By John Shand, Peter McCallum and Kate Prendergast
THEATRE
THE PRODUCERS
Hayes Theatre, April 1
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★★½
Who’d have thought laughing at Nazis would suddenly become so pertinent again? Mel Brooks’ original film was made in 1967, when you could have fought in World War II, and still be in your 40s. Fifty-eight years later, the same blister still needs pricking, and The Producers still does it best, whether the original movie, the resultant musical, the film of the musical, or ongoing revivals like this dazzling production directed by Julia Robertson.
Who’d have thought a huge centrepiece like Springtime for Hitler could be performed by a cast of just 14? Or that this cast of 14 could execute such scintillating choreography on the Hayes Theatre’s baby stage (already housing an eight-piece band), without either bumping each other or spilling over into neighbouring countries?
Shoehorning this show onto the tiny Hayes stage is a triumph of ingenuity. Credit: Grant Leslie
This is among the most polished pieces of musical theatre I’ve seen. The level of detail in each line, voice, gesture, costume, dance move, orchestration and design element is exhilarating. You could simply sit there and admire it all in terms of aesthetics and craft – except you’re laughing too hard.
“The urge to merge can rob us of our senses,” sings Leo Bloom, and in humour terms, it’s the show that keeps on giving, however often you see it. Brooks wasn’t just a funny guy, he wrote roles for actors to relish, and Robertson has cast this so well you’d think she had a limitless budget and millions queuing to audition.
Anton Berezin has played in a swag of musicals, all prepping him for being given Max Bialystock, the Broadway producer who, having left his moral compass in a cab, resorts to fleecing little old ladies who are short of sex and long on lolly. Berezin plays Max as though all the world’s chutzpah has been confiscated and he alone has the key to where it’s stored.
For Bialystock’s foil, Brooks gleefully borrowed the protagonist’s name from James Joyce’s Ulysses (plus sly references to that work) to create his male ingenue, Leo Bloom. Des Flanagan plays Bloom with more innocence than a two-year-old pretending he hasn’t just wet his pants – until it dawns on him that the delicious Ulla is offering more than a life-long innuendo, and Alexandra Cashmere is a fabulous Ulla.
Jordan Shea is consistently hilarious as Franz, the Hitler-loving writer and pigeon-fancier, and Blake Erickson arrives in a blaze of gowned glory as Roger de Bris, the director who’s supposed to be so bad that Max’s show is guaranteed to fail. Each ensemble member fashions every role into a fully fledged character and they perform Shannon Burns’ choreography as if their mothers were being held hostage.
Osibi Akerejola has the band similarly honed, and Nick Fry’s set, Ryan McDonald’s lighting and especially Benedict Janeczko-Taylor’s costumes ice a cake so near-perfectly baked that even the neo-Nazis might swallow it.
With the Hayes season sold out, they’ll need to invade Riverside Theatres, May 15 to May18.
THEATRE
THE LOTTO LINE
Flow Studios 88, April 2
Until April 12
Reviewed by KATE PRENDERGAST
★★★½
You find Flow Studios through a narrow slot in a broad high brick wall in Camperdown. Inside is the simulacrum of a creative student rec room: a cosy jumble of lumpy sofas, pillaged books and odd furniture. It feels like you’ve walked into your undergrad arts uni days, hurtled back into that unhinged familiar.
The Lotto Line, an absurdist and surreal fable by John Tsakiris, also emerges from that rare and precious penumbra of young creatives touched in their genius heads. Its theatre space is a repurposed warehouse out back, the audience cackling out of sync on tiered seats.
In front of a large roller door on a concrete expanse is the square of a strange town, where The Lotto Master commands with diabolical governance. After collecting their tickets, a gaggle of misfits trap themselves in time by cheating the wait for the next day’s draw. They had tried to make time go faster (by counting on their hands), but their plan backfired.
James Thomasson, Jonathon Nicola, Megan Heferen, Holly Mazzola and Larissa Turton in The Lotto Line.Credit: Patrick Phillips
Nonsense logic reigns in overwhelming and glittering stupidity, as we tumble through the events including body swaps and rebellion. As the characters fumble towards civil camaraderie and a possible tomorrow, a few messages about hope pop from the chaos like pennies. It’s like dorm room Beckett tripping the light bodacious.
The five misfits – or “cuddlesome groundlings”, as Tsakiris’s exhilarating language offers – are an unforgettable lot. In their physical theatre clowning, their co-ordinated futilities, their clashing costumes and, against the relentless glare of the production’s lighting, they appear as a cartoonist’s fever dream.
Jonathon Nicola is Mr Borvin, who I will ever see frozen as an idiot Icarus. Megan Heferen is Ms Atkins (also co-director, co-producer and co-creator of Studio 5 with Tsakiris), who struggles with leadership. James Thomasson is Mr Horner, a man with a Mormon beard and buccaneer-brimmed stetson, who had to temporarily surrender his words to the Lotto Master. Mr Horner must grunt his lines throughout; Mrs Cotter (Holly Mazzola), a gladsome housewife with a soprano squeak, helps to translate.
One must not overlook the Lotto Master (Jess Spies), though her role only bookends the play. From her raised booth, in top hat and plum velvet coat, she is an imposing overseer of an arbitrary game.
Perhaps most memorable though is Larissa Turton as Miss Dabbs. A mad woman heaving on a single crutch, two pigtails flying from cut holes in a flat cap, she doesn’t so much speak as allow a string of low grunts to fall from wet lips. Cheeks bobbling with a palsy of unknown emotions, Turton shows her acting chops when the “body swap” occurs.
The lighting is a white blare and hanging lightbulb; the sound is just a few well-timed slaps of slapstick. But The Lotto Line is a feast of comic imagination and performance for those with an existential stake in the absurd. The third original production from Studio 5, it is a galvanising rubber-gun shot against the staid and self-serious, both in theatre and in life.
THEATRE
THE PLAYER KINGS
Seymour Centre, March 29
Until April 5
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★★
The great wonder of history is that we continue to be surprised by it unfolding in our own lifetimes, as if it were something that only happened in the past. The corollary is that all that happened in the past is our tutor if we’ll listen – hence part of the longevity of Shakespeare’s eight history plays, despite only a couple of them being among his greatest works.
Linking the eight – Richard II, the two parts of Henry IV, Henry V, the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III – into a chronological cycle is a fond project of “bardologists”, this being Sydney’s third this century. Immediately setting The Player Kings apart from The War of the Roses (2009) and Rose Riot (2018) is its sheer scale.
The performance is a monumental demand upon audiences, actors and technicians.Credit: Brett Boardman
Including the intervals, this was 12 hours long: a monumental demand upon audiences, actors and technicians. Within that frame, the director and adaptor, Sport for Jove’s Damien Ryan (who also did Rose Riot), has succeeded in emphasising narrative through-lines, intergenerational parallels, clarity of language and the plays’ contrasting worlds.
The show is presented in six chapters of towards 90 minutes each, knitted by such devices as having Falstaff, beloved joint protagonist of Henry IV, cheekily appear before the preceding Richard II is done. Ryan cunningly fiddles with the order of events and placement of speeches, without doing any particular disservice to Shakespeare.
John Gaden and Peter Carroll are uniformly good.Credit: Brett Boardman
Yet, despite the care with which the plays have been edited and the general excellence of the performance, it’s simply too long, and the problem, as ever, is Henry VI. The young Shakespeare contributed to these three plays rather being their primary creator (who probably was Christopher Marlowe), and consequently much of the verse is inferior, the characterisations are thin and the storylines mere bloody melodramas.
Henry VI essentially consumed two Player Kings chapters: a massive edit of three full-length plays, but still a drag upon the whole because it’s too burdened with the tiresome bickering of the ruling class – or what we now call politics.
We tumble into the concluding Richard III, therefore, with some relief, and it’s fully worth the wait because Liam Gamble is as good a Richard as I’ve seen. Having cerebral palsy, and therefore not fully able-bodied himself, Gamble evades the cartoonish Richards that have predominated.
Any good performance of Richard charms us, as he smirkingly confides in us his wicked plans, but Gamble makes our emotional response to Richard more complex; draws us towards him in a way that changes the dynamics of the play. We aren’t just charmed by his Richard in a sly, winking sense; we’re charmed to the point of being won – until, of course, his outrageous bloodlust snaps our new-found tolerance.
Linking the eight plays into a chronological cycle is a fond project of “bardologists”.Credit: Campbell J Parsons
Steve Rodgers presents a memorably likable rogue of a Falstaff. The prodigious Sir John has been portrayed as more intelligent or sadder, but seldom as more fun, amid which Rodgers still mines the deep truths of his speech about the speciousness of honour. He later returns as the rabid Jack Cade in Henry VI, and all 17 performers take many roles, other than composer Jack Mitsch primarily realising his own score on drums, guitar or keyboard; a score that makes the most dramatic episodes thunder, delicately shades others, and never tramples on the language.
Inevitably, with people playing multiple roles, there’s some unevenness, although veterans Peter Carroll and John Gaden are uniformly good, including when playing Silence and Shallow to Rodgers’ Falstaff. Gaden is a noble John of Gaunt in Richard II, and Carroll clowns his way through the put-upon waiter Francis in a lively Henry IV scene.
A hallmark of Ryan’s directing is the never-laboured, yeast-like visual humour he adds to his brew, whether as the merest grace notes or as fizzing embellishments from his arsenal of surprises. His son, Max Ryan, excels as a swaggering, live-wire Harry Hotspur in Henry IV, while Max’s brother Oliver plays Harry’s counterpoint, Prince Hal, and their fraternal swordfight sees sparks flying from their blades.
Ryan’s direction crafts countless moments of magic, such as Hal looking in a mirror where the reflection is enacted by Andrew Cutcliffe, who then becomes Hal as he’s crowned Henry V, encapsulating the change in personality. Cutcliffe’s Henry is defined by a lighter, more intimate and slightly comedic St Crispin’s Day speech.
Another piece of magic comes when Ryan has a troop of English soldiers undergoing a medical examination become the members of the French court in a sauna via a sudden flourish of towels. That said, there are also moments when the French characters seem inclined to the Monty Python school of accents.
A hallmark of Damien Ryan’s directing is the never-laboured, yeast-like visual humour he adds to his brew.
Katrina Retallick shines as a wildly loyal and impassioned Isabel, wife to Richard II, played by Sean O’Shea, who leads us on that character’s agonising journey from royal petulance to confronting his mortality and what would be his ordinariness, were he not a poet whose exquisite lyricism intensifies as his power drains away.
Gareth Davies, Emma Palmer (a hilarious Doll Tearsheet), the stentorian-voiced Christopher Stollery, Marty Alix, Lulu Howes, Leilani Loau and Ruby Henaway all have their moments in the sun, with the latter playing Joan of Arc, the most intriguing creation in Henry VI. The crackles of the flames when she burns are created by the actors clapping out of synch.
Immeasurably aided by Kate Beere’s set (with 20th-century costumes) and Matt Cox’s lighting, much of the production is so enthralling that at one point in I was momentarily stunned to see other audience members in the light.
We all stood and cheered at the end, knowing the actors, guided by Ryan’s vision, had just pulled off a triumph of endurance as well as of their art, and we, the audience had been just been part of a tiny slice of history. Nonetheless, see it over two days rather than one.
MUSIC
Bach’s Orchestral Suites
Australian Brandenburg Orchestra
City Recital Hall, March 29
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★
During his extraordinarily busy life as Cantor in Leipzig, Bach still found time to be Director of the Collegium Musicum in that city, which held weekly concerts in the Café Zimmermann. The concerts took place outside in the summer and inside in the winter and were free except for the price of a cup of coffee and Bach scholar Christoph Wolf suggests this as a likely context for performances of Bach’s Orchestral Suites.
In playing all four of Bach’s Orchestral Suites on a modern concert platform and in a single sitting, the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra shone light on this group of instrumental works, and also on the very different challenges of instrumental balance the works pose.
At one end of the spectrum are the Suites Nos 3 (which was played first) and 4 (which concluded the concert), both in D. In these works, probably written for outdoor performance, trumpets, oboes, bassoons and timpani join the string ensemble.
Under the theatrical gestures of leader Paul Dyer, who encouraged them leaping to his feet with outstretched arms, the trumpets dominated while playing, sometimes thrillingly and sometimes at the expense of the details of the violin line. The first section of the Overture has elaborate arabesques of notes that lead into the next downbeat like courtly hand gestures preceding a bow.
In the Suite No. 3, the slow tempo prevented these from falling with complete naturalness, but in the Suite No. 4 at the close, the ABO achieved a stately and majestic effect. Dyer took the well-known second movement, Air, of Suite No. 3 at a restrained pace, although the tradition of playing this work at a slow tempo arises from a nineteenth century transcription to be played entirely on the G string of the violin (hence its nickname) rather than any indication by Bach.
At the other end of the balance spectrum is the Orchestral Suite No. 2 in B minor for strings and flauto traverso, played by Melissa Farrow. This was likely a work for indoor performance and Farrow’s delicate tone blended discreetly in the Overture. The passage work flowed mellifluously, and cutting the strings back to single instruments during solos allowed the flute to be heard.
Farrow flitted lightly in the virtuosic final movement, Badinerie. The happiest medium, in terms of balance came in the Orchestral Suite No. 1 in C blending strings with oboes and bassoon, especially in moments like the Gavotte, where Dyer quietened the sound on return for contrast.
MUSIC
Daniil Trifonov performs Rachmaninov
Sydney Symphony Orchestra, March 28
Reviewed by PETER MCCALLUM
★★★★★
Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 4 has never enjoyed among audiences the celebrity of his second and third concertos but has found champions among some notable pianists. Daniil Trifonov inhabited the piece with demonic brilliance, exploring its emotional range with Dostoyevskian darkness and tempestuous intensity.”
After the exultant opening theme, Trifonov created a texture of wiry expressiveness in the quieter second theme, while elsewhere energising the finger work as though brewing a spell. After starting the slow movement with insouciant disregard, he sat motionless while the main theme shaped itself with ominous simplicity under his fingers.
In the last movement, his playing flashed fiercely against the orchestra like lightning cracks, in a virtuosic display of tensile strength. Trifonov’s last appearance in Sydney in 2017 (playing, among other things, Rachmaninov’s equally neglected First Piano Concerto) showed him as a pianist of precocious technical mastery. He returns as an artist of distinctive stature, fiery depth and complexity.
The other welcome returning guest was Asher Fisch, who conducted a beautifully hushed reading of Liadov’s short gem The Enchanted Lake, Op. 62 to start, and whose astute leadership drew out the Sydney Symphony at its very best – and that is very good indeed – in Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, Op. 14.
The latter is a work of huge imagination, orchestral refinement and innovative structural organisation. Yet it can become sprawling, Romantically overblown and inchoate without careful guidance. The first movement, Daydreams – Passions was discreetly balanced, with each floating idea given space and light around it to flow freely with the strange logic of a vivid dream.
For the second movement, A Ball, the whirring energy of the strings, with trumpet moved to a position just behind them in front of the horns, created the sense that all this glitter was happening elsewhere while the protagonist’s obsession, represented in the recurring idea or idée fixe that nags in each movement, forced its way to the forefront of consciousness.
In the fields, with haunting cor anglais from Alexandre Oguey and a welcome guest return of oboist Diana Doherty in response, was a succession of delicately shaded colours right up to the ominous timpani chords like distant thunder at the close.
Both the fourth and fifth movement were notable for tightly disciplined energy and rhythmic incisiveness. Olli Leppäniemi’s clarinet playing introduced a tone of parody and the use of ophicleides (Nick Byrne and Bradley Lucas) as Berlioz specified (rather than modern tubas) gave the dies irae theme in the finale an aptly morose, sardonic bitterness.
The concert was also a warm and heartfelt tribute by the orchestra to longtime SSO concertmaster Donald Hazelwood who led the orchestra with distinction from 1965 to 1998 and who sadly died earlier this month, aged 95.