Who is this man, what is his connection with Club Troppo and how could you be a HUGE winner from it all? (HUGE)
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Category Archives: Theatre
Another thirty minutes with Barrie Kosky
Barrie Kosky is a big hit with people who are vastly more knowledgeable about theatre than me. He’s very big in Europe. So maybe he’s just the ticket. My two exposures to his theatre have been strikingly similar. At the end of something I went to at the Sydney Opera House I snuck into the second half of his King Lear at the Opera House.
I love the play but didn’t stay long. From memory, it consisted of people wandering about in a space made as unpleasant as possible. A bit of a metaphor for how bad things were going for His Majesty Mr Lear no doubt. Anyway, I didn’t really come to any strong conclusions about it. It seemed cliched to me – with many shopping trolleys and neon lights and loud and harsh noises and people speaking at each other with rat-tat-tat voices making things pretty unpleasant. But I hadn’t seen that much of the whole play and maybe there was a point to it all – and maybe I wouldn’t have got it even if I had seen it all. After about 30 minutes or so I let myself out and thought no more about it.
My wife Eva – who’s Greek – organised that we go see her favourite classical Greek playwright – Euripides (It’s funny how one keeps discovering English words and expressions with classical roots – the most obvious here being that exclamation you hear at the footy “you-little-ripper-dees’). Eva told me that the notices indicated that you had to be there on time or you got locked out of the whole thing.
Anyway it was only on arriving I discovered that this was directed by Barrie Kosky. That was OK by me, I figured what with this guy’s success in Europe I’d see something of interest. Well perhaps I would have – but I’m afraid I only got through another 30 minutes with the master. It was the usual post-holocaust scenario.
Hecuba is hauled on in an Abu Grahib style hood, plonked on a pedestal, has all her possessions removed from her and says a few words of woe. Then four more women are wheeled on (literally on a trolly) with hoods, shackles and electric wires attached and put on their own pedestals. One of the women then undergoes depedestalisation, is bashed nearly to death and then shot dead. She lies there while Cassandra jabbers and jibbers in pretty much the same rat-tat-tat style I remember from Kosky’s King Lear. It’ s virtually impossible to understand but one gets snippets. Things are not going at all well for the women. There’s some sound in the background a TV or something, but you wonder if it’s the theatre next door with bad sound insulation. But that makes it even harder to figure out what’s happening. Then mercifully the TV noises die down.
Then Cassandra gets the same treatment as the previous girl except she’s also dragged into a tin filing cabinet (the back wall is all filing cabinets) and emerges raped with blood streaming from her undies, is repedestalised whereupon she graces us with the big vomit that she’s ingested while being secreted in the filing cabinet.
We left at that stage – another 30 minutes of Barrie to my name – though not without being warned by the usher that we wouldn’t be let back in.
I’m writing this just to let you know. I’m certainly not saying that you shouldn’t go. There are people whose judgement I’d trust much more than mine who might well say you should. But Barrie and I don’t see eye to eye and I’ll probably stay away in future if warned. I think I understand some of the points that Barrie is making, but it’s not really my thing.
I’ve reproduced a much more favourable review below the fold – well it’s not quite a ‘review’, it’s a kind of promotional interview. Continue reading
Guys and Dolls
Last weekend I went to see Guys and Dolls. I had no idea it was such a good show. I remember it was on when I was a kid, so I figured it might have been written in the late fifties or early sixties – definitely pre-Beatles or Buddy Holly even if it chronologically coincided with either if you know what I mean. In fact it premiered in 1950 (if my memory from last week’s trip to Wikipedia doesn’t desert me).
My guess is that the show couldn’t be staged from around 1969 till sometime around now because the sexual politics are sufficiently traditional that their representation would not have been tolerated by a sufficiently large number of people that it would have ruined the show for enough people that it would have been a commercial failure.
Now we’re a bit more mature, I think that people can accept the representation of those sexual politics without contesting it – as a representation of another era even if most people in the audience would also know that things are different today.
Anyway, perhaps others disagree.
To quote from Wikipedia “The show stars Lisa McCune, Marina Prior, Garry McDonald, Ian Stenlake, Shane Jacobson and Magda Szubanski, and is playing at the Princess Theatre.”
Magda was good fun, but not as great as she can be, Garry McD was enjoyable but I’m not much of a fan, Ian Stenlake was very good. Lisa McCune – well I like Lisa McCune (I think I should have added that to Tim Watt’s ‘guilty pleasures’ challenge from a few weeks ago – I think she’s not supposed to be cool, but I think she is.) She has a nice voice – so long as it’s amplified as it’s quite sweet and true, but not strong. Marina Prior was a standout.Great fun as a comedy actress and damn good, strong singing.
Go and see it if you can. It’s very well put together, very enjoyable, and a great look at a world which is now a full sixty years ago, about a time which is eighty years ago. They did things differently there.
On at the Princess Theatre till it stops. Well worth it.
Postcript – Leslie Katz has just sent this great YouTube of the duet Sue Me, which was well sung by Gary McDonald and Marina Prior, but not as brilliantly as this pair.
Get thee to a symphony
There have been a bunch of things I’ve wanted to post about, but have simply not had the time. I still don’t have the time, but I with a bit of enthusiasm and not much time, I thought I’d mention some good things.
The first is that I listened to this podcast of Dan Pink talking about his new book on Econ Talk. The interviewer almost invariably annoys me with the way in which he labours all the ideological points he wants to make about how ‘economics’ shows that markets are great. I don’t need persuading of many of these points, though it’s all argued with such repetitive vigour that my only instinct is to look for grounds to disagree because I hate that style of discussion where we all smugly congratulate ourselves about how we know and how silly all those people who don’t agree with us are.
But the interviewee can’t be blamed for that, and the interviewee comes up with lots of interesting thoughts on the (now not particularly original) theme that the jobs that will survive the next great wave of globalisation the ‘offshoring’ of services will be those things that use the right side of the brain or rather use both sides of the brain.
Like any self respecting aspirant for the job of writing a bestseller, Pink has got his lines down to acronystic (sorry about that) lists. The forces driving offshoring are
- Abundance;
- Asia; and
- Automation.
And the things us normies in the West ought to be developing if we want to be on the right (economic) side of the tectonic shifts that will take place are to emphasise
- Design;
- story;
- symphony;
- empathy;
- play; and
- meaning.
Anyway, I often find this kind of thing a bit of a bore, but I liked it, so go listen if you want to, and try not to be annoyed by the interviewer. You have to put up with him on all the Econ Talk podcasts which are often very interesting. At least for those of us interested in this stuff.
Free plug – The Zoo Story – A play by Edward Albee
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One of the numerous tasks that’s been distracting me from resuming Missing Link over the last couple of weeks is doing promotion/marketing for Jen’s Missing Link Theatre production of Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story, playing next week in Darwin (I stole the name of the blog review from the theatre company not vice versa). I’d be remiss in my marketing role if I failed to plug the show here at Troppo, so if you live in Darwin come along. You won’t be sorry. Here’s the promo stuff.
How comfy is your cage? Bob Scheer (Peter) and Nick Manley (Jerry) deliver Albee’s verbal pyrotechnics in a high energy smash and grab one act black comedy that leaves no man standing at Brown’s Mart August 7, 8 and 9. Show starts at 7.30 and tickets through DEC Box office 89 803333
Season: August Thurs 7, Fri 8, Sat 9
Time: 7.30pm
Venue: Browns Mart Theatre, Smith St Darwin
Bookings: DEC Box office 89 803333
Adults: $16.50
Conc: $9.50
About the show TheZoo Story
Life for Jerry is not so good. It is lousy. He has no friends, his home is a dump and all he wants to do is tell someone. Life for Peter is comfortable. Dull but secure, he has a wife, daughters, 2 parakeets and the weird patience it takes to listen to the truly insane. The question hangs between them. Is Jerry insane or is he righteously depressed about the injustice of the world? Peter and Jerry meet by chance in the park and Peter listens to everything Jerry has to say and then falls victim.
A one act play by Edward Albee (Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) The Zoo Story is Albees first play written in 1958. He recently wrote an additional act and both acts are currently playing Broadway under the title Peter and Jerry. The addition makes it a play that spans Albees career as a popular and always controversial playwright.
Opera Australia’s Don Giovanni
Catherine Carby, Rachelle Durkin and Gábor Bretz |
If one wants uniformity to be the basic rule for an opera, it is easy to see that a more perfect subject … than ‘Don Giovanni’ is simply not to be contemplated. (Source)
Was Kierkegaard right about this opera being the greatest of all time? Conceivably, personal taste comes into it somewhere, but to the extent that the proposition is a scientific theory, it’s a very hard one to refute. The work is an ingenious blend of comedy and tragedy, with an engrossing narrative, a sparkling script, a reprehensible but not quite despicable central character, and a brilliant dramatic denouement. On top of that there’s three hours of sublime music, without a boring moment in it, in a genre that has its fair share, though no more than its fair share, of boring moments.
While Opera Australia seems to put Don Giovanni on every three years or so, this is a brand new production. The first big decision for the director of any new production of this opera is what kind of tone she should strive for. It’s generally true that 21st Century audiences can’t take 18th Century Opera Seria seriously; accordingly in many cases some kind of camp or tongue-in-cheek interpretation is called for. I’ve seen at least one such version of Don Giovanni, and while that was very entertaining, it seems to me that the music itself firmly dictates something dark and atmospheric. Even in this century, we like our ghost stories to be genuinely spooky. Continue reading
After the decapitation
Fiona Campbell
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For the sake of completeness, here’s a brief and belated reaction to Juditha Triumphans, which I previewed last week. The production surpassed even my very high expectations. As commenter John Greenfield noted, the sets were not lavish, but I thought the use of scaffolding cleverly exploited the ample vertical space, given that the horizontal was in short supply. Taking into account the costumes and staging as a whole, the inescapable parallels between ancient and present Middle Eastern politics were faced up to and handled pretty well. Anyway, Spartan sets are part of the charm of low-budget opera. You make up for it by dazzling your audience with the music (as they evidently managed with John).
I don’t have much to add to the other reviews on the web. In fact I disagree with Harriet Cunningham Continue reading
The Other Barber
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I mentioned when reviewing Opera Australia’s Barber that there was another production of the same work in the pipeline. By now it’s actually too late to see Pacific Opera’s season of The Barber of Seville, which finished last weekend. But it’s still worth a comment for the benefit of my two valued readers, and anyone who might contemplate going to their future productions — a course of action I strongly recommend. Pacific Opera is basically a nursery for up-and-coming opera singers, and what it lacks in technical polish and expensive sets it easily makes up for in raw talent, enthusiasm, and smart direction. It was a treat to see it at the Riverside Theatre in my very own cosmopolitan City of Parramatta, for a third the price of an Opera House ticket.
The publicity for this production stresses (as it probably will for future productions) that the story and setting have been ‘updated’ and ‘modernised’. If this is meant to imply a favourable contrast with stuffy ‘traditional’ productions by OA and other established companies, it’s misleading for several reasons. In the first place, since the form has been evolving for four hundred years, there is no such thing as a traditional production for any opera: only derivative and old-fashioned ones. Second, for that matter most productions from mainstream companies are pretty innovative these days. Third, contemporary settings have been commonplace since the 1960s, and are in any case no real guarantee of innovation.
Most importantly, Continue reading