor issues aside, My Robot comfortably clears the bar set by what now must be regarded as Australia’s leading theatre company for children and young people. We should be grateful for having them here.

   

Theatre: Let The Right One In (★★★★½)

by Jack Thorne

based upon the novel and film by John Ajvide Lindqvist

Black Swan State Theatre Company

Director Clare Watson

Set and costume designer Bruce Mckinven

Lighting designer Richard Vabre

Composer and sound designer Rachael Dease

Featuring Sophia Forrest, Stuart Halusz, Ian Michael, Rory O’Keeffe, Clarence Ryan, Maitland Schnaars, Steve Turner and Alison van Reeken

Heath Ledger Theatre

Until December 3

The last production of Black Swan’s 2017 season marks the completion of the extended and orderly transition from the company’s long-time artistic director Kate Cherry to the leadership of Clare Watson.

During the transition, Watson has gained the trust and friendship of Perth’s theatre community, and, as her much-anticipated 2018 season demonstrates, her board and Black Swan’s sometimes tricksy and disparate stakeholders.

But can she deliver in her own right as the director of a whopping main stage production in the signature theatre of her new town? Well, as we have just discovered, 61.9% is the new benchmark for overwhelming success, and Watson’s splendidly executed and often downright thrilling Let the Right One In does way, way better than that.

We didn’t need to wait long for those thrills to start. The first sights and sounds – Blue Oyster Cult’s smashing Don’t Fear The Reaper (just the opening salvo of Rachael Dease’s soundtrack of 1980’s hits and her own haunting compositions), and Bruce Mckinven’s Rubik’s Cube of a set, animated by Richard Vabre’s lighting and Michael Carmody’s projections, set the senses racing, and the first scenes, an ominous voice-overed narration and, not long after, a bloodlettingly brutal murder, set the nerves on edge.

So, within minutes, it’s apparent that Watson knows her stuff and recruits her staff wisely. Within a few more it’s obvious she has cast just as astutely – and, in the case of her two young leads, with some inspiration.

The business in and around Mckinven’s cube by the cast, supported by Claudia Blagaich and Meabh Walton’s stage management, is adeptly paced, and Rohin Best and Tim Collins’s sound operation is of exemplary clarity and quality.

In such good hands, Jack Thorne’s adaptation of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel and screenplay could hardly go wrong.

As much young romance and teen revenge tale as horror, Lindqvist’s story exposes the unpreparedness of smug, well-ordered suburban society to deal with that which lies beneath and beyond – be it phantasmagorical or all-too-human (as Edgar Cooke and the Burnies have shown us).

Which makes Let the Right One at its heart a grim tale, and Watson is wise to take it seriously. Sure the final flight of the young ill-matched lovers, the boy Oskar (Ian Michael) and the undead Eli (Sophia Forrest) after the destruction of their pursuers and tormentors has a redemptive quality, but the drained corpses they leave behind, and the hunger that will never leave Eli, are not a good fit for cartoon treatment.

Rather like Michael Lehmann’s ’80s cult classic Heathers (there’s something about that decade) it pays to play things straight, even when Eli is wrapped around her victims’ heads like an octopus and doing some extremely unwelcome necking (movement director Claudia Alessi and fight director Andy Fraser are kept busy throughout).

Rory OKeeffe and Clarence Ryan as the school bullies who make Oskar’s life hell are deliciously odious and ripe for come-uppance, while the seasoned core of the cast, Stuart Halutsz, Maitland Schnaars, Steve Turner and Alison van Reeken are exceptional without exception.

I understand that a vampire can only come in if invited, and Sophia Forrest’s Eli is certainly the right one. Tough and sexy, needy and very scary, she clambers over this play – and its set – with remarkable surety and athleticism. Ian Michael’s singular quality shines again here. He makes Oskar vulnerable, complex and surprising, and shows that weakness, like beauty, is only skin deep.

Let the Right One In is a mightily auspicious start for Clare Watson and the new phase of what is now her State Theatre Company. 

Don’t miss it.