Cabaret: Christa Hughes

Neurotic Ladyland
Downstairs at the Maj

15 – 18 August, 2013

Christa Hughes, she with the voice that goes right up to her bum, returns to the basement cabaret at the Maj in great form.

Last time she was here was with her dad, the venerable boogie woogie pianist Dick Hughes, and a terrific set of dirty blues and drinking songs; this time around she’s brought the striking jazz pianist Leonie Cohen, drummer Jim Dunlop, a combustible collection of right-out-there songs and some truly gob-smacking costumes.

The result, Neurotic Ladyland, sometimes threatens to tip over the edge, but most of the risks Hughes takes pay off, and she’s always got that mighty voice of hers to straighten things up if they go haywire.

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: Other Desert Cities

Black Swan State Theatre Company

Written by Jon Robin Baitz

Directed by Kate Cherry

Set and costume design by Christina Smith

Lighting designer Trent Suidgeest

with Janet Andrewartha, Conrad Coleby, Robert Coleby, Rebecca Davis and Vivienne Garrett

Heath Ledger Theatre

Until August 4

pic: Gary Marsh

Black Swan has, for the second time running, mounted a production that improves the material it’s working with. In Joanna Murray-Smith’s Day One, a Hotel, Evening, director Peter Houghton, designer Tracy Grant Lord and a strong cast made a more than satisfying entertainment from an improbable and inconsistent text.

Other Desert Cities, Jon Robin Baitz’s story of familial and political disintegration against the background of lotus land America, has some similar flaws, but they don’t diminish the sparkle of his dialogue, the magnetism of his characters and the quality of the play’s architecture.

The play is given an immaculate, CinemaScope reading by director Kate Cherry; it's dressed to kill by designer Christina Smith (once again producing a set for the Heath Ledger you’d spend your lottery winnings to live in) and lit with technicolor glamour by Trent Suidgeest. In the face of such excellence, there’s not much point picking over the script’s occasional shortcomings.

Theatre: I'm Your Man

A Belvoir production

Created and directed by Roslyn Oades

Performed by Michael Mohammed Ahmad, Katia Molino, Billy McPherson, Justin Rosniak and John Shrimpton

PICA and Mandurah Performing Arts Centre until August 3

Billy 'The Kid' Dib

Boxing defies the understandable public revulsion and incontrovertible medical evidence that, you’d think, should have consigned it to history along with throwing folk to lions for the crowd’s entertainment.

One reason could be that boxing is unique among sports for the life and death drama and tight focus that allow it to work on stage and screen.

The writer and director Roslyn Oades’s singular achievement in I’m Your Man is to show how the actual words of fighters and trainers, exactly reproduced, are a fertile source of real life drama, humanity and a beaten-up, but still beautiful, poetry.

Circus: Empire

The Empire Spiegeltent

Crown Perth

Until August 18

Don’t listen to a word they say. Empire is not, as its publicity implies, a burlesque, or a strip show. Rather it’s a thrilling, agile, contemporary circus, immaculately staged and precariously gripping for every one of its 90 minutes.

It’s also as fine a gathering of talent, both on its tiny stage and behind the scenes, as you’re ever likely to find.

Two acts in particular deliver that magic that lifts you out of your seat. Degefa spinning and throwing the diminutive, explosive Alemu with his feet was simply incredible, and the long, delicate performance by Bilgin of the hypnotic Sanddorn Balance act, thirteen palm fronds and a single feather suspended in the air like the skeleton of an ancient bird, closes this humdinger of a show with audacious grace and impossible beauty.

 At the risk of stealing Memet Bilgin's thunder, here's the Sanddorn Balance Act performed by its originator, Maedir Eugster of the Rigolo Swiss Nouveau Cirque

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian   

Theatre: Yirra Yaarnz

Yirra Yaakin

directed by Eva Grace Mullaley

performed by Zac James, Mathew Cooper, Shakara Walley and Amy Smith

Blue Room Theatre

9 – 13 July, 2013

Shakara Walley (pic: Ashley de Prazer)

If the Yirra Yaakin production that closes the Blue Room’s first 2013 season is any gauge, the development of Aboriginal writers and performers in WA is in good hands.

Seven young writers (four of whom also perform) have taken up the challenge of creating short theatre pieces with the overarching theme of the river, and the result – brought together as Yirra Yaarnz – is diverse, compelling and insightful.

Much credit is due to the dramaturg Hellie Turner and project manager Irma Woods for a fine job of tending the material, and the director Eve Grace Mullaley and designer Daniel Ampuero for giving it an understated yet focused staging. The four actors, all graduates of WAAPA’s Aboriginal Theatre course, give clear, measured performances with much emotional subtlety.