Performance: How Like an Angel

Circa and I Fagiolini

Directed by Yaron Lifschitz

Musical director Robert Hollingworth

Winthrop Hall

February 29, 2012

There were high expectations for How Like an Angel, the union of circus and vocal music which made its world premiere in Winthrop Hall on the auspicious 29^th of February.

Auspicious because the show, a co-production of PIAF and the Norfolk and Norwich Festival, has been commissioned as part of the celebrations attending that other phenomena of this leap year, the London Olympic Games.

It wasn’t just Brisbane’s cutting edge circus theatre Circa, the celebrated English vocal ensemble I Fagiolini and the producers who assembled at Winthrop with high expectations. 

We got everything we came for, but, ultimately, How Like an Angel was something less than the sum of its wonderful parts.

I Fagiolini too often seemed to be in excess of requirements. This came to a head when they burst into a piece by the Zulu composer Bheka Dlamini in the style of Joseph Shabalala and his Ladysmith Black Mombazo. The singers performed it with enjoyment and enthusiasm (right down to a little unassuming ululation), but what it meant, and what it was doing there, simply escaped me.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Music: Baro Banda

The Festival Gardens

February 28, 2012

Apart from being a whole lot of fun, the Turkish/Australian gypsy band Baro Banda’s exuberant show at the Festival Gardens taught us a lot about the music that inspires these six peripatetic musicians.

Murat Yurcel, Alisha Brroks and Savas Zurnaci

The trick is in the rhythm, the “beat of nine”, which the band’s charismatic lead singer Murat Yucel demonstrated before leading us in clapping and then dancing to it. This nine-beat rhythm is behind much music for the belly dance, as well as Turkish and Greek folk songs. You can practice it at home: it goes 1 2 3 1-2, 1 2 3 1-2.

It’s a quite distinct feel from the rhythms of Western Europe and Africa in our musical DNA, and it evokes a different physical response from the blues and rock ‘n’ roll beats we’re used to.

That’s the driving wheel of the music. Its magic is the insinuating melody that weaves through and above the rhythm. In the hands of the band’s gypsy clarinet master Savas Zurnaci, those tunes led us away to different places and times.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian.

Music: Striggio and Tallis: Music in 40 Parts

I Fagiolini

Conducted by Robert Hollingworth

Perth Concert Hall

February 27, 2012

In a way I’m glad that Robert Hollingworth and his I Fagiolini chose Senfl’s silly little Glaut zu Speyer, complete with clockwork arm movements, as the encore after their astounding performance of polyphonic masterpieces from the sixteenth century, anchored by two pieces for 40 parts, Allesandro Striggio’s Missa ‘Ecco si beato giorno’ and Thomas Tallis’s famous Spem in alium.

Perhaps Hollingworth deliberately tempers his approach to music of such transcendent beauty by keeping things fairly light-hearted around the edges. If he hadn’t, I would have been a danger on the roads, such is its power to take you up and away.

Apart from praising all the musicians who contributed to this wonderful evening, Hollingworth and the eight perfect voices in I Fagiolini, Joseph Nolan and the admirable St George’s Cathedral Consort Choir, Paul Wright and his fine instrumentalists (many of whom I assume were from UWA’s School of Music) and the sublime cornetto player Gawain Glenton, I freely confess I’m not capable of seriously analysing this music or the technical quality of this performance.

So let’s be a little frivolous about it too. Despite its beauty, and the high religious tone of its subject matter, there is something very playful and wide-eyed about this music. These guys were the Brian Wilsons of their day, stumbling on the Renaissance version of stereo and, like the Beach Boys’ genius, going for it for all they were worth. I’ve no doubt the music was an uplifting spiritual experience and a vital copasetic to its first listeners (anything that could take your mind of smallpox and poisoners would have to be), but it was also designed to stimulate their dull sublunary senses in the right here and now, even as it opened a window to the hereafter. The pulse of the sound, its sweeping panorama, the erogenous, logical pleasure of forty voices singing forty different parts coming back together for the Amen.

It’s an orgy in the ears, and the Good Vibrations of its era. If God was Walt Disney, and Heaven was in Anaheim, this would be the music playing in Fantasylandl.

Here's Robert Hollingworth to explain it properly:

And you can link here to Big Bill Yeoman's take in The West.

Theatre: Driving Into Walls

By Suzie Miller

Barking Gecko Theatre Company

Directed and designed by John Sheedy

Featuring Harrison Elliott, Michael Smith, Rikki Bremner, Thalia Livingstone and Matthew Tupper

The Studio Underground, State Theatre Centre

February 25 – March 3

pic: Jon Green

Last year, I called another show about alienated youth in Western Australia, Reg Cribb’s The Damned, memorable and unlovely, and that’s also an apt description of John Sheedy and Suzie Miller’s collaboration on Driving into Walls.

Cribb’s essentially fictional story drew on a number of real-life stories from around Australia, while Driving into Walls is the result of interviews and workshop exercises with 500 young people from around the state. It tells their private stories, about the perils and pitfalls of 21st century life for young people, in their own words.

Theatre: Atishoo

DNA

Directed by Rachel Riggs

Performed by Anne Marie Biagioni and Adam Bennett

Subiaco Arts Centre Studio

Until March 3

The great “Muse of Fire” speech that begins Shakespeare’s Henry V – on our minds because of Propeller’s mighty production at The Maj – is an exhortation to the imagination of its audience: “Think, when we talk of horses/That you see them printing their proud hoofs in the receiving earth.”

That extension of the imagination is the great promise of the theatre, perhaps the primary reason it continues to beguile us in the face of film and other media far better able to represent reality. It’s more than simply the “willing suspension of disbelief”; it’s the positive benefit of the work our minds do to imagine a world complete from the poor scraps put before us on the stage.

That power, and the benefit it brings, was never clearer to me than at a moment in DNA’s wonderful little Atishoo. A tiny girl near me was watching the show’s performer, Anne Marie Biagioni, and puppeteer, Adam Bennett, waving sheets on the floor and above an outsize tissue box while they swayed back and forth. She turned to her mum and asked, “Is that the sea?” There was a few seconds’ silence, and then she exclaimed, triumphantly, “It IS the sea!” What marvels had happened to her in those few seconds when she, maybe for the first time in her life, realised that something could be something else, if you imagined it. I later found out she was all of two and a half years old.

Theatre: Henry V

By William Shakespeare

Propeller

Directed by Edward Hall

Designed by Michael Pavelka

His Majesty’s Theatre

Until February 25

I’ll keep this brief. This is the best Henry V I’m ever likely to see; Propeller give the story of the Hero King of Agincourt an adrenal, turbo-charged energy that would be nigh-on impossible to improve on. In return, nothing in Shakespeare or elsewhere is better suited to the company’s rambunctious, open style; I’d love to see them do Macbeth or, especially, Julius Caesar, but if I had to choose, this is the play for them.

Theatre: The Winter's Tale

By William Shakespeare

Propeller

Directed by Edward Hall

Designed by Michael Pavelka

His Majesty’s Theatre

Until February 25

It’s a bonus, this late tale of William Shakespeare, here in a gorgeous looking, beautifully spoken and often riotously staged production by the English company, Propeller.

The bonus is perhaps also the reason The Winter’s Tale doesn’t rank higher among Shakespeare’s plays, despite containing some of his finest writing and most vivid characters: it’s really two short plays yoked together, worlds apart in style and substance. The good news is that Propeller revels in their differences, and does both more than justice.

Concert: Faustian Pact

Silver Alert and Micki Pellerano

The Festival Gardens

February 14, 2012

Hey! What's Lenny doing here?

A technical hitch delayed the start of Faustian Pact, leading the Breath of Fresh Air that is new PIAF artistic director Jonathan Holloway to bound down the line reassuring us that all would be well and that “twenty years from now we’ll look back on this and laugh”. Well. It’s only the next morning, and I’ve already got the giggles.

Not since the infamous Motorhead gig at the White Sands back in the '80s that had the crowd’s jeans flapping* has such a noise been directed at a paying audience in Perth.

When it was over, there was embarrassed silence, punctuated only by that strange yelping sound made, I assume in approbation, by people who know members of the cast.

An unforgettable evening.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian.

*On the unimpeachable authority of  the immortal Johnny Leopard, who flapped a few jeans himself.

Theatre: Super Night Shot

Gob Squad

Featuring Mat Hand, Erik Pold, Sarah Thom and Simon Will

Sound design and mix by Jeff McGrory and Sebastian Bark

 STC Studio Underground

10 - 13 February, 2012

Gob Squad have a manifesto, and Super Night Shot makes its point very effectively: they claim they are waging war on anonymity, that each of us is not just one more face in the crowd, “easy to replace and easy to forget in a town that doesn’t really need us”. Their mission is to make anonymous people randomly encountered into stars.

And that’s the secret of this unique little show. Really nothing extraordinary happens, nothing (at least not this night) profound gets said, yet there’s an energy, a style and, somehow, a point to it all. In a month when the people of Perth have taken to the streets in the pursuit of art in massive, potentially history-making numbers, it’s great to have the Gob Squad here to catch us at it.  

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Beautiful Burnout

by Bryony Lavery

Frantic Assembly and the National Theatre of Scotland

Directed and choreographed by Scott Graham and Steven Hoggett

Featuring the music of Underworld

With Blythe Duff, Kevin Guthrie, Eddie Kay, Vicki Manderson, Stuart Martin, Taqi Nazeer and Ewan Stewart  

ABC East Perth Studios

10 - 25 February, 2012

Eddie Kay, Taqi Nazeer, Vicki Manderson and Kevin Guthrie

We stood on the pavement outside the ABC’s East Perth Studios wiping our eyes and gasping for breath. The cause of this disruption to our emotional equilibrium was the mighty Beautiful Burnout, the collaboration between the National Theatre of Scotland and Frantic Assembly, the company of directors Scott Graham and Steven Hogget that anchors this year’s PIAF theatre programme.

I only hope that the rest of Jonathan Holloway’s first festival has other shows as good as this. It will have none better.

If sport is devilishly hard to fictionalise on film – perhaps boxing and baseball are the only games to produce a body of satisfying cinema – you’d be forgiven for believing it was impossible to bring to the live stage. It’s the miracle of Beautiful Burnout that the muscularity, discipline and beauty of training and sparring, and, eventually, the peril and violence of the prize fight, come to life with an intensity and authenticity of unparalleled effectiveness. 


Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: The White Divers of Broome

by Hilary Bell

Directed by Kate Cherry

Featuring Caitlin Beresford-Ord, Adriane Daff, Kylie Farmer, Michelle Fornasier, Stuart Halusz, Sean Hawkins, Yutaka Izumihara, Miyuki Lotz, Kenneth Moraleda, Jo Morris, Greg McNeill, Tom O’Sullivan and Ian Toyne  

Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre

February 1 - 16, 2012

For the second consecutive year, Kate Cherry’s Black Swan State Theatre Company begins its season, and makes its contribution to the Perth Festival, with a sprawling tale of one of the skeletons in the closet of Australian history.

This is a good thing. For all its faults, at least last year’s Boundary Street shed some light on the strained relationship between Australian civilians and US servicemen during World War II.

Hilary Bell’s The White Divers of Broome does the same for the strange, exotic boom that drove the Kimberley town of Broome from its foundation in 1883 well into the 20^th century.

It’s a cracking story and powerful, instructive history. But whether it makes for great theatre is another question.


Link here to the complete review in The West Australian.