Newcastle Reviews - August 2009

Newcastle Reviews - August 2009
The Shrewd Maid, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, Fame, Proof, Puzzling Pirates and Stage 3 Project

Ken Longworth has been out and about in Newcastle.

Image: The Shrewd Maid - Dermod Kavanagh and Samantha Cobcroft

The Shrewd Maid
Blue Bottle Productions. DAPA Theatre, Newcastle, August 2, followed by a tour to North-West NSW, New England and the Hunter.
Expatriate Novocastrian director Scott Blick, who is based in Europe, has been touring small-scale productions of short comic operas during annual visits home since 2006. The Shrewd Maid, staged this year, is believed to have been the Australian premiere of a work by Johann Adolf Hasse, a prolific and popular creator of operas in the 18th century but now largely forgotten.
Blick’s delightful production showed the neglect to be undeserved, with Hasse’s use of supple melodic lines and simple harmony giving the singers the chance to show their virtuosity. Likewise, the director’s translation of the libretto into contemporary English with an Aussie idiom and his setting of the tale in the depression-hit 1930s enabled the two performers to reveal impressive comic skills.
The narrative has Balanzone, an ambitious but naive businessman trying to woo a rich woman, being continually foiled by Dorilla, his intended’s foxy maid who is determined to be Balanzone’s wife. She ensures that he never meets her mistress when he comes calling.
Dermod Kavanagh was delightfully innocent from first to last as Balanzone, and a marked contrast to the guileful Dorilla, played alternately by Samantha Cobcroft and Gabrielle Jack with a vibrance and growing relish of the way she is working her wiles.
The director’s Australianisation of the lyrics made amusing use of expressions such as “stone the crows” and “get a cuppa”. Likewise, the introduction of bars of jazz, in marked contrast to the classical music played so well by pianist Vincent Parmeter, added to the fun and showed that opera doesn’t have to be grand to be a crowd-pleaser.
Ken Longworth

The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, book by Rachel Sheinkin, music and lyrics by William Finn.
Newcastle Theatre Company. NTC Theatre, Newcastle. July 8 to August 1.
The large number of young people who auditioned for this Newcastle production made it clear that The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee is a musical of the moment for a new generation of performers.
Director Adelle Richards certainly ended up with an excellent team in their late teens and early 20s portraying the six 11- and 12-year-old finalists in a United States school district final of a national spelling bee.
The actors revealed with charm the hopes, dreams and personal problems of the youngsters on the verge of puberty. Each of the six – Timothy Shearman’s alpha-male Chip, Rachel Aspinall’s gushingly confident Marcy, Peter Bird’s tormented William, Giverny Lewis’s Logainne, torn between the demands of two homosexual fathers, Mat Lee’s Leaf, the butt of his seven older siblings’ jokes, and Stephanie Priest’s Olive, seeking the love of parents caught up in their own affairs – had a song which movingly put their lives into perspective.
The adult supervisors, played by Emily Price, John Christie and Guilherme Noronha, likewise became very recognisable people.
NTC’s intimate theatre was transformed into a small school hall but the size of the stage certainly didn’t lead to downsizing of the song-and-dance numbers. The traditions of larger-scale musicals came boisterously alive, as in William’s Magic Foot (his tapping method of spelling words) when the other performers donned sparkling hats and red cloaks to become a backing chorus.
By the end, the characters made it clear that there had been no losers from the spelling bee, only winners. That included the audience.
Ken Longworth

Fame: The Musical book by Jose Fernandez, lyrics by Jacques Levy, music by Steve Margoshes
SNAP Productions. Hunter Theatre, Newcastle (NSW). July 15 to 25.
Fame is a lame piece of storytelling, with too many characters and too little plot as it haltingly follows a group of students through their four years of training at a New York performing arts college in the early 1980s.
The songs, too, while offering an interesting variety of styles, including romantic ballads, rap, gospel and Latin rhythms, aren’t especially memorable.
What the show does offer, however, is the opportunity for performers in their late teens and early 20s to show what they can do with sketchy roles. And the team in this production came through with flying colours, bringing largely stereotyped figures vibrantly to life.
Seth Drury’s Nick, embarrassed by childhood appearances in television commercials, passionately showed his determination to prove that he has acting ability in I Want to Make Magic. His singlemindedness blinded him to the love of Serena (Katie Wright), gently expressed in their beautiful duet Let’s Play a Love Scene.
Another couple made interesting by the playing was Nicole Maslowski’s Carmen, a dynamic Latina who wants fame immediately, and Tristan Pugh’s Schlomo, a member of a well-regarded Jewish family of classical musicians who is aware of the pitfalls of rushing into situations.
The energetic vocal backing and dance routines by ensemble members further boosted the production’s audience appeal, with the choreography by Silvia Martinez and Nicole Maslowski revealing the talent of their students from the opening Hard Work.
Directors Dez Robertson and Paul King kept the action flowing more smoothly than the script deserved.
Ken Longworth

Proof by David Auburn
Godot Theatre Company. The Playhouse, Newcastle (NSW). July 22 to 25.
Newcastle’s intimate 203-seat Playhouse is solidly booked more than a year ahead, so the Godot Theatre Company was only able to get a week’s booking for its inaugural production when another show was cancelled.
Company founder Gregory Gorton, a Newcastle University student in his 20s, is keen to stage quality contemporary works that other companies might see as too difficult or with too little audience appeal.
The number of people Proof attracted in its brief season suggested there is a market for quality plays that challenge people while entertaining them.
David Auburn’s play, a Pulitzer Prize winner in 2001, looks at issues including family relationships, mental illness and the nature of genius in a brisk tale that makes good use of the elements of thrillers and mysteries.
The proof of the title is a solution to an age-old mathematical problem that is found in the desk of a just deceased scholar. As the man had been mentally ill for years, doubt is raised as to whether he produced the proof. And, if he didn't, who did?
The four actors – Rachel Jackett as the dead man’s younger daughter who gave up her studies in mathematics to care for her father, Amy Edwards as her guilt-ridden sister who moved to another city, Luey Kotevski as one of the dead man’s former students, and Brian Wark as the father in flashbacks and the imagination of the carer daughter – brought out the tensions and humour in Auburn’s excellent text.
While director Gorton’s pacing could have been brisker at times, this was a rewarding first work for a new company.
Ken Longworth

Puzzling Pirates by David Harrison.
Footlice Theatre Company, at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Newcastle (NSW). July 11 to 19.
Footlice Theatre Company was formed by a group of Newcastle University students in 1986 with the aim of staging new works and revues written by the members. Footlice discovered in its formative years the value of staging school holiday productions. But while the shows for kids help to fund offbeat works for older audiences, they include the same principles of invention and innovation.
Footlice has especially won respect for its shows built around life-sized puppet characters. Although the pioneer puppeteers have moved on and are staging their works professionally, the zest of the puppet tales is being maintained by a younger crew, led by David Harrison, who worked on some of the earlier puppet projects.
Harrison’s experience has led to the construction of more manoeuvrable puppets, with the agility of the characters delightfully evident in the figures operated by black-clad actors in Puzzling Pirates.
The tale’s pirates were amusingly modelled on the “aargh, aargh” figures familiar from movies: a short and rotund pirate leader, with a black eye patch and beard, and known as Captain Jill (“my mother wanted a girl,” he explains), Bosun Bill, bespectacled and wearing a large ear-ring, and a young hunk, Ed, with huge muscles and a tan.
Pitted against them in a race to find a hidden treasure were brown-skinned island girl Kayla, clad in breezy yellow, and formally dressed, pale Dominic, the son of a European schoolteacher.
The lively 45-minute show, which included a well-staged swordfight between Dominic and Captain Jill, quickly caught youngsters up in the generous amount of audience participation. It will be interesting to see what Harrison and his crew do next with their puppetry.
Ken Longworth

Stage 3 Project, developed and staged by Hunter Region Drama School.
The Playhouse, Newcastle (NSW). July 2 and 3.
Youth theatre is burgeoning in the Hunter region and quality is growing along with numbers.
Stage 3 Project was developed by teenage senior members of the Hunter Region Drama School, and arose from the suicide last year of a Newcastle high school student while he was sitting for the Higher School Certificate. A similar tragic death in this work is met with varying responses.
The fictional school tries to hush the incident up, partly to ease the pain of other students, and sets up the title project to raise funds to establish a memorial garden for the boy.
Many of the 18-year-old’s contemporaries, however, derided him as a nerd and teased him, leading a Year 11 girl, Anna (Matilda Eyre), to decide to do a HSC course work looking at the factors behind the suicide.
Anna’s determination results in splits with her boyfriend, William (Dean Johnson), who was the dead Jacob’s best friend, and her own best friend, Celina (Cassie Nicholas).
Stage 3 Project raised a lot of issues in a brisk 40 minutes and, as director Daniel Stoddart said in a program note, the play doesn’t tie everything together neatly at the end. But that is life.
Stoddart’s staging, with 21 scenes in its brief span, moved smoothly from classrooms, playgrounds and homes to events such as a school dance and a funeral. The other performers in a strong cast, Laura Goodwin, Stephanie Stritch, Breanan Hiscock, Cassidy Magin and Olivia Wallace, played well-observed students, parents and teachers.
Ken Longworth

 

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