Reviews

This little-known musical (known as Shout! The Mod Musical outside Australia and New Zealand) was presented to sold-out audiences in Manpac’s Fishtrap Theatre, as a community partnership between Primadonna Productions and The Mandurah Performing Arts Centre.

This juke-box musical, is what it says in the title, as it follows a group of young women, fans of a popular magazine “Shout” from 1962 through 1970, featuring twenty-eight of the 1960s’ most memorable songs.

The overriding theme of this Maestro, series with works by Igor Stravinsky, Bela Bartok and Sergei Rachmaninov, was that they were all works that premiered in America.

Sometimes what is promised on the box is what you get, and this twenty-year celebration of the first production in Adelaide was packed with masterful singers.

The semi-staged production of the third act of Wagner’s only comic opera delighted the full house with the quality of the music, played superbly by the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra under the assured baton of Nicholas Braithwaite, returning to Adelaide for this special performance. The music they created soared and melded beautifully with the singers.

This hilarious comedy of errors looks at the world of on-line hook-ups and breakups in this age of online communication. Disaster occurs when a juicy e-mail is sent to the wrong address. The play is told entirely through laptop computers, along with the occasional phone call to add to the mayhem. This proved to be very amusing to the audience as they learnt about the modern world of courtship and sexual relationships (with the extreme language associated with this).