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: The Book Club

Written, directed and designed by Rodney Fisher

from the play by Roger Hall

Starring Amanda Muggleton

Subiaco Arts Centre until June 8, returning June 26 - 28  
Bruce Rock June 12
Mandurah June 15
Kalamunda June 18  
Thornlie June 20
Albany June 23

Playing one-handers is a fiendishly difficult craft. Taking an audience with you, and you alone, on the journey of a play requires a charisma and dexterity given to very few performers.

To make an art of it, as Amanda Muggleton has done, is rare to the point of collectible. As she had done in Shirley Valentine and Medea, and as she does here, in Rodney Fisher’s adaptation of Roger Hall’s perennial The Book Club, she uses her charm, and her wiles, to captivating effect.

Muggleton cascades out into her audience – very largely female, very many clearly book-club devotees themselves – and The Book Club becomes a conversation between the performer and us, a bond she makes, and holds, with all her practised skill and ease.

Link here to the complete review in The Wast Australian 

Theatre: Blood Brothers

by Willy Russell

Directed and designed by John Senczuk

Featuring Ian Toyne, Sarah McNeill, Richard Mellick, Simon Thompson, Nick Maclaine, Garreth Bradshaw, Julia Hern, Maree Cole, Tyler Jones, Charles McCombe and Amanda Muggleton

 The Metcalfe Playhouse

Until 4 December

Willy Russell, Amanda Muggleton and Perth are words that fit well together. For a substantial number of theatregoers, they may be all a reviewer needs to report, along with a number for bookings.

It’s easy to understand why. La Muggleton has wowed our audiences, most notably in Russell’s Educating Rita and Shirley Valentine, repeatedly and unfailingly for so many years that the actress and playwright are inextricably linked in our hearts and minds.

But before you make that booking (call 9228 1455, by the way), a few words of warning. Unlike Shirley and Rita, Blood Brothers is a big cast show, and a musical to boot. While Muggleton’s Mrs Johnstone is unquestionably its star vehicle, she’s not the show’s entire focus, or even its central character. And while it shares Russell’s concern with Britain’s class system and the trouble it causes, this is a darker, ultimately tragic, story with a much different mood than his other hits.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian