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: Bali (★★★★)

The Last Great Hunt

Written and performed by Jeffrey Jay Fowler and Chris Isaacs

Subiaco Arts Centre

Until October 28

Chris Isaacs and Jeffrey Jay Fowler

The adventures of Corgan and Jimmy

Dinky-di tales of two true blue boys…

That mightn’t be exactly how the title song from Barry Humphries’ epochal ’70s satire “The Adventures of Barry McKenzie” went, but it’s appropriate enough for the continuing story of Perth’s BBSF and BBGF. And Now, like Bazza, the fag and the stag have that most satisfying of stamps of public approval – a sequel.

This time the boys are on Australians’ favourite holiday isle, but, of course, like 2015’s hit Fag/Stag, this is no mere romp in an exotic location.

Like its predecessor, Bali is a razor sharp, witheringly witty and technically brilliant take on contemporary Australia, its mores, expectations and hypocracies.

Chris Isaacs’ Corgan (the stag) and Jeffrey Jay Fowler’s Jimmy (the fag) are in Bali for Corgan’s mum’s sixtieth, and Corgan has picked up the tab for his skint friend.

As Polonius would warn you, that’s bound to be a risky proposition, and it gets even more so when Corgan’s GF won’t pick up when he calls her, and Jimmy has picked up a gaucho amigo who comes complete with a crush.

As things heat up around and between the boys, we learn a lot about both of them – and it’s far from fun and games.

It doesn’t pay to be too judgmental, though; if you don’t recognize parts of yourself in Corgan and Jimmy, perhaps you should take a long, hard look in the mirror they are holding up to us.

Isaacs and Fowler are fine writers and polished performers, and they smoothly, and hilariously, pull off the often-tricky feat of telling two versions of the same story simultaneously, like the Rashomon Effect on speed. The acrobatic dialogue, and the laughs, keep coming, even when their darker purpose is revealed.

On the strength of Bali, there’s no reason why, like Martin and Lewis or Hope and Crosby, Corbin and Jimmy, won’t pop up again.

When they do, I’d like to see Corbin given a little more smarts and awareness than he has in Bali; there’s a little gap growing between him and the vivacious Jimmy that could do with closing so he doesn’t become merely – forgive me for this – a straight guy.

But that’s a word of caution, not a criticism; indeed, there’s precious little to criticize in this stellar outing by two of the brightest stars of Perth’s stage.

 

Theatre: Coincidences at the End of Time (★★★)

Written and directed by Scott McArdle
Second Chance Theatre
Designed by Sara Chirichilli
With Nick Maclaine and Arielle Gray
Subiaco Arts Centre
Until July 2

By the time Scott McArdle’s Coincidences at the End of Time gets under way, things have come to a decidedly un-pretty pass. Outside the beat up café Peter (Nick Maclaine) has holed up in, whopping great fire-breathing lizards are barbecuing whole neighbourhoods and a flesh-eating mist is gurgitating the survivors.
The waitress has been reduced to a smear of ash on the wall, while Peter has either had some pretty lucky escapes from the general misfortune or he’s disastrously bad at opening the café’s fiddly tomato sauce sachets.
For those of us familiar with the fashion for dystopia and apocalypse that infects our indie playwrights, the tea leaves are easy to read.
Of course – it’s a rom-com!

Theatre: 51 Shades of Maggie Muff

by Leesa Harker

Directed by Terence O’Connell

Starring Nikki Britton

Subiaco Arts Centre

Until September 21

A spectacularly obscene parody of the mummy porn phenomenon 50 Shades of Grey was inevitable, and, despite myself, I’m happy to welcome it to our shores.

51 Shades of Maggie Muff started life as a bit of fun for Belfast mature-age student Leesa Harker and her mates on Facebook. Then known as 51 Shades of Red, White and Blue (there’s some Irish politics here), it became an overnight online sensation in Ireland, gathering 25,000 readers and a book deal within weeks, followed quickly by hit stage versions in Dublin and Glasgow.

Within a year of Harker’s first lurid chapter hitting the ether, it’s here, now set in the rough-as-guts wrong side of the tracks in Manchester, where the main employer is the dole office, the main activity is late night shoplifting and the main entertainment, to use the least offensive of Maggie’s arsenal of wafer-thin euphemisms, is bucking.

In the practiced hands of the busy director Terence O’Connell, whose Empire is also running in Perth, and with a fabulously vivid and boisterous solo performance by Nikki Britton, Maggie Muff is wildly funny much of the time, and surprisingly touching to boot.

That’s because Maggie, who thinks she’s found love with the creepy upper class tosser who works at the dole office, is as much working class heroine as she is sex addict. The tone of the play shifts adroitly between excruciatingly crude descriptions of sexual attraction and practices, and the effect they have on various body parts, to nicely drawn vignettes of lives lived tough, rough and not far from the street.

It’s desperately offensive, and, to be honest, becomes a little grinding and repetitive in the second half, but Maggie is no Anastasia Steele, her saltiness is of the earth and she’s a character that you can recognise, and empathise with, even at her most outrageous and degraded.

And boy (well, really, girl) does this thing have an audience! On a stay-at-home-and-watch-the-tv night in the middle of the third week of its run, there were still a couple of hundred in the theatre. Only around ten per cent of them were male (including Britton’s dad, who’d taken a couple of days off work to fly to Perth to see his daughter make an exhibition of herself), and the gleeful laughter of the other ninety per cent was unmistakable. And it isn’t girlish giggling we’re talking about here; this was full-throated guffawing born, I think, of identification and ownership.

Not, I hasten to add, with and of BDSM and the other amusements on Maggie Muff’s menu; more for the chance to have some good filthy fun that isn’t for, and owned by, men.

Actually, I’m not quite sure what the male equivalent of 51 Shades of Maggie Muff is. And I’m also not sure, if it exists, we’d be up to it.   

This review appeared in The West Australian
  

Theatre: Red

By John Logan
Onward Production

Directed and designed by Lawrie Cullen-Tait

Featuring James Hagan and Will O’Mahony

Subiaco Arts Centre

Until August 27

Biographical theatre needs to be approached with caution. It’s a brave writer who tries to draw drama from a real life, especially a famous one, and a brave actor who attempts to represent that life.

The currency of great theatre is universal human truth, not the facts of an actual life. The more we know about someone, the more difficult it becomes for a writer and actor to convince us that the person on the stage is who he claims to be.

It’s the polar opposite of the willing suspension of disbelief - the necessary engagement of belief - and it’s essential for biographical theatre to succeed.

Which is exactly what Red, John Logan’s terrific exploration of the Latvian-American artist Mark Rothko (1903–1970), does.

Red is a must-see production, and another feather in the cap for the independently funded Onward Production. The play comes to Perth within a couple of years of its London debut and only a year after it dominated the Tony Awards. I hope it attracts an audience large enough to encourage the company to bring more international work of this quality to Perth theatres.

Link here  to the complete review in The West Australian. 
For a broader look at Rothko, his legacy and the issues raised by the play, link here to William Boyd’s article in The Guardian. 

         

Theatre: Catalpa

By Donal O’Kelly
Actor Des Fleming

Director Alice Bishop

Composer Wally Gunn

Subiaco Arts Centre

March 12 - 19, 2011

Catalpa is an engrossing re-telling of the rescue in 1876 of six Fenian political prisoners from Fremantle by the American whaler, Catalpa. The fine theatre craft of playwright Donal O’Kelly, the show’s solo actor, Des Fleming, and director Alice Bishop breathe life, surprise and not a little wonder into the story.

Des Fleming

Fleming is a masterful performer, admirable for his endurance alone – two hours of demanding physical and vocal effort is an achievement in itself. Bishop also deserves praise for her sure-footed and inventive direction, in particular her imaginative transformation of mundane objects into an array of sails, lamps, boats, clothes and carriages.

In O’Kelly’s original version, Catalpa was a stand-and-deliver piece for an actor at a microphone. Bishop and Fleming, aided greatly by Wally Gunn’s cinematic score, nicely performed by James Rushford, have made it, I suspect, a much more complete experience.

Catalpa would be a rewarding night out at the theatre at any time; in the week of St Patrick’s Day, it’s damn near irresistible.

Link here  to the full review in The West Australian