New Owner (★★★★)
The Last Great Hunt
Created and Performed by Tim Watts and Arielle Gray
Set construction and gadgets by Anthony Watt
Puppet design and construction Chloe Flockart
Music by Rachael Dease
PICA Performance Space
1 – 16 October, 2016
Tim Watts and Arielle Gray, the co-creators and performers of New Owner, are heartstring-tweakers of the first order. Their previous collaborations, The Adventures of Alvin Sputnik: Deep Sea Explorer and It’s Dark Outside, play to rapt audiences around the world, and this will follow in their footsteps.
New Owner sits perfectly in the timeless tradition of storytelling for children, and the child in all of us.
Read the complete review in The West Australian.
Big Bad Wolf (★★★★)
By Matthew Whittet
Directed by Rosemary Myers
Designed by Jonathon Oxlade
Sound Design by Harry Covill
Lighting design by Chris Petridis
Preformed by Patrick Graham, Emma J Hawkins and Ellen Steele
Heath Ledger Theatre
Until 8 October
As you’d expect, times have changed around here since the famously gruesome episode involving Granny, Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf.
These days there’s a Wolf Alarm System in place, operated by the village’s resident serial over-achiever – and Little Red Riding’s descendant – Heidi Hood (Emma J Hawkins), to keep the current Big Bad Wolf (Patrick Graham) at bay.
Only trouble is, Heidi gets few thanks, and makes no friends, for all her good works. The BBW also finds it hard to make any when everyone and everything assumes he’s eying them up for a one-way dinner date.
Read the complete review in The West Australian.
Written and designed by Ralph McCubbin Howell and Hannah Smith
Trick of The Light
Directed by Hannah Smith
Music by Tane Upjohn Beatson
Performed by Ralph McCubbin Howell
State Library Theatrette
Inside a magic book, a boy goes on a journey to right a wrong, save himself and, perhaps, a world.
It’s a tale told, in all its variety, from the earliest fairy tales to today’s multiplex family magnets, but rarely with the charm, wit and inventiveness of this tiny gem from New Zealand’s Trick of the Light.
Read my review from the 2015 Fringe Festival in The West Australian
A Mano (By Hand) (★★★½)El Patio Teatro
Devised, constructed and performed by Julian Saenz-Lopez and Izaskun Fernandez
AGWA Theatrette
Until 8 October
We have no more supple, subtle and sensitive tool than our hands. With theirs, the Spanish artists and performers Julian Saenz-Lopez and Izaskun Fernandez make faces and bodies, tell stories and create emotions in front of our eyes, all from lumps of clay.
The story they tell in A Mano (By Hand) is shrewd, funny, touching but unsentimental, and sad.
Read the complete review in The West Australian.
Sunny Ray and the Magnificent Moon (★★★)
Arena Theatre Company
Written and performed by Clare Bartholomew and Dan Tobias
The West Australian Barn
Until 10 October
When we dumb adults go down in the woods of children’s theatre, we better not go alone. We need guides who really know their stuff.
For me, at the Awesome Festival, it’s Harper, who’s sharp as a tack and young enough to be my grand-daughter (she is).
Overgrown-ups’ main problem, of course, is that we don’t get that fart and poo jokes are the funniest things in the universe. But one of the other traps we can fall into is a consequence of the cultural literacy and sophistication of so much children’s theatre these days. We get to expect shows to deliver as if they were written and performed for us as well as them. But, as Harper shows me, they don’t HAVE to be.
This story – the Sun wants to stay up late and party all night with the Moon and Stars, but they hide whenever she appears, is cute enough, and Bartholomew and Tobias are both energetic and unselfconscious performers. But I’m starting to fidget.
But what would I know? Harper writes all her star ratings in my Awesome programme, and she’s a pretty hard marker (although she did break the rules and gave the fantabulous Madame Lark 5½ stars). Three stars, she wrote. Good fun, well done, she said.
And, in that case, so say all of us.
Read the complete review in The West Australian.
But what would I know? Harper writes all her star ratings in my Awesome programme, and she’s a pretty hard marker (although she did break the rules and gave the fantabulous Madame Lark 5½ stars). Three stars, she wrote. Good fun, well done, she said.
And, in that case, so say all of us.
Read the complete review in The West Australian.
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