Reviews

What, asked the audience member sitting behind me of her companion on the opening night of ARC’s production of Singin’ in the Rain, were they thinking? Apparently, a less-ambitious show might have been in order. Well, if ambition is the yard-stick by which we are to measure the success of this young company’s terrific production of this celebrated musical, then all power to them.

The Plot

Puccini’s opera, adapted from a play by French playwright Soudain, and first performed in 1900, is set in Rome in 1800 as Napoleon’s troops approach to free Rome from the long and tyrannical rule of the Kingdom of Naples.

Angelotti, who has just escaped from prison, hides in the Attavanti chapel of the Sant’Andrea dell Valle church. When he emerges, the artist Mario Cavaradossi, who is completing a painting of Mary Magdalene in the church, agrees to help him escape but tells him to hide when Tosca approaches.

Tape, an enthralling one-act play by Stephen Belber (The Laramie Project), draws the audience voyeuristically under its spell, and into the lives of its three characters.

Premiering at the Humana Festival of New American Plays in 2000, it was subsequently made into a film in 2001, directed by Richard Linklater starring Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman and Robert Sean Leonard.

Fancy staging a new production of a classic and setting it in the period which it is written. It’s almost revolutionary in Australian theatreat the moment, where transplanting the time and context of a text isnow de rigueur.

And yet here was a production faithfully set in 19thCentury Europe, as written, that was every bit as fresh and shocking as one would wish from a contemporary performance. In this case as fresh as a wound which will not heal.