Sweet Charity shines in return season move to Opera House

IT took out three Helpmanns and now Verity Hunt Ballard returns in the brilliant Sweet Charity, this time at the Opera House.

Verity Hunt Ballard in the show Sweet Charity at the Hayes Theatre Co in Potts Point Picture: KUR

IT collected a hat-trick of Helpmann Awards last year, beating out big-budget productions such as The King & I, Strictly Ballroom and Richard O’Brien’s Rocky Horror Show.

It won for choreography, direction and star Verity-Hunt Ballard took home her second Helpmann in a very different role to Mary Poppins, the show which catapulted her to musical theatre stardom.

The pared-down production of the 1967 musical Sweet Charity that launched the new Hayes Theatre in February last year was one of the year’s biggest stage surprises — for all the right reasons. But if you missed it then, now’s your chance, as the cast is currently enjoying a return season in the slightly bigger surrounds of the Sydney Opera House playhouse.

This reviewer can’t compare the success in which the show unfolds in the two spaces, having missed the first season. But Sweet Charity as it exists right now, is a breathtaking outing.

The work follows the dance hall girl Charity Hope Valentine (Hunt Ballard), a sunny sort of soul who’s hoping that one of the men she squires will eventually request her hand and whisk her away to live happily ever after — away from the big city seediness in which her existence is mired.

Her optimism flies high — much to the amusement of her fellow dancers, seemingly somewhat more hardened to the lies men tell to keep the favours flowing. But it’s misplaced and Charity is constantly let down.

Until a chance meeting in a lift brings shy accountant Oscar Linquist (Martin Crewes, in one of several roles) into her orbit and it looks like our heroine has a chance at a happy ending after all.

The words are from Neil Simon’s book, with Cy Coleman and Dorothy Fields’s music and lyrics, but for this production director Dean Bryant has gone back to the original inspiration for the US musical, which was filmmaker Fredrico Fellini’s somewhat grim Italian drama Nights Of Cabiria, from the decade previous.

It’s in the way the work teases out the hopelessness of the women’s situation — the manner in which they’re effectively trapped by their circumstances that it is at its most powerful. There are a bunch of questions around gender and class here, as well as bourgeois hypocrisy in matters sexual, which renders some of the songs an especially jarring impact, and richness that might not have been apparent when heard elsewhere.

Signature tune Big Spender becomes positively creepy as the production emphasises the economy of desire that underpins the transactions driving the song, while Ballard’s version of If My Friends Could See Me Now is ridden with pathos, accentuating Charity’s naiveties and the hopelessness of her situation.

Having been designed for the 110-seat intimacy of the Hayes, the five-piece band do their thing on stage, with chorus members seated at the edge when not needed. There’s a wonderful air of club rawness to the whole enterprise, the performers on stage interacting with the audience as we enter.

Ballard is superb, displaying a vast emotional range, and some brilliant comedic skills, when she goes home with Crewes’s famous film star Vittorio Vidal. And Crewes himself is an able partner in crime, sending himself up and seeming to have a ball as he occupies several of Charity’s love interests. Meanwhile, Debra Krizak is spectacular as the voice of reason among the dancing girls at Charity’s danchall.

Underpinning all this are spirited, compelling performances from a gorgeous chorus while the band are tight and polished, pulling back from being too slick to maintain a slightly grungy edge.

This is an astounding production that shows just what an emotional punch musical theatre can pack, even those pieces you thought you knew well.

Playhouse, Sydney Opera House; until February 8, $74.95-$89.95, 9250 7777, sydneyoperahouse.com