Reviews

Pilepileta

By Sheree Stewart. Melbourne Fringe Festival. Theatre Works. Sep 25 – 30, 2918

The definition of Pilepileta in Wemba Wemba language is to shine and glitter.

As an indigenous and queer artist, Sheree Stewart does just that in her new debut solo show Pilepileta. It is a heart wrenching and an imaginative spoken word performance. 

Stewart is unabashedly raw, upfront and honest! Brought up in a small town in the Mallee region of Victoria in the early nineties, where life for the locals was hard and work was scarce with industries drying up, along with the remoteness factor that continued to cripple the community.

Julie

By Polly Stenham after August Strindberg’s Miss Julie. National Theatre Live. Cinema Nova & other participating venues. In cinemas 29 September – 10 October 2018.

Polly Stenham drops the ‘Miss’ from the title of Strindberg’s 1888 original in her rewrite/update.  That change is central and crucial to her 2018 take on this classic.  On its production in London, most critics/reviewers judged that Ms Stenham had ‘lowered the stakes’.  I’d say that she changed the stakes, by blurring the rigid class boundaries of the original, making the characters her own, and using Strindberg’s triangular situation to grind her own axe.  In other words, this is an even more wholesale takeover than say, Simon

Freefall

Melbourne Fringe Festival. The Burrow - Brunswick St, Fitzroy. September 21 – 30, 2018

FreeFall was an experience that I never realised I wanted to experience again... Until tonight! Theatre makers Kitan Petkovski of Bullet Heart Club and Milly Copper from Wielding Theatre have combined forces and created a performance reeking with blurred moments and dreamscapes from the drunken night out that haunts your clubbing days of time gone by (well, for me anyway)!

A brilliantly cast ensemble of performers, who are also credited as writers, work symbiotically on the small stage, faced head on by a row of seats either side of the performance space.

Uprising

By Patricia Cornelius and Melissa Reeves. Tasmanian Theatre Company and Upstart Theatre in association with Hobart Youth Arc. Moonah Arts Centre. Christine Best (Director). Angela Barnard (Choreographer). Sept 19-29 2018

Uprising is a double bill comprising Got to start somewhere by Patricia Cornelius and This age wanted heroes by Melissa Reeves. The two plays are linked by the concept of “protest”.

Offenbach Retold Triptych

By Jacques Offenbach. BK Opera (Vic). Director: Henry Shaw. MC Showroom, September 25 – 29, 2018

BK Opera continues to push the boundaries when it comes to opera. This production featured a new director, with Henry Shaw taking the reins, but the innovation was still there.

Offenbach wrote many operettas, and the director has taken three, utilising the music, but replacing the original story line with his own with English dialogue. The music was sung in the original French with surtitles on a TV screen, which was part of the set.

It was bedlam!

Kindly Leave The Stage

By John Chapman. Sunnybank Theatre Group, Sunnybank, Qld. Director: Chris Guyler. September 14 – 29, 2018.

Kindly Leave the Stage is new to me but with its set of stock characters I feel like I’ve seen it a hundred times. This English farce written by John Chapman, who has a heap of credits in the genre - Not Now, Darling, There Goes the Bride, and TV’s Are You Being Served - has devised a play-within-a-play piece about actors on a provincial tour who let their private lives surface in full-view of the audience. The fourth wall is not only broken but blitzed.

SPIN

Created, directed and performed by Anna Seymour. Northcote Town Hall Arts Centre as part of Darebin Arts Speakeasy. September 21 & 22, 2018.

SPIN is an astounding educational dance experience devised, directed and performed by the contemporary deaf dance artist Anna Seymour and her deaf team creatives.

Seymour’s dance residencies took her across the Americas and through Europe but her time spent at the International Deaf Dance Festival in San Francisco galvanized her experiences, to devise a ‘similar’ show with her fellow creatives in Melbourne, who are committed to raising deafness and music connection awareness.

Ruthless! The Musical

Book and lyrics by Joel Paley, music by Marvin Laird. New Farm Nash Theatre. Directed by Brenda White. September 21 – October 20, 2018.

This is an all female musical that spoofs Broadway musicals like Mame and Gypsy premiered Off-Broadway in 1992. As the director accurately says, it takes a satirical and jaundiced look at the whole business of show business: all the has-beens, the wannabes, the successes and failures and what some will do to make it onto the stage. This is not what we have come to expect as a musical theatre storyline but it still depends on the music and lyrics in carrying the story forward.

We Can Work It Out. Four Beatles. One Room. No Filter.

By Gabriel Bergmoser. Bitten By Productions. The Butterfly Club, Carson Place, Melbourne CBD. 24 – 30 September 2018

The title tells you what this 2015 one-act play is about.  We’ve got John, Paul, George and Ringo in a room.  We don’t know where – or even why - but it seems they might be on tour – although a single bottle of Scotch in a dressing room seems meagre for such huge stars.  We don’t know when, but the dialogue refers to ‘films’ – plural – so that’s after A Hard Day’s Night and Help!  It’s probably 1965 and – although he’s not named – it’s after they’ve met

Unsolicited Male

By Ron Elisha. Q44 Theatre. Abbottsford Convent, Abbottsford VIC. 17 September – 7 October 2018

This concise, focussed and beautifully executed play is – by accident or design – as timely as possible in the context of the #MeToo phenomenon.  But don’t think that Unsolicited Male (that title maybe is a little too cute) is a pamphlet or a piece of agit-prop.  As Ron Elisha says in his program note, ‘Theatre can only ask the questions.’

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