Guys and Dolls shakes off the shackles of its time
By Sonia Nair, Tony Way, Kate Herbert and Martin Boulton
This wrap of shows around Melbourne includes a positively queer reimagining Guys and Dolls at Chapel Off Chapel, an unusual evening of music, Melbourne Theatre Company’s Escaped Alone and What If If Only at Southbank Theatre, rock ‘n’ roll stalwarts the Beasts at the Croxton Bandroom, Dvorak’s Serenade by the Australian Chamber Orchestra, and Inventi Ensemble’s performance of Bach’s Art of Fugue.
MUSICAL
Guys & Dolls ★★★★
Chapel Off Chapel, until August 19
Antipodes Theatre Company’s gender-fluid, body-positive, positively queer reimagining of Guys & Dolls breathes new life into the iconic Broadway musical.
Angelo Vasilakakos (left), Bugs Baschera and Jahla Black in Guys and Dolls, at Chapel Off Chapel until August 19.Credit:
Like musicals before it, such as Once and & Juliet, the actors are on stage and interspersed throughout the room as audiences stream in.
Conceived in the 1950s but set in the 1920s, Guys & Dolls assembles a motley crew of gamblers, gangsters, showgirls and preachers to tell a familiar tale of morality, thwarted love and conflicting desires. What’s more novel is this reprisal’s spotlighting of trans and non-binary actors and musicians who subvert a binary script with aplomb and pizzazz.
With a central storyline not dissimilar to 1999 teen rom-com She’s All That, affable rogue Nathan Detroit (Shannon Foley) makes a $1000 bet with the debonair, perennially lucky gambler Sky Masterson (Javon King) that Nathan believes can’t be lost: Sky must take a woman of Nathan’s choice out for dinner in Havana, Cuba. Nathan chooses missionary Sarah Brown (Maddison Coleman). Hijinks ensue.
Willow Sizer and Shannon Foley in Guys and Dolls.Credit:
The pulsating energy and relentless hubbub of New York City’s Prohibition-era nightlife are brought to life through marching processions of the superb onstage band and expertly choreographed formations of actors darting around one another as they cartwheel, do the splits, gyrate, and waack – a queer disco dance pioneered by African-American and Latinx communities in the 1970s.
Under Jonathan Homsey and Carolyn Ooi’s direction, the movements are acrobatic, highly physical and delightfully anachronistic in parts. Scenes when the entire ensemble cast are on stage – the prolonged hot and steamy Havana sequence and the illegally conducted, barely silhouetted craps game – are highlights.
Willow Sizer as Miss Adelaide, Nathan’s long-suffering fiancee of 14 years and a talented showgirl, is a standout with their faultless nasal twang and emotionally rich, nuanced portrayal of a character traditionally portrayed as a ditz.
Angelo Vasilakakos and Bugs Baschera play Nathan’s weaselly sidekicks Benny Southstreet and Nicely-Nicely Johnson with charming impudence and impeccable comic timing. Kikki Temple oscillates seamlessly between nightclub host and mission leader.
Bianca Pardo’s costuming is androgynous, exemplifying the 1920s New Women of the Weimar Republic who flouted gender and sexuality conventions – nary a dress can be spotted.
A spirited performance of Sit Down, You’re Rocking the Boat has characters swapping their garments with one another – a playful reinterpretation of what it means to rock the boat – while a memorable rendition of A Bushel and a Peck has the dancers in farmers’ overalls instead of slinky outfits.
Guys & Dolls remains a play of its time – the gender roles are strict and unyielding. But through its non-conformist casting and costuming and cheeky subversion of the original script, this bold reconception of Guys & Dolls emancipates the script from the strictures of its time.
Reviewed by Sonia Nair
MUSIC
Silk, Metal, Wood ★★★★
Musica Viva, Melbourne Recital Centre, August 15
In an unusual east-meets-west program, Musica Viva has brought together two fine cellists with a masterly practitioner of the Japanese koto.
Silk, Metal, Wood saw an unusual pairing of instruments.Credit: Annelise Maurer
Standing in the western corner, French cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras opened with a cornerstone of the cello literature, Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 in G in which a refined sweetness of tone was put at the service of a broad view of the work’s various dance-like gestures.
Australian koto player Satsuki Odamura’s elegant account of Midare by 17th-century composer Yatsuhashi Kengyo projected the resonant, crystalline timbre of Japan’s national instrument with assurance, nimbly negotiating the rise and fall of the work’s intricate variations.
Bridging this bifurcated selection came a newly commissioned work by young Adelaidean Jakub Jankowski entitled Eclogue, conceived for two cellos, koto and bass koto. Also hailing from Adelaide, up-and-coming cellist James Morley joined Queyras and Odamura in this adventurous score.
While the composer says the work “represents a range of ideas such as birds and spirals, and the colour green”, the frenzied climax suggested dystopian elements.
Satsuki Odamura plays the koto.Credit: Annelise Maurer
Calm was restored with Letters from a Stranger’s Childhood, a 1987 work by British folk musician Robin Williamson. Plucking the koto with fingers – rather than the traditional picks – Odamura brought the various moods of this engaging work to life by harnessing the remarkable resonance of her instrument.
Queyras’ absorbing presentation of Britten’s Cello Suite No. 1 alone was worth the price of admission. Intent on telling a story, Queyras never let the multiplicity of technically challenging effects get in the way of musical communication. Rapturous and quirky by turns, the suite’s nine movements became a vibrant, richly detailed soundscape.
Britten’s intensity was offset by Offenbach’s effervescent Duo for two cellos, Op. 53, sending listeners off with a spring in their step after this curious yet accomplished multicultural encounter.
Reviewed by Tony Way
THEATRE
Escaped Alone ★★★★
What If If Only ★★★
Melbourne Theatre Company
Southbank Theatre, The Sumner, until September 9
This unique double bill of short plays, Escaped Alone and What If If Only, typifies UK playwright Caryl Churchill’s work over her prolific, six-decade career. Both works, directed by Anne-Louise Sarks, are non-naturalistic, experiment with dramatic form and structure, incorporate eclectic styles and shifts in time and place.
They ask probing questions, address disquieting subjects, shock us into awareness and demand our attention.
Escaped Alone’s Helen Morse (left) is the interloper in Caryl Churchill’s carefully crafted, poetic work. Credit: Pia Johnson
In the 45-minute Escaped Alone, the domestic intersects with the global and epic, and the absurd collides with the tragic and horrific. In designer Marg Horwell’s idyllic garden with blooms peeking from among tall grasses, four older women (Helen Morse, Deidre Rubenstein, Kate Hood, Debra Lawrance), engage in banal, afternoon tea chatter about their ordinary, daily lives.
Wiry and birdlike, Helen Morse’s grim, restrained monologues punctuate Escaped Alone.Credit: Pia Johnson
Morse’s Mrs Jarrett is the outsider, the spectator, an interloper invited into the inner circle of neighbours with a shared history. She is wiry, spare and disconcertingly birdlike, pecking out her occasional, terse contributions to the chit-chat.
It is heartening to see four female characters over 70 on stage, and these captivating actors relish the challenge of Churchill’s carefully crafted, poetic, rhythmic language.
Their tightly cued, crisp, often hilarious dialogue ebbs and flows, veering into non sequiturs or song, overlapping and interrupting like old friends’ conversation. Suddenly and surprisingly, their serene nattering tilts into intense monologues, revealing despair, fears and dark secrets; just as abruptly, it tilts back to the banal.
Morse’s alarmingly grim but restrained monologues punctuate the play. She emerges alone from unnerving total blackout to dispassionately describe a chilling, apocalyptic world of global disease, famine and death that collides with the tranquillity of the neighbourhood garden and the women’s tepid chatter. This collision of styles and ideas exemplifies Churchill’s work.
What If If Only, a shorter work of 25 minutes, is the less successful of the two plays, although the first 10 minutes are gripping.
Alison Bell in Caryl Churchill’s What If If Only, at Southbank Theatre until September 9.Credit: Pia Johnson
Alison Bell is a woman, known only as S, shattered by grief at the loss of her partner and grasping at any possibility that her late beloved will communicate with her. Her grief is palpable and heart-wrenching.
In the first minutes, Bell sits alone, silently eating a boiled egg at her kitchen table, while Paul Jackson’s cunningly designed lighting suggests time passing, day shifting into night and into day – again and again.
However, the impact of this intense, intimate portrait of loneliness and loss is dissipated, then completely lost, when multiple actors enter, representing the woman’s possible, unlived futures. This splits the focus by crowding the stage with over a dozen actors: some silent, others bombarding her with images of dystopian or utopian futures, damaged worlds or lost dreams.
Churchill’s script does not name characters or specify gender, and the number of actors is at the director’s discretion, but fewer actors might crystallise the woman’s existential predicament thus focusing our attention. Churchill’s playwriting remains intelligent, innovative, incisive and insightful and her themes resonate with contemporary audiences.
Her devotees will be enthralled by these two works, while the uninitiated may leave bemused, but the compelling performances of the leads in both plays are memorable highlights.
Reviewed by Kate Herbert
MUSIC
The Beasts ★★★★
Croxton Bandroom, August 13
The late Tony Cohen was the man behind the mixing desk four decades ago for the recording of Beasts of Bourbon’s debut album The Axeman’s Jazz.
Cohen recalls that exceptional day, in his book Half Mad, Completely Deaf, as “an event, as recording should be”, and it was celebrated on Sunday night with an anniversary show that only The Beasts, as they’re now known, could pull off.
“This is what we used to do 40 years ago,” frontman Tex Perkins told the crowd of 900 people, all eager to hear gloriously shambolic, dirty ol’ renditions of the band’s swampy rock, originally recorded in one day at Paradise Studios in Woolloomooloo.
The Beasts transported fans back four decades in an anniversary performance.Credit: Martin Philbey
Instead, they got covers, and lots of them. And it was magnificent. After a couple of looseners, including later Beasts’ songs Hard Work Drivin’ Man and Hard For You, they launched into a spirited version of the Stooges’ I Need Somebody, dedicated to long-time friend Ron S. Peno, who died on Friday night, aged 68.
The Sonics’ Strychnine, Alice Cooper’s I’m Eighteen, the Gun Club’s Sex Beat, and The Painkillers’ Drunk On a Train were all rolled out, paving the way for the Beasts’ unique spin on Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Graveyard Train and their own Evil Ruby, both taken from The Axeman’s Jazz.
On this night, The Beasts deliberately transported fans back four decades, back to what it was like to hear the group in full, chaotic flight, cranking the amps, cracking into the drums and paying homage to their own musical heroes.
Joining original band members Kim Salmon, James Baker, Boris Sujdovic and Perkins on stage was guitarist Charlie Owen, filling the spot vacated by founding member, the late Spencer P. Jones.
James Baker of The Beasts performing at Croxton Bandroom on Sunday.Credit: Martin Philbey
Salmon, who also recorded and performed with Peno as The Darling Downs, roared the backing vocals to crowd favourite Dropout and wrung every blazing, heartfelt note from his guitar.
Psycho, also from the band’s first album, was a typically spooky Beasts’ version of country singer Leon Payne’s song, but it was their own Ten Wheels for Jesus that closed the night in epic style, Perkins howling, guitars wailing and raised to the roof in a rock ‘n’ roll salute.
Reviewed by Marty Boulton
MUSIC
Dvorak’s Serenade ★★★★½
Australian Chamber Orchestra, Hamer Hall, August 13
As welcome as sunshine in the depths of a Melbourne winter, Dvorak’s justly popular and perennially sunny Serenade for Strings made a heartwarming return in the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s finely wrought selection of string music predominantly by nationalist composers.
ACO perform Dvorak’s Serenade at Hamer Hall. Credit: Charlie Kinross
By way of contemporary contrast, Entr’acte by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw opened the concert with an intelligent and sympathetic exploration of string colours and textures, starting with gently pulsing chords, moving through pizzicato effects and some seemingly wayward harmonic excursions before neatly returning to the initial mood.
This arrangement of an original score for string quartet was followed by Richard Tognetti’s own arrangement of Bartok’s String Quartet No.5 for string orchestra. Tognetti is no novice when it comes to such arrangements and his skill and empathy were clearly evident here, particularly in the dimly lit second movement where the players, here as elsewhere, displayed enviable ensemble.
The lopsided swagger of the central folk-inspired scherzo came across with infectious enthusiasm, while the energetic outer movements took on a certain cinematic quality, full of momentum and nodding to Bartok’s droll humour in the finale.
Josef Suk’s little-known Meditation on the Old Bohemian Chorale “St Wenceslas” was a most welcome discovery, featuring cameos from Stefanie Farrands’ viola and providing a perfect vehicle for a luscious collective tone from the orchestra.
The ACO put on a superb performance.Credit: Charlie Kinross
Such captivating tone also pervaded the Dvorak, where the delicate buoyancy of the Waltz, the rollicking optimism of the Scherzo and the tenderness of the Larghetto all charmed before the vigour of the Finale once again brought forth the incisive, engaging unanimity for which the ACO is famous.
Featuring the ACO’s expert core playing group, this program was a reminder that beyond all the occasionally distracting marketing hype this orchestra remains a superb, world-leading exponent of the traditional string orchestra repertory.
Reviewed by Tony Way
MUSIC
Inventi Ensemble ★★★½
Melbourne Recital Centre, August 12
Left incomplete at the time of his death in 1750, Bach’s Art of Fugue is arguably the greatest attempt to mine the riches of contrapuntal music derived from a single theme.
True to their name, the members of the Inventi Ensemble brought enquiring resourcefulness to their efforts both in realising this music (which was created without any designated instrumentation) and to providing a creative conclusion to an unfinished masterpiece.
Rather than performing the work’s entire 14 fugues and four canons, Inventi grouped together eight fugues and one canon into four coherent and neatly contrasting brackets, with helpful explanations provided by flautist Melissa Doecke.
Seated in a circle, to emphasise the equality of parts in this music, the ensemble which also comprises oboist Ben Opie, violinist Phoebe Masel, violist Lucas Levin and cellist Gemma Kneale, harnessed the intimate space of Melbourne Recital Centre’s Primrose Potter Salon.
Sharing this mostly four-part music between five instruments, Inventi’s arrangements provided thoughtfully coloured solutions which helped the listener to make sense of the occasionally dense polyphonic textures. The use of pizzicato strings, as well as changes between oboe and cor anglais, and two different flutes added welcome variety to the soundscape.
Commissioned by Inventi, Melbourne- and Geelong-based composer Kym Alexandra Dillon arranged the final, incomplete fugue and “completed” the work by providing an Afterword taking its inspiration from the process of mourning.
Marking the end of Bach’s writing with an abrupt pause, the music attempts to continue in a similar vein, before giving way to a more discordant expression of grief that, by way of quoting Bach’s main themes, eventually subsides into a sense of quiet gratitude.
While this contemporary homage with its ethereal ending is one answer to Bach’s conundrum, there is a sense in which Bach will always have the last word.
Reviewed by Tony Way
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