Theatre: Legally Blonde (★★★★½)

By Laurence O’Keefe and Nell Benjamin
Book by Heather Hach
WAAPA 2nd & 3rd Year Music Theatre students
Directed by Jason Langley
Music Director David King
Choreographer Lisa O’Dea
Set Design by Steve Nolan
Lighting Design by Trudy O’Neill
Regal Theatre
Until June 20

Bend and Snap: Jess Philippi, Tayla Jarrett, Heather Manley, Taryn Ryan, Kate Thomas and the ensemble

Omigod you guys – it’s time to get serious!
WAAPA have staged a coup by securing the rights to Legally Blonde, the Broadway hit musical that somehow didn’t make Perth in its professional run in 2013.
It’s hard to imagine a better property for the academy. All the characters bar the lecherous law professor Callahan (Matthew Hyde) and the heart-of-gold hairdresser Paulette (the show stopping Taryn Ryan) are age-specific for the young cast, and the show’s high-energy music and dance fit their talent and energy to a T.
I’m always banging on about how much more than class assignments WAAPA’s shows are, and how you’d be mad to miss them.
And this time I’m deadly serious.

Go to the complete review in The West Australian 

Comedy: Perth Comedy Festival Gala

Perth Comedy Festival Gala
Joel Creasey, Cam Knight, Tien Tran, Gen Fricker, Mike Goldstein, Paul Foot, Stephen K Amos, Craig Hill, Nick Cody, Rhys Nicholson, Angelo Tsarouchas and Tony Woods
Regal Theatre, Subiaco
Wednesday April 29

Crawl over broken glass to see this bloke (pic: Tobias Venus)

The Perth Comedy Festival has defied demographic gravity this year and moved west. It’s now spread everywhere from the UWA campus to the Mt Lawley Bowling Club, the only venue to survive from the festival’s previous iteration.
The great benefit of a Gala is that you generally get the best of each act’s full show. It’s interesting to see how fashions change in comedy, sometimes quite rapidly. There seemed, happily, to be less fixation with sex than a couple of years ago, and far more on various forms of bigotry; admittedly, with four gay men, an Asian Australian and African American comedians on the bill, that might be expected.
As always, Galas are the best of times and the worst of times; you love the variety, but miss the journey a fine comedian takes you on.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Stomp

Created and directed by Luke Cresswell and Steve McNicholas

Performed by Cameron Newlin, Angus H Little, Paul Bend, Ian Vincent, Phil Batchelor, Michael Landis, Leilani Dibble and Asha Jennings-Grant

Regal Theatre

Until August 18

Gus Little

Perth is having a run of shows from what might be called the International Cirquet. These high-production, big top-inspired extravaganzas follow in the footsteps of Cirque du Soleil (whose own Michael Jackson – the Immortal arrives here in a month).

Stomp is one of the most venerable and successful of the type.

It’s trained its audience well. There was much hootin’ and hollerin’ from the stalls as the eight-strong company banged, crashed and walloped their way through a dozen or so routines, mostly in overdrive.

The hook – and it’s a good one – is to make noise on “found” objects, so there’s much banging of tins and steel drums and shopping trolleys, bits of pipe and even more unlikely instruments. It’s appealingly democratic and liberating, but I confess to checking my watch a couple of times a bit too long before the stomping stopped.                   
  Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Slava's Snowshow

Created and staged by Slava Polunin

Performed by Derek Scott, Robert Saralp, Andrey Klimak, Evgeny Perevalov, Ira Selberstein, Nikolai Terentiev, Aelita West and Bradford West

Regal Theatre

Until August 5

The circus is well and truly in town. The acrobats and jugglers are over at Crown in the Empire spiegeltent, but the clowns have taken over the Regal Theatre in Slava’s Snowshow.

And what a show it is.

Slava Polunin has inherited centuries of European clowning tradition; a line that runs through folklore to Shakespeare, from Commedia dell’Arte to Pierrot and Columbina, Punch and Judy, and Laurel and Hardy, from the Little Tramp to the tramps in Waiting for Godot, from Mo McCackie to Louis CK.

Its great device is the irrepressible humour that bubbles up from under the sadness of the clown. At the start of the show, the Yellow Clown (the wonderful Robert Saralp) shuffles on stage, full of sighs, his eyes, in the lugubrious mask of his clown’s face, downcast, a noose in his hands. Naturally, faced with a man at the end of his rope, we start laughing, and we rarely stop for the next eighty or so minutes.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Certified Male

 By Scott Rankin and Glynn Nicholas

Directed by Glynn Nicholas

With David Callan, Cameron Knight, Mike McLeish and Glynn Nicholas

Regal Theatre

Until August 25

In the Peter Sellers movie, Only Two Can Play, he plays a critic who reviews shows he doesn’t attend (so, as it turns out, he can indulge in a spot of womanising). He comes unstuck when the theatre he was supposed to be at burns down.

I thought a little wistfully of my fictional predecessor while I wished I wasn’t at the Regal Theatre as this remarkably unedifying story of four reprehensible men lurched towards its unsurprising and unsatisfying end.

Music: Melinda Schneider

Doris Day – So Much More than the Girl Next Door

Written by Melinda Schneider and David Mitchell

Directed by Tom Healey

Musical Director Michael J Harding

Choreographer Andrew Hallsworth

Featuring Sam Ludeman and Rohan Browne

Regal Theatre

October 13 - 16, 2011

It’s interesting to see how far the tribute show has gone since someone first slipped on a sequined pantsuit and purported to be Elvis.

It’s even developed sub-niches, from the one-act cover bands, witness the multitudes of ABBAs, Queens, AC/DCs and Led Zeppelins plying their riffs around the globe, to the bio-tribute shows, the Lennons, Dustys and Orbisons that have sprouted up – most often from beyond the grave ­– and hit the world’s stages. There’s even, I believe, a three-day festival in Singapore with only tribute acts on its bill.

Melinda Schneider’s homage to Doris Day at the Regal is a little different. First, the object of her affection is still alive, 87-years-old and surrounded by her dogs, in leafy Carmel, California. Second, Schneider doesn’t actually purport to be Miss Day; she’s Ms Schneider throughout, weaving – with varying levels of success – her own story with that of her idol. And third, despite the aforementioned reservation, this is a genuinely felt and stylishly delivered example of its type that in some part at least transcends its genre.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian