Bernadette Robinson: A Show for Somebody.

The past and present inevitably leads to the future and that in turn takes this diarist onto a new show, which is winning hearts and minds in Australia and maybe America soon.

There’s no such thing as certainly, but singer and actress Bernadette Robinson’s remarkable performance in Joanna Murray-Smith’s Songs for Nobodies comes close to being positively Broadway Bound.

The series of monologues, which features five divas and the ordinary women whose lives they touched, is presently having a Brisbane re-run till June 3 (2012).

However, the industry’s chattering class is already marking it down for Broadway following what sounds like one of the most extra ordinary New York City previews in living memory.

Playwright Murray-Smith (Honour) wrote Songs for Nobodies – apparently after some persuasion – to give Robinson’s outstanding gift for vocal and performing mimicry some gravitas.

The result is five superbly crafted intimate monologues sandwiched between Robinson’s uncanny tributes to Judy Garland, Patsy Cline, Edith Piaf, Billie Holiday and Maria Callas.

This show has been blowing away Australian audiences for the past couple of years, and winning accolades from star names such as Geoffrey Rush and Barry Humphries, but now it appears that international acclaim and fame is beckoning.

The story goes that Robinson and Murray-Smith, along with director Simon Phillips and producer Harley Medcalf, jetted to New York to stage a pared-back performance in a relatively bare space.

Robinson presented the 90-minute show with only a piano accompaniment, and minimal costuming, but still managed to secure a standing ovation and more praise than you’d find at St Paul’s Cathedral on a Sunday morning.

The standing ovation is tribute enough, but the names of some of this collection from a who’s who of Broadway notables and Australian expatriates make the anecdote a whiz-bang.

This cheer squad included Sir Andrew Lloyd-Webber, director Fred Schepisi,  Aussie comic Judy Morris, Priscilla Queen of the Desert star Tony Sheldon and Broadway producer of The Producers and Hairspray fame Richard Frankel.

Nobodies producer Medcalf, who admittedly has a vested interest in the show, said he had never seen such a spontaneous display like this at the end of  a performance.

Frankel, who is more likely to be instrumental in taking Robinson to Broadway, described the scene as ‘jaw dropping’ and the artist’s talent as ‘truly unique.’

“That has kick-started some serious discussions around town,” he confirmed.

Murray-Smith described the experience as ‘exhilarating’ and the response to   Robinson as ‘ecstatic’.

“Here was proof positive that her talent is not simply local, but global: in the standing ovation that she received from the seen-it-all Broadway folk who came somewhat skeptically to see her and who left utterly astonished at her performance.

In the past week or so I have heard both seasoned professionals and occasional theatre goers and more in-between extol Bernadette Robinson and Songs for Nobodies and read a myriad of reviews like this one from the Melbourne season.

http://australianstage.com.au/201112305042/reviews/melbourne/songs-for-nobodies-%7C-melbourne-theatre-company.html

Carolyn: They’re Dancing for You

Carolyn Rappel with Robert Helpmann in Facade for the Australian Ballet 1972 . Doesn't she look just great. My friend. (courtesy: National Library of Australia)

Can never catch the Don Quixote ballet without thinking of someone who meant so much to me in the 1980s.

While I was loving the Queensland Ballet’s new production of the Don Q–    wonderfully reconceived by AD Francois Klaus – could not help but think of Carolyn Rappel being there.

She had danced with the Australian Ballet – notably the Rudolf Nureyev film of the Australian Don Q – and then  reinvented herself as an more than able arts administer at the Queensland Performing Arts Complex (QPAC).

Carolyn helped pioneer the children’s festival at QPAC, Out of the Box, but from a purely personal point of view was a great friend to me.  I miss those conversations. Carolyn was born 1947, but died 2010 too young.
Out of the Box performance festival for children http://www.outoftheboxfestival.com.au/

Frankly, it’s Time to throw down the Gauntlett

Spot the crazed killer? Top actor-manager Alfred Dampier, Frederick Deeming (middle) and mild-mannered Sydney actor Patrick Trumper. If you thought Mr Trumper was Deeming I imagine he would be more than happy.

Old chum Francis A. Gauntlett sat in the court of public opinion at the Three Blackbirds as Old Father Time donned a black cap he had bought from the Army and Navy stores for a fiver.

Heaving a Guinness, that someone else had bought, the judge read out the charges, which included being over-the-top (OTT) with malice of forethought and pinching all the verbal space.

Before said judge could dip his lid, and call time on around another round of the black gold, the dark hairy fellow had done a hop, skip and jump of Olympian proportions and landed in the colonies.

The blaggard had shaken off the shackles of the Old Country, without so much as a ticket of leave, and found a journalistic bolt hole at a time when hacking was still thought to be a type of persistent cough.

Gauntlett and wife, Pirate Jenny, now call Old Sydney Town home as long-suffering spouse combs the country searching for new ideas and Frank dips his quill into the fountain of strewth.

The results over the past couple of decades have included books, plays and strange little doodles on beer mats his probation officer puts down to some malfunction in his early toilet training.

Among the most lasting contributions to the human cannon of misfired shots in the literary dark are a musical adaptation of the story of the little boy who wouldn’t grow up, Peter Pan, a salute with Bunny Gibson to veteran Australian actor and occasional abstainer, John Meillon, and a theatrical fine tuning of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine.

Now Frank, with whom I have shared the occasional Bacchanal, is having a go at reality, which is something that thus far has tended to elude him in this life-time.

The result is a recreation of a magically theatrical time in the history of the colony, when the celebrated actor-manager, Alfred Dampier (For the Term of His Natural Life) walked the boards looking for a curtain raiser at the Alexandra Theatre (later Her Majesty’s).

Dampier couldn’t fail to notice that one Frederick Bailey Deeming was drawing huge crowds for his 1892 production of ‘How I Murdered the Wife and Kids.’

Deeming was a serial killer, who made sinners feel like saints as his evil deeds came to light, and we do know that in true Victorian Underbelly style that inspired the Dampier melodrama Willful Murder!

See more on Deeming : http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/deeming-frederick-bailey-5940

Gauntlett- the cunning old fox – has weaved a tale of the past and present as ‘orrible murders morph into TV’s modern assault on our sensibilities as in the world of Big Brother, The Block and Masterchef.

Gauntlett’s play Deeming paints a picture of Dampier as a reality pioneer, creating theatre out of tragedy, as horrific facts come to light on a day to day basis.

I’m popping down to Old Sydney Town to catch the play – and hopefully a cup of Guinness kindness for the sake of Old Lang Syne - when it opens at the King Street Theatre, Newtown, next week.

The production, which features Patrick Trumper (The Magic Pudding), Emily Stewart (Cops LAC) and Anthony Hunt (Woyzeck) under the direction of Steven Hopley (Theatre of Blood and The Sydney Shakespeare Company) runs May 22-June 3 Tues-Sat.

Dog Day Afternoon

There were open auditions for Hound of the Baskervilles and Rogie thought he was in with a chance



A Hoax: Fascinating Fake or Factious Fiction?



A Little White Lie.



A Hoax: Stars Shari Sebbens, Glenn Hazeldine, Sally McKenzie, Charles Allen. Directed by Lee Lewis. La Boite. Runs till May 26.

                                         

The writing genre known as Misery Memoirs or Inspirational Lit - depending on how sensitive your cynicism gauge – has spawned its own fake sub-culture.

For the uninitiated, or unconcerned, this is the area of biography which allows the troubled individual to seek solace, and mass media therapy, through the lucrative medium of a best seller.

There’s been heaps of genuine storytelling stories successes, where early suffering has been expunged through letting it all hang out in colourful literary form.

However, award-winning Australian’s playwright Rick Viede’s second major work, A Hoax, which had its world premiere at Brisbane’s La Boite last week, deals with the even darker side of this public self-analysis.

A Hoax, as the play’s title suggests, takes a fictional microscopic view of fact fakery, through the story of young indigenous girl recruited to be a ‘classic victim’ of hideous child abuse.

The idea is that naïve Miri Smith becomes the ‘real-life’ author Currah (Shari Sebbens), while white social worker and genuine author, Anthony ‘Ant’ Dooley (Glenn Hazeldine), stands behind the façade of this dirty little secret.

Dooley, who is such an insignificant character he can’t get anyone to use his nickname-moniker Ant, has penned Nobody’s Girl, but the world is not to know that significant guilty fact.

The other two characters in the play, as we fellow Currah’s remarkable transformation, are the over-the-top, champagne swilling, self-seeking agent Ronnie Lowe (Sally McKenzie) and her camp and rather sometimes scary assistant Tyrelle Parks (Charlie Allen).

The play, which has been brilliantly written and plotted, moves between high farce and frightening overtones of threatening behaviour, but still managed to polarise opinion within the Brisbane theatre community.

While I’ll be reviewing A Hoax on Brisbane’s 612ABC on Friday (May 18) with Spencer Howson, I thought today I’d publish links to two very different Brisbane views of the production.

The reviews, at the bottom of this story, from Absolute Theatre’s Eric Scott and David Burton in the Greenroom, both make entertaining reading and an engaging contrast.

Being a great believer in cultural democracy, I love Vive la Difference in critical surfing. I believe it’s the differences between things which truly defines them.

And my view?

I had a great night going on this bewildering journey, following a quartet of colourful and sometimes over-the-top characters, although at times it all seemed a little confusing.

That’s not so much fence sitting as simply acknowledging that art, like life, is never black and white, and even the most brilliant diamonds are flawed.

Incidentally, this already award-winning play is a joint production with the Griffin Theatre Company and will be opening at the Stables Theatre July 20.

          http://actorsgreenroom.net/archives/6732

http://www.absolutetheatre.com.au/

What Makes the World Go Around?




Maria Monk (courtesy of Faculty staff vwc.edu)

 



A Hoax’s promotional build-up here has, naturally, focused on some of the real-life autobiographical fakes, such as James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (2003) picked as an Oprah’s Book Club selection.

That created an impression, in my mind at least, that the fake fact literally tradition – particularly in the misery memoir genre - was a modern phenomenon.

That’s far from the case, as would be writers, like painters, have been fabricating and masquerading lies as truth before the façade of their own talent for decades or even centuries.

The Holocaust was a rich source of this kind of expose and, going back even further, there have been several suspect accounts of evil goings on within religious institutions.

One of the most famous confessions featured a Canadian woman, Maria Monk (1816-1849), who’s Awful Discourses (that’s a short for the long-winded title of the book) were published in 1836.

The book had sold 300, 000 copies by the beginning of the US Civil War, there was a fellow-up, although Monk was comprehensively discredited.

She claimed to have lived in a Montreal convent within an order known as The Black Nuns, where the Brides of Christ were frequently abused and raped by neighbouring priests.

The work is full of sensational horror stories with references to secret tunnels, nightly orgies and ‘terrible doings,’ culminating in the most terrible acts of brutality.

The worst includes accounts of unwanted bastard babies being born as a result of the unions and then, after being baptized, murdered and thrown into a lime pit.

Fact fakery, horrible accusations, politically motivated exposes and horrific flights of the human imagination, like so many more aspects of the human condition, are not exclusive to the 21^st century.

For more on Maria Monk read:

http://www.english.upenn.edu/~traister/hughes.html  

   

    

     

    

Shari’s Shining Sapphires.

La Boite’s world premiere A Hoax coincides with a terrific break for young actress Shari Sebbens.

The proud Bardi, Jabirr-Jabirr women – who hails from Darwin – is leaving the show to be at the special Cannes Film Festival screening of her new movie The Sapphires.

The Australian movie, which also stars Deborah Mailman, Jessica Mauboy and Miranda Tapsell, is the only Australian feature to be selected as part of this year’s official selection outside competition at the Palais.

In a magnificent gesture, La Boite has cancelled four shows so Sebbens can wing her way to France and bask in the movie’s success with her co-stars.

The Sapphires, which also stars Chris O’Dowd, is a 1960s period flick which tells the story of four indigenous women who form a Supremes-style singing group and go to entertain the troops in Vietnam.

 

The film, which will open the Melbourne International Film Festival, is being hailed as one of the year's most anticipated Aussie movies.

This comes as Sebbens has been selected as one of 13 finalists in the fourth annual Heath Ledger Scholarship, designed to help the winner achieve Hollywood success.

                                 

                                             Good luck Shari.

The Sapphires from left Shari Sebbens, Miranda Tapsell, Jessica Mauboy and Deborah Mailman