Circus: Cavalia

The White Big Top
Belmont Park Racetrack
Until December 29

In this year of spectacles, the biggest, if not unequivocally the best, has been saved to last. Cavalia, the Canadian equestrian show is ensconced under its massive complex of white big tops at Belmont Park and selling through December (although the removalists haven’t been booked until late January).
I don’t share the palpable electric thrill that horses give those who love them. For me, Cavalia didn’t have a moment quite as audacious as the mesmerising Sanddorn Balancing Act in Empire at Crown in July, or overwhelming as the snowstorm finale of Slava’s Snowshow at the Regal in August.
But for technical excellence, audience experience and pageantry, there’s been nothing to top it in town this year.
The quality of audience experience sets a new standard for Perth. From the efficient parking arrangements to the hospitality options available (you can pay anything from $64 to $294 for different packages), the air-conditioned tents to the guided stable tour after the show, it all made for a special night out.
I’ll never get on a horse again (Id rather forget my only calamitous attempt), but in a Perth summer once again devoid of the entertainment people would enjoy this time of year, Cavalio is a ride I’m sure many of you will want to take.         

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Gertrude Stein and a Companion

By Win Wells
Her Infinite Variety Ensemble
Directed by Helen Doig
Performed by Vivienne Glance and Shirley Van Sanden
The Guild Studio
Until December 14

While I first became aware of Alice B. Toklas, in my student days, it was only because her name was part of the title of a minor Peter Sellers movie of the time. It had nothing to do with her, but made for a great round of charades.
Later, you saw grainy images of a mousy little woman standing with another woman and someone really, really famous, like Ernest Hemingway or Pablo Picasso.
The other woman was Gertrude Stein, and they were perhaps the world’s most famous lesbian couple before Ellen and Portia.
I feel I know her much better now, thanks to Win Wells’s deft Gertrude Stein and a Companion, and a terrific performance by Shirley Van Sanden.
There’s nothing mousy about Van Sanden, but she can play it, and that sets up her characterisation on familiar ground. What she does then, to Alice and our impression of her, is outstanding. Van Sanden makes her feisty, sometimes fierce, funny and downright sexy. She plays Alice from the studious young woman who arrives in Paris in 1907 until she dies, impoverished and evicted from her apartment, sixty years later. She has outlived Stein by 21 years.
Vivienne Glance, who plays Stein in life and as an apparition after her death, is a perfect foil for Van Sanden’s Alice. She captures both Stein’s generosity and her haughtiness, her essential American-ness, in a handsome, evenly paced performance.
I must say Wills is the most obscure playwright I’ve ever not come across – even our friends of last resort, Messrs Google and Wikipedia, are almost no help. His dialogue cleverly uses the cadence of Stein’s own writing to great effect, and director Helen Doig’s decision to let his words do the work pays of in a clear, engaging reading of his text.
I got off to bad start with Van Sanden and HIVE, the all-female ensemble, because of their first production, a misguided Titus Andronicus in which I thought she was fatally miscast. Here she is perfectly cast, the show has been judiciously chosen and produced (in the tiny Guild Studio space in East Perth), and absolutely deserves your attention.

This review appeared in The West Australian 5.12.13       

Theatre: Brief Encounter

Kneehigh Theatre
By Noël Coward
Adapted and directed by Emma Rice
Original music by Stu Barker
Designer Neil Murray
Lighting designer Malcolm Rippeth
Sound designer Simon Baker
Projection and film designer Jon Driscoll and Gemma Carrington
Performed by Joe Alessi, Kate Cheel, Damon Duanno, Annete McLaughlin, Michelle Nightingale and Jim Sturgeon, with musicians Dave Brown and James Gow
Regal Theatre
Until December 1

Time is short, and yours is precious, so let’s not beat about the bush.
I suggest you immediately secure tickets to one of the four remaining performances of Kneehigh’s glorious Brief Encounter at the Regal. You’ll be so glad you did.
It’s a tragedy that this season has been shortened because of poor ticket sales. Don’t be one of the unfortunate many who miss it.

Link here to my review in The West Australian, and have a brief encounter now...

 

Newman at seventy

Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday Randy Newman
How terribly strange...

Theatre: Bruce

Weeping Spoon Productions

Created and performed by Tim Watts and Wyatt Nixon-Lloyd

Music composed by Wyatt Nixon-Lloyd

The Blue Room Theatre

Until December 7

Like all modern heroes, Bruce is a complicated guy. Well, maybe not “guy” exactly. Bruce is a complicated chunk of mattress foam with eyes stuck in it, and a pair of disembodied, white-gloved, hands. Sometimes three.
Bruce only has three hands when he’s a hallucinating junkie. Not when he’s an astronaut, or a cop, a best-selling author or a newborn baby, a doting father, a tongue-tied suitor or an old man.
No matter how he’s counting his hands, though, Bruce has a problem with eyes. Not his two, but the one that his former partner, One Eyed Joe, lost when Bruce unwisely took a shot in a police raid. Joe, who grew up dreaming of being an astronaut himself.
It’s a cruel world for the one-eyed, and Joe wants revenge.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Crash Course

Performing Lines WA
Created and performed by James Berlyn
with Sarah Nelson
Directed by Nikki Heywood
PICA until November 30

James Berlyn has constructed a language, Winfrien, of his own, and, in the hour of Crash Course, he sets about teaching it to us.
Our good work is rewarded with an encouraging “kweiloo”, as Berlyn helps – “tsoopun” – us adapt – “arn-tsunder” – to speaking – “ka-ka” – and writing – “glicken” – in this unfamiliar language.
Before the hour was up, and much to my amazement, I share with my classmates the first, dim, sense that understanding, perhaps even mastery, of Winfein isn’t unattainable. It’s an exhilarating feeling, an emotion of logic, like that which great music or dance elicits.
Berlyn delivers all this with skill and magnetism. There are little winks and nudges from the “real” world – at one point, buried so far under his Winfeinish accent you could hardly decipher them, he recited a list of English-language poets; Shakespeare, Joyce, Eliot, Yeats – but his command never drops, you never think he is talking anything but cogent, coherent Winfrien.
Crash Course was great fun, it was immensely thought provoking, and, above all, it was very, very kweiloo.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian 

Theatre: South Pacific

The squirrel and the bear

By Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein II
Book by Oscar Hammerstein II and Joshua Logan
Directed by Bartlett Sher
Musical Staging Christopher Gattelli
Musical director and conductor Stephen Gray
Set Design by Michael Yeargan
Starring Lisa McCune and Teddy Tahu Rhodes
Featuring Mitchell Butel, Blake Bowden, Christine Anu, Bartholomew John, Jeremy Stanford, Rowan Witt, Andrew Hondromatidis and Celina Yuen
Crown Theatre until December 8

What we have here is the Australian touring production of the smash Lincoln Center Theatre 2008 Broadway revival of Rogers and Hammerstein’s classic 1949 musical adaptation of James A. Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific.
With that pedigree, and all that talent, you’d be confident very little could go wrong.
South Pacific is more than romantic froth and bubble under swaying palm trees, of course. It had been only four years since US Marines were bloodily island-hopping their way towards Japan through the same dots on the map on which South Pacific is set, and it would be only another eight years later that General, now President, Eisenhower would order a division of the U.S. Army to escort nine frightened children to school past an angry mob because of the colour of their skin.
Sher is punctilious in keeping these sinister, painful things front-and-centre, and adds layers of his own.
There’s plenty to ponder in the story of the romance of the French planter De Becque (Teddy Tahu Rhodes) and the small-town flower Nellie Forbush, the heroic, doomed Lieutenant Cable (the handsome Blake Bowden) the Vietnamese girl Liat (Celina Yuen) and her mother, the souvenir merchant and pimp Bloody Mary (Anu).
But some things do go wrong, and it starts at the top. Rhodes is a gigantic figure on stage, but his presence, especially in dialogue, amplified and in an accent that seems a couple of countries east of French, is – I hate to say this – almost Schwarzeneggarian. McCune's clinches with Rhodes are like a squirrel being hugged by a bear. Some of her performances, too, fade a little, and that’s a problem in a show where her songs provide much of its snap, crackle and pop.
South Pacific is a mighty achievement and a great show. This revival has much to like, but, as tropical island weather goes, it was some degrees short of a heat wave.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian