Theatre: TILT 2018

WAAPA  3^rd Year Performance Making Students

Blue Room Theatre

Until September 8

(l-r) Zachary Sheridan, Tamara Creasey, Christopher Moro and Elise Wilson in Cookies and Cream

The forays by WAAPA’s Performance Making course’s graduating class to the Blue Room Theatre for the double-head TILT programme have become an annual highlight.

That’s in part for their own sake – eight short pieces over two nights with the freedom, expressiveness and self-indulgence (not always a bad thing) that, maybe, will never come again, will always reveal some delights.

It’s also a window into the future; what these young theatre-makers are interested in, and how they deliver it to audiences, will more than likely be the matter and method of the independent stage in time to come.

There’s a very direct pay-off from that – along with a trap for young players. Some of the best (or, more correctly, more substantial) Tilt bits have quickly gone on to become fully-fledged productions at the Blue Room, albeit with mixed results.

The problem, the challenge anyway, is converting a 25-30 minute piece into the hour or so alternative theatres, fringe festivals and the like trade in.

Sometimes these short shows are exposed as skits when a longer format calls for more character development and a more sustained narrative. Sometimes they leap that tall building with a single bound.

Last year’s showstopper, The View From the Penthouse, is a case in point. It’s slotted to return, with a longer running time and a shorter title – just Penthouse – at the end of next month in the Blue Room.

From what I saw last year, I’d advise you to crawl over broken glass to see it – but that trap is baited and waiting.

So, to this year’s Tilts.

Courtney Henri and Jordan Valenti’s play-within-a-play about street performers, a flying whale and surface tension, Fluke, was deftly managed and sweet, without quite nailing its allegory or compelling our attention.

Evelyn Snook, in her Work in Progress, certainly does. A small, sad portrait of a girl battling depression and inertia (“Sometimes it’s okay if the only thing you do today is breathe”), it’s beautifully written and winningly performed.

The evening’s closer, and its most striking performance, was Girl & Thing, a kinetic, sometimes frightening dance piece devised and performed by the busy Henri and Marshall Stay, who also delivered an impressive video and sound design (with Ash Lazenby). Henri is an extraordinary sight, diminutive, a shock of hair and a frenzy of movement, sometimes defying your senses to keep up with her. I’m tempted to wonder whether Henri and Stay always knew what they were saying in Girl & Thing, but if the language they used to say it was sometimes incomprehensible, the effect was certainly mesmerizing.

I’m cheating. The best was first, not last, but I’ve saved it anyway.

Cookies and Cream (or, as its writer Zachary Sheridan and director Amelia Burke would have it, “however the diddly is done”) is everything you could want in forty minutes of alt-theatre. Smart, screamingly funny, did-she-really-SAY-that-ish, snappy, crackly and poppy, it’s the antidote to whatever ails you.

And, among the terrific cast of Sheridan, Christopher Moro and Tamara Creasey, a star is born in Elise Wilson – anyone who loves the work of The Last Great Hunt’s fabulous Arielle Grey is gong to really love this gal.

Cookies and Cream will be back. You can bet on it.

The second programme (which ends this Saturday 8) may not have a firecracker like Cookies and Cream, but it’s textually more substantial than the first.

The opener, The Painfully True Story of the Show we Couldn’t Make, devised and performed by Noemie Huttner-Koros, Karina White and Snook is a backstage procedural about, as the title suggests, the difficulty – and even the validity – of nice, young, white folk making theatre about people without their privileges. It’s a good and worthy idea, blunted by an overabundance of long, meaningful looks and some lengthy, problematic recorded segments that had plenty of verbatim but not enough theatre.

Dad is Isaac Powell, Jarryd Prain and Stay’s emotional paean to those strange creatures that fathered us. It’s, perhaps, a little repetitive, but it sneaks up on you, building bit by bit to a touching, insightful kind of father-son catharsis – and a pillow fight. It’s performed with energy and commitment and should both extend and tighten up nicely if it goes around again some time. The pillows are inspired.

Clare Testoni has made quite a splash over recent times with her combination of shadow puppetry and fairy tale-telling, and it’s a lode that Chloe-Jean Vincent, co-creator Madeleine McKeown and co-writer Valenti mine effectively in Where the Woodsman Cannot Find You. Working with the fairytales The Big Bad Wolf, Little Red Riding Hood and Jack and the Beanstalk, Vincent and fellow performers Henri and Stay deliver a multi-media take on the stories, and the head of the girl imagining them, that is tightly-drawn, funny and sometimes genuinely scary.

Who knew the story of Ada – Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace – the only legitimate child of Lord Byron and, some claim, the writer of the first computer programme? Wikipedia, naturally, the writer and director Huttner-Koros, clearly, and now all of us who saw her smarty staged and delightfully composed little bioplay about this extraordinary (Queen) Victorian woman. Played with corseted good grace by McKeowyn, well supported by Snook, Burke, Creasey and White, Ada is another tilt that could easily re-emerge as a fully realized-piece in a Spiegeltent near you sometime soon.

Theatre: Present Laughter (★★★★)

Laura McDonald and Martin Quinn

By Noel Coward
Directed by Vivian Munn
Set design by Kelly Fregon
Costume design by Kaitlin Brindley
Lighting design by Ellen Sergeant
Sound design by Kevin Tan
Performed by WAAPA 3rd Year acting students
Roundhouse Theatre, WAAPA
Until June 22

Doing Noel Coward is as easy as falling off a log. As you topple, all you have to be is beautiful and beautifully dressed, with an opera length cigarette holder in one hand and a Josephine glass in the other, a plum in your mouth and a little acid on your tongue.
And you’ve got to take yourself deadly seriously – but pause for the laughs.
That’s certainly the case in the visiting British director Vivian Munn’s high-gloss, glamorous take on Coward’s semi-autobiographical crowd pleaser, Present Laughter. 
Munn makes every character a treat, and, boy, do they deliver; from Quinn’s bantam rooster of an Essendine (he’s so like the comedian Michael McIntyre you sometimes have to look twice) to Mitchell Bourke’s Basil Fawlty of a forlorn hopeful playwright; from the flashing rapiers of Vickery and McDonald’s feuding femmes to the quick, delightful cameo of poor Daphne’s aunt, Lady Saltburn, by Ruby Maishmann.
These delicious young actors poke gleefully at Present Laughter as it floats past like bubbles and bursts in gaiety.
It was a pleasure to watch them at play.

Read the complete review in The West Australian

Musical: 42nd Street (★★★)

By Harry Warren and Al Dubin
Book by Michael Stewart and Mark Bramble
WAAPA 2^nd & 3^rd Year Music Theatre students
Directed by Jason Langley
Choreographer Lisa O’Dea
Set Design by Tyler Hill
Lighting Design by Trudy O’Neill
Costume Design by Sarah Duyvestyn
Regal Theatre
Until June 24

I’ve been in raptures about recent WAAPA musical productions at the Regal, 2013’s How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and 2015’s Legally Blonde (2014’s West Side Story was problematic, but for good and understandable reasons – WAAPA is a school after all – and I missed last year’s Bring it On!).
It’s a shame, then, to say I was less than carried away by this year’s extravaganza, Al Dubin and Harry Warren’s 42^nd Street.

The fault, though, lies almost entirely with the show, not the student showgirls and boys performing it.

Theatre: A View From the Bridge (★★★★)

By Arthur Miller
Directed by Lawrie Cullen-Tait
Set designer Patrick Howe
Lighting designer Joe Lui
Sound designer Lewis Spragg
Costume designer Molly Werner
Performed by WAAPA 3rd Year acting students
Roundhouse Theatre, WAAPA
30 April – 5 May, 2016

Elle Mickel, Brittany Santariga and Guiseppe Rotondella (pic Jon Green)

The graduating classes in the four WAAPA’s theatre courses will mount eleven public productions this year (three more than our State Theatre Company). If what we’ve seen so far is any guide, it’s a programme you shouldn’t miss.
None will be more unmissable than Lawrie Cullen-Tait’s masterful production of Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge.
The play is a room filling with gas from an unlit burner, waiting for a stray spark to ignite it, and Carbone (Guiseppe Rotondella) is as combustible a character as ever walked a stage.
Rotondella belies his 23 years in a performance as a man twice his age of wonderful maturity and strength.
A View From the Bridge is an important work, both in the American theatre canon and as a timely warning of the destructiveness of the walls we build, inside our families and around our communities.
Eddie is a sinner, but he is sinned against as well. He loses his capacity to love, but, as this breathtaking production of a great play shows us, it’s because he loves too much. 
   
Read the complete review in The West Australian

The Mars Project (★★★★)

Written and directed by Will O’Mahoney
with WAAPA 3rd Year acting students 
State Theatre Centre rehearsal room
Until 29 August

In 2013, at the suggestion of WAAPA’s programme director Andrew Lewis, the playwright and director Will O’Mahoney embarked on a project to devise and mount an original production with the academy’s then first-year acting class.
The result, The Mars Project, ranks among the most ambitious and impressive new works to arrive on the Perth stage this year.
It must have been a daunting exercise for O’Mahoney; seventeen young actors, a big chunk of two years of their finely honed talent – and a blank piece of paper.
It’s a cast full of enormous potential, and all of them shine very brightly in a work that, perhaps, could only ever have emerged under WAAPA’s auspices, and that we are very fortunate to see.
 Read the complete review in The West Australian

Carrie the Musical (★★)

By Michael Gore and Dean Pitchford
Book by Lawrence D Cohen
Based on the novel by Stephen King
WAAPA 3rd Year Music Theatre students
Directed by Crispin Taylor
Music Director David King
Choreographer Christabel Ellis
Set Design by Madeleine Watt
Lighting Design by Amelia Blanco
Geoff Gibbs Theatre, WAAPA
Until August 29

In 1988, the Royal Shakespeare Company was persuaded to mount a ghastly musical based on an infamous horror story that became one of the biggest flops in Broadway history. Twenty-five years later the show was given a makeover and returned to the stage. The stinger, of course, was that it was still awful. 
None of this is the fault of this cast, another marvellous herd of all-singing, all-hoofing WAAPA musical theatre students, all of whom make the most of a very bad lot.
Let’s hope the Australian musical theatre is able to support professional careers for the stampede of ability heading its way.

Read the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: The Luck of the Irish

Megan Wilding and Seamus Quinn

Yesterday was the 112^th anniversary of the summer’ afternoon James Joyce and Nora Barnacle stepped out together in Dublin, later immortalized as the day in which he set Ulysses. It has been celebrated as Bloomsday for over nine decades, in homage to the book, its author and the joys of alcohol.

The Irish Club staged its 26^th (and, some report, last) Bloomsday last night, with performances by the illustrious and indefatigable Colm O’Doherty, his lovely daughter Damien, and other luminaries.

As the luck of the Irish would have it, there’s been a lot of it around this week; from the saga of Fionn Mac Cumhaill and the Fianna in Finn O’Branagain and Scott Sandwich’s illuminating, poetic The Epic at the Blue Room to Taryn Ryan’s show-stopping Ireland in WAAPA’s smashing Legally Blonde at the Regal (both reviewed here).

But they were mere tastes; for the whole stew, it’s off to WAAPA and, where else, the Irish Club.

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 

Theatre: Les Misérables

Kerrie Anne Greenland

From the novel by Victor Hugo
Music by Claude-Michel Schönberg
Lyrics by Alain Boublil and Jean-Marc Natel
English libretto by Herbert Kretzmer
A Cameron Mackintosh production
Directed by Laurence Connor and James Powell
Musical director/conductor Geoffrey Castles
Set design by Matt Kinley
Lighting design by Paule Constable
Sound by Mick Potter

Back in 1987, when we were young and unafraid, we sprang a leak as Debbie Byrne dreamed her dream and foundered completely as Normie Rowe brought it home. We were amazed as the barricades clicked into place like a massive Transformer toy and Javert hurtled down through a torrent of stars. We were sure that we’d seen the standard-bearer for the return of the musical, and that it all meant something profound.
Will Les Misérables have survived all the years intact? How will this production measure up to its famous forebears? Most revealing, will it still pass the Old Grey Sniffle Test?
The answer to all three questions is “yes”, albeit with real reservations.
We came out from the opening night performance to news of gunfire and slaughter in the streets of Paris. A reminder that Liberté, Égalité and Fraternité always have their foes, and that we should save our tears for when they are truly needed.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian                             

Theatre: Great Expectations

By Charles Dickens
Adapted by Nick Ormerod and Declan Donnellan
Directed by Andrew Lewis
Performed by WAAPA 3rd Year Acting students
Geoff Gibbs Theatre
Until August 28

It’s unsurprising that those two mighty epics of relentless pursuit and ultimate redemption, Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables and Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, are contemporaneous (the English novel was published in 1861; the other a year later). Neither is it surprising that both were instant and enormous successes, nor that they have generated many successful adaptations, across artforms, in the subsequent century-and-a-half.
This year’s WAAPA Acting graduating class performs the adaptation of Great Expectations by Cheek By Jowl’s Mick Ormerod and Declan Donnellan, first staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2005. It’s a wise choice.

Theatre: Realism

By Anthony Neilson
Director Anthony Skuse
Set designer Sarah Duyvestyn
Performed by WAAPA 3rd Year Acting students
Roundhouse Theatre, WAAPA
June 13 – 19, 2014

There was something touching about seeing the WAAPA’s 3rd Year Acting students’ production of Realism in the shadow of Rik Mayall’s death. Anthony Neilson, who wrote the play in 2006, is an elder statesman of British “in-yer-face” theatre, and if Realism doesn’t exactly owe a debt to The Young Ones, it’s at least popped next door to cadge some sugar from them occasionally.

Theatre: West Side Story

By Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim and Jerome Robbins
Book by Arthur Laurents
WAAPA 2nd & 3rd Year Music Theatre students
Directed by Crispin Taylor
Music Director David King
Choreographer Lisa O’Dea
Set Design by Steve Nolan
Lighting Design by Mark Howett

Regal Theatre
Until June 21

WAAPA have really chanced their arm for their annual music theatre extravaganza by re-staging the dark and mighty West Side Story.
It’s a phenomenal challenge for a student cast, no matter how talented, but the ability being tested here needs only the experience and hunger that come from years out in the business to master the technique, and harness the passion, that West Side Story demands.
For all that, it’s fantastic to see a great show given a full production with a talented team behind it. This West Side Story confirms that the big WAAPA music theatre show is a wonderful gift to the people of Perth as well as a huge moment for its young performers. May it long continue thus.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: WAAPA class of 2014

Hair
Book/ lyrics by Gerome Ragni and James Rado
Music by Galt MacDermot
Director and choreographer Tanya Mitford
Music director David King
Set designer Hannah Metternick-Jones
Costume designer Georgia Metternick-Jones
Performed by WAAPA 3rd Year Music Theatre students
Geoff Gibbs Theatre, WAAPA
 
The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui
By Bertolt Brecht
Director Michael Jenn
Set designer Sarah Olivia Tartaglia
Costume designer Sarah Duyvestyn
Performed by WAAPA 3rd Year Acting students
Roundhouse Theatre, WAAPA
 
March 14 - 22 2014
 
The first round of productions at the WA Academy of Performing Arts is like the first round of the footy season. What will the new kids be like? Who’ll be the stars?
WAAPA unveiled its 2014 graduating classes in acting and music theatre in two sprawling, messy and entertaining productions.
The messiness, I hasten to add, was not the fault of the young performers or their mentors. Both Hair and Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui were written on the run, and it shows. 


Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Easy Virtue

By Noel Coward
Directed by Jason Langley

Ayeesha Ash

Performed by WAAPA 3^rd Year Acting students Charlotte Davenport, Nicholas Starte, Grace Smilbert, Andreas Lohmeyer, Ayeesha Ash, William Thompson, Emilie Cocquerel, Shaynee Bradshaw, Samuel Delich, Justina Ward, Cecelia Peters, Michael Abercromby, Oscar Harris, James Sweeny, Madeleine Vizard, Felix Johnson and Rose Riley

Geoff Gibbs Theatre, WAAPA

August 23 - 29, 2013

WAAPA productions must strike a delicate balance between the academy’s objectives – its students’ training and the imperative to showcase their talents to the performing arts and entertainment community, and, of course, to put on a swell show.

That last priority is even more important now: the demise of some local companies has thinned out the options for theatre audiences, and WAAPA can mount large cast productions that can’t be matched elsewhere.

The annual Broadway extravaganzas staged by the music theatre department at the Regal are the most prominent example of this balancing act. This production, the third year acting students’ blitz of Noel Coward’s parlour melodrama Easy Virtue, matches them for purpose, and for sheer entertainment.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Love and Money

By Dennis Kelly

Directed by Matthew Dunster

Set designer Patrick James Howe

Performed by WAAPA Third Year Acting students Charlotte Davenport, Nicholas Starte, Grace Smilbert, Andreas Lohmeyer, Ayeesha Ash, Joel Horwood, Bill Thompson, Emilie Cocquerel and Kirsty Mariller

Roundhouse Theatre, WAAPA

June 14 - 20, 2013

Nicholas Starte and Ayeesha Ash

I imagine Perth Theatre Company’s AD Melissa Cantwell sitting, a little sadly, in the audience at Love and Money, Dennis Kelly’s savage, sharply realized tragedy about exactly what its title suggests, knowing that her company – which specializes in work with this play’s provenance and stance – could never put a cast of the size it requires on a professional stage in this town.

It’s to our great benefit, then, that WAAPA, our precious nursery of theatre talent, can, and does.

More than that, it's had the great good fortune of having the accomplished English actor/writer/director Matthew Dunster here to direct.  He took the Young Vic production of Love and Money all the way to an Olivier Award nomination. Dunster's experience goes much of the way to explaining the assurance and balance of the play’s staging, and the confidence and courage of its cast of Third Year Acting students.

Theatre: Thoroughly Modern Millie

By Jeanine Tesori and Dick Scanlan

Book by Richard Morris and Dick Scanlan

WAAPA Second and Third Year Music Theatre students

Directed by Crispin Taylor

Music Director David King

Choreographer Jenny Lynnd

Set Design by Steve Nolan

Regal Theatre

Until June 22

The WA Academy of Performing Art's annual musical at the Regal Theatre is one of the highlights of Perth’s entertainment calendar. WAAPA has a precious resource to throw at the

production; thirty-six of its prodigiously talented Music Theatre students. It can call on its music students to strike up a 20-piece band, and roll out creative and production credits as long as a Hollywood movie. There are 128 people (not counting front-of-house, marketing and administration staff) working on this year’s show.

What this means is that WAAPA can mine the repertoire of great musicals from all eras to showcase the talents of its students. It’s a wonderful opportunity for them, even if Thoroughly Modern Millie doesn’t reach the heights of its most recent predecessors, last year’s captivating How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and 2011’s ravishing Crazy For You.

Be that as it may, the story of Millie (Emily Hart), an archetypical small town girl from Kansas, is as brisk as it is befuddling and sassy as it is silly.

Theatre: Hamlet

William Shakespeare

Barking Gecko Theatre Company
Performed by WAAPA Third Year Acting students

Directed by John Sheedy

Designed by Patrick James Howe

Sound design by James Luscombe

Subiaco Arts Centre

Until March 22

James Sweeny and Grace Smibert

John Sheedy’s fresh, energised Hamlet shows its hand early. In its opening tableau, orderlies mop a bleak institutional common room, with its linoleum floor, green wall tiles and neon strip lighting. Mantovani’s saccharine, soothing ’50s hit, Charmaine, is playing. A green, illuminated hospital sign on the wall reads Helsingør. When Hamlet appears, he’s in dressing gown and trackpants, a patient’s tag on his wrist.

Now where have we heard that tune before? Where have we seen that room? Where have we seen this damaged prince?

Such direct and pervasive evocations (One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, with a more than passing nod to Marat/Sade) might rankle. In this case, though, they work so well and consistently that, unusually for referential treatments like this, they liberate rather than bind the action and the performances.

In both its own terms, and those it was designed to achieve, it succeeded entirely.  

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian 

Theatre: Summer of the Seventeenth Doll

By Ray Lawler

Directed by Marcelle Schmitz

Set designer Lauren Ross

Performed by WAAPA 3^rd Year acting students Abbie-Lee Lewis, Emily Kennedy, Renae Small, Travis Jeffery, Andrew Hearle, Arabella Mason and Mathew Cooper

Roundhouse Theatre, WAAPA

15 – 23 June, 2012

Renae Small and Andrew Hearle

Ray Lawler’s 1955 play, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, occupies a formidable place in the history of the Australian stage, rather like Patrick White’s novels of the same vintage do in its literature. It bears the weight of comparison to the gigantic American and British naturalist dramas of the mid-20th century: Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge and Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof premiered the same year; John Osborne’s Look back in Anger the year after.

It also suffered a bowdlerised, Americanised film version in 1959, happy ending and all, that did its reputation no good at all.

For all these reasons, “The Doll” has long been a play admired from a distance. In the WA of 2012, though, it offers something much more immediate.

Theatre: How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying

 By Frank Loesser

Book by Abe Burrows, Jack Weinstock and Willie Gilbert

WAAPA 2^nd & 3^rd Year Music Theatre students

Director Jason Langley

Choreographer Jenny Lynnd

Music Director David King

Set Design by Steve Nolan

Regal Theatre

Until June 23

Karla Tonkich succeeds with the boys

This exuberant musical made a star of Robert Morse 50 years ago and still had the zing to turn Daniel Radcliffe from a dorky kid with a wand into the wizard prince of Broadway in 2011. It’s Mad Men put to music, complete with rotary phones, drinks cabinets, naked ambition and, of course, a knockout typing pool.

This is a whiz bang production with 36 all-singin’-all-dancin’ guys and goils backed by a 28-piece orchestra, a show you just won’t see in this town produced and performed with this flair and quality otherwise, and there are still tickets to be had. I wouldn’t wait too long to get yours.

Theatre: Vernon God Little

By DBC Pierre

adapted by Tanya Ronder

Directed by Sarah Giles

Set designer Daniel Ampuero

Performed by WAAPA 3^rd Year acting students

Roundhouse Theatre, WAAPA

4 – 10 May 2012

Damien Strothos and Megan McGlinchey 

(pic: Jon Green)

Tanya Ronder’s darkly comic adaptation of Vernon God Little, DBC Pierre’s Booker Prize-winning novel, gets a tight, entertaining showcase from WAAPA’s 3^rd year acting students under the skilful, inventive direction of Sydney Theatre Company associate director Sarah Giles.

First staged by the Old Vic in 2007, the play has had a similarly mixed reception to the novel (fueled, in part, by the Australian-born Pierre’s decidedly flaky personal reputation), but Giles and her talented young cast amplify its strengths and neatly side-step most of its weaknesses.

Link here  to the complete review in The West Australian