Reviews

Sometimes, when confronted with spectacular talent, those around them are held in such thrall that no-one is prepared to say “you just crossed the line from innovation to indulgence” – or from “excellence to excessiveness.” This seems to be the case with the amazing combination of Ash Flanders and Declan Greene (Sisters Grimm) – it appears no one has told them that the work loses its brilliance when it becomes schoolboy campery.

Pennsylvania Avenue is less about script, and more about performer. Playwright Joanna Murray-Smith has, after all, written this one-woman show for Bernadette Robinson to play, and what a performer she is! Director Simon Phillips completes the Trinity with his return to MTC.

A contemplative tone pervades as Harper reminiscences on her retirement day after 40 years service in the East Wing of the White House. Her improbable impact on Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Ford, Nixon, Carter, Reagan and Bush resemble a Forrest Gump influence.

On a bleak, dark stage cold with flurries of snow, Ebenezer Scrooge hunches over his desk, endlessly checking his riches. Behind him, Bob Crachit waits quietly for the end of another day. The silent, empty stage and the two lonely figures are a stark introduction to this new adaptation of Dickens’ time-honoured tale.

This was a lavish production. Minimalist was nowhere to be seen as every set towered over the performers. In Act 1 the church of Sant' Andrea della Valle looked magnificent with layers of gold on the walls and in the gaol of Act 3 a guard patrolled the upper level.

Setting the opera in Nazi Germany worked well. I particularly liked the “shepherd boy” being a young Jewish lad inside the gaol, with an uncertain future. In the second act Scarpia molests an embarrassed female officer in front of the other soldiers.