Theatre: Oliver!

Performing Arts Association

Directed and designed by John Senczuk

Music Director Ian Westrip

Regal Theatre

Until April 21

Michael Loney

When it comes to the big musicals, we’ve got to pick a pocket or two in this town. So it is with this locally produced pro-am (largely am) production of Lionel Bart’s Oliver! at the Regal.

For all its shortcomings and anachronisms, it’s in many ways more satisfying than the Vegas-style hotel auditorium productions (Wicked, Mary Poppins) that trundle through Burswood, and way better than nothing.

Oliver! is a terribly old-fashioned conveyance (Oom-pah-pah, oom-pah-pah, that’s how it goes…) and this production does precious little to bring it up to date. But it’s a great opportunity for lots of people to try their hand at a big musical, and lots of others to see one in Perth, and for that rare treat we should be grateful.

Link here to the complete review in The West 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

Theatre: When Dad Married Fury

by David Williamson

Directed and designed by John Senczuk

Featuring Jay Walsh, Alinta Carroll, Corinne Davies, Richard Mellick, Alison van Reeken, Lauren Lloyd Williams, Casey Edwards and Edgar Metcalfe

The Metcalfe Playhouse

Until 21 August

David Williamson has had a lucky break.

Love him or loathe him – and there are plenty in each camp – it’s Williamson’s ability to generate the pleasurable sensation of recognition for his audience that has kept him at the forefront of Australia’s playwrights for 40 years.

Alinta Carroll and Edgar Metcalfe

In his best work, that recognition comes from the universality, in particular the universal Australian-ness, of his characters; even in his lesser plays – and When Dad Married Fury is decidedly one of those – he maintains his touch for topicality.

For that, though, a little luck goes a long way: if you could choose a week to premiere a play about a wilful old man, his feisty, much younger, second wife, his dubious offspring and a loose email that brings them all undone, surely this would be it.

Theatre: The Enchanters

By John Aitken

Directed and designed by John Senczuk

Lighting design by Trent Suidgeest

Sound design by James Luscombe

Featuring Richard Mellick, Nick Maclaine, Ethan Tomas, Ian Toyne, David McLeod, Sam Tye, Edgar Metcalfe, Cody Fern, Andrew Hale, John Pratt, Nick Candy and John Aitken.  

Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre

June 1 – 4, 2011

Veteran WA playwright John Aitken has seized the opportunity presented by the opening of the State Theatre Centre to imagine the watershed year of William Shakespeare’s career in The Enchanters, and he and director/designer John Senczuk have fashioned a likeable, albeit patchy, entertainment from it.

It’s a ripping yarn, with cloak-and-daggery at court and lawyers, swords and money in the streets. Aitken has drawn assiduously from his sources, most notably, I suspect, James Shapiro’s terrific 1599, to tell the story of Richard Burbage’s company, the Chamberlain’s Men, and the opening of their new theatre, the Globe.

Aitken can’t resist airing some of the more contentious speculations about Shakespeare, his sexuality and religious and political loyalties among them. Personally, I’m averse to the idea of Shakespeare as a high-class rent boy for the Earl of Southhampton and some of the other detritus of Shakespeariana given credence by the play, but you can be the judge of that.

Link here  to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Her Holiness

Written by Justin Fleming and Melvyn Morrow

Directed by John Senczuk
Featuring Caitlin Beresford-Ord, Jay Walsh, Brendan Ewing, Alinta Carroll, Alysha McGreevy, Charlotte Westrip, Corinne Davies, Richard Mellick and John Aitken
Metcalfe Playhouse

April 16 - 18, 2011

The Mary MacKillop that emerges from Justin Fleming and Melvyn Morrow’s Her Holiness is far removed from the St Mary of recent hagiographic pop nationalism, but not so far that we can’t understand the love and loyalty she has inspired in the century since her death.

This isn’t the great play about Mary McKillop that waits to be staged; when it is, it will contain many of this one’s strengths.

As played with obstinate strength and real warmth by Caitlin Beresford-Ord, Mary may have had a heavenly calling, but her cares and ambitions were for the far-flung, backward settlements of colonial Australia. God may have forsaken them, but sure as hell Mary wasn’t going to.

Starting with literally nothing, and blessed by wanting nothing more, she and her order, the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart, founded schools and orphanages from Ceduna to Mackay, along the way attracting the enmity of many in the fiercely patriarchal Irish hierarchy of the Australian Catholic church.

Much of the action revolves around their repeated attempts to bring Mary down, and her just as determined efforts to keep doing things her way. It’s a great story, and Her Holiness rattles along well while it’s being told.

Other parts of the play are much less interesting. In particular, some long scenes between a contemporary Australian journalist (also played by Beresford-Ord) and the current Pope Benedict XVI (John Aitken) are flimsily constructed and tediously discursive. They do serve a purpose, but they are a dramatic weight the show struggles to carry.

Caitlin Beresford-Ord as Mary MacKillop

By and large, though, Her Holiness is a worthwhile insight into the life and career of our newly-minted saint. Director John Senczuk deals with the text sensitively and efficiently. He’s assisted by solid and engaging performances from the women in his supporting cast, Alinta Carroll, Alysha McGreevy and Charlotte Westrip as Mary’s very human and spirited acolytes and Corinne Davies as a wealthy supporter with all of Mary’s determination and forcefulness.

Brendan Ewing, as the feverish Father Julian Woods and Richard Mellick, in a number of smaller parts, make the most of their opportunities. The venerable John Aitken and Jay Walsh, as the various popes and bishops in Mary’s life and afterlife, are burdened with much of the play’s more awkward text, and in all fairness they often make hard going of it.

Her Holiness is the first production in the Metcalfe Playhouse, a 280-seat auditorium inside the Empyrean function centre in Lake Street, Northbridge. The space – formerly an IMAX cinema – needs a bit of fine tuning, but is a welcome and, it’s claimed, reasonably affordable addition to Perth’s theatre stocks.

With, I’m delighted to report, the most comfortable seats, a legacy of its former life, I’ve ever had the pleasure of watching a play from. 

An edited version of this notice appeared in The West Australian of 18.4.11 link here