Back Stage Story: Le Petomene

Le Petomane

There’s all sorts of farting. There’s the kind that comes out of your backside – don’t be shy madam we all do it – and the kind that comes out of your mouth.

I’ve seen it on the internet, both in the public domain and personally, where people masked in anonymity feel free to talk in vulgarities as it pleases them.

Of course, they would never speak like that to their wives, girlfriends, and children , but someone they don’t know on the internet is fair game.

I could name *****, who lives in ****** and works at *****as one of those but I am not in the business of farting.

That turned my attention to a really talented farter Le Petomane (Joseph Pujol) who was born in Marseiville  in 1857.

It appears a swimming accident as a young man gave him some great farting gift, which allowed him to set off wind at will and even make it musical.

A lot has been written – and I’ll give you a link at the end – about the technical reasons for  his success.

And I am talking about success; Le Petomene was earning around 20,000 francs a show at the height of his career and playing to the European Victorian and Edwardian elite.

What interests me, however, is that at the end of the Great War (1918) he gave it all away to run a small bakery and live a modest life. He said the ‘inhumanity’ of the war had influenced him. He died aged 88 in 1945.

He put his backside into mouth balls or maybe mothballs in his backside. I wish some on the cyber message base would show that kind of common sense. http://www.damninteresting.com/professional-farters/

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 "The time has come the walrus said to speak of many things - of shoes and ships and sealing wax  -of cabbages and kings,": Lewis Carroll Alice Through the Looking Glass.

We’re Are Ugly But We Have The Music

Can you see the lonliness in Andersen's eyes and the passion in his lips? He is ugly but ( as Leonard Cohen wrote http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGfgMYfdBFc ) he's got the music

Just been re-visiting Susan Boyle’s emotionally-charged Britain’s Got Talent debut on YouTube and immediately thought of Hans Christian Andersen.

The Danish wordsmith didn’t write The Ugly Duckling by accident, but rather to reflect his own inadequacy, which was really his lack of success in the relationship department.

Without love it is questionable that there is life.

He wasn’t quite as good looking as Danny Kaye  in the 1952 bio-pic Hans Christian Andersen (although Kaye was no Cary Grant).

He fell in love with women whom he couldn’t possible have – makes me think of Lorenz Hart of Rodgers and Hart fame- including the Swedish songbird Jenny Lind.

Andersen once wrote: “Give me a bride, my blood wants love, as my heart does.”

There’s a story that Andersen wrote to Lind asking for her hand and she replied: “God bless and protect my brother, (which ) is the sincere wish of his affectionate sister.”

What spotty young awkward fellow hasn’t heard the line: “I like you as a person but…..?”

There’s another story – I hope fabricated – that Andersen was married , but for only for  two days, as his wife couldn’t face the bedroom encounter.

As the Lorenz Hart wrote in his Glad To Be Unhappy lyric: Unrequited Love’s A Bore.

I’d rather be a husband and a father and a grandfather than a genius, but life only gives us so much choice.  Fortunately, life has given me family. Thank you.

There were smiles all around from Gus and Marie in the music hall. Don't you just luv 'em

Peas and Queues

If you come back to On Centre Stage (OCS) from time to time you’ll discover that I have three great passions in life, the history of the British theatre and its ugly sister (but really beautiful)  music hall, the musical theatre and 1950s’ rock ‘n’ roll.

An odd ball collection perhaps, but hopefully that will make OCS unpredictable. This is my little corner of my cyber paradise, but I never loose sight of the fact that if I want an audience, I have also to engage and entertain.

Lloyd, and I guess music hall in general, was that she understood the halls were all about connecting with the people, the real working people, and holding up a mirror to their hopes, fears and aspirations etc.

If you want an insight into the social history of England around the late 19^th century and early 20^th century take a close look at the music hall during that period. The down-to-earth human stoy was all there. 

I mean, for instance, Coster songster and showman Gus Elens’ ‘If It Wasn’t for the Ouses In Between’, must rank as one of the  first social environmental impact studies? . Take a look.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1GmDA8FU9w

I decided that this song was so important I'd add a few lyrics. 

IF IT WASN'T FOR THE 'OUSES IN BETWEEN

(Edgar Bateman / George LeBrunn)

Gus Elen - 1899

If you saw my little backyard

"Wot a pretty spot", you'd cry

It's a picture on a sunny summer day

Wiv the turnip tops and cabbages

Wot people doesn't buy

I makes it on a Sunday look all gay

The neighbours finks I grow 'em,

And you'd fancy you're in Kent

Or at Epsom if you gaze into the mews

It's a wonder as the landlord

Doesn't want to raise the rent

Because we have such nobby distant views

Oh! it really is a wery pretty garden

And Chingford to the Eastward could be seen

Wiv a ladder and some glasses

You could see to 'Ackney Marshes

If it wasn't for the 'ouses in between

Marie’s contribution came when she tackled the wowsers (that’s an Aussie word for folk who want to put fun on the backburner) who were keen to dismantle the great music hall tradition (American readers note that's the UK's version of vaudeville).

Marie fronted up a morals committee in the 1890s (they wanted to close the people’s entertainment for goodness sake) and gave the performance of her life.

She did the saucy music hall favourite, She Sits among the Cabbages and Peas (get it) like it was a lovely middle- class ballad and Come into the Garden Maud (a genuine middle-class frontroom favourite) as if it were an invite to a lustful you-know-what.

(In another version of the above story I have been told she sang two music hall songs straight-faced, Oh! Mr Porter

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1XxG33PE3k

and A Little Bit of What You Fancy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihOqdfwbCPw
,
and the Come Into the Garden, Maud.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-rv4YiTg8U shocked the committee into silence. Bet that was a relief all around!)

In the next few days I am going to post a  farting story from the music hall, which, at the time, was considered a great entertainment.

A 19^th century French fartiste was one of the most successful performers on the European music hall stage, being paid heaps, and playing for the crown heads of Europe.

In the coming soon category I also have something on a new Australian play and, as the year rolls by, the Brisbane theatre scene just gets more exciting.
 

Pictures from QTC's Romeo & Juliet




The Final Abs-Fab Scene as a shirt- buttoned-up Steven Grives looks on  at Romeo and Juliet (Thomas Larkin and Melanie Zanetti) surrounded by other cast memebers




Juliet (Melanie Zanetti) and Nurse (Caroline Kennison)

 

From left standing Prince (Simon Burvill- Holmes), Montague (Norman Doyle) and  Capulet (Steven Grives) while Juliet (Melanie Zanetti)  nurses Tybalt (Ross Balbuziente).
(All Photos Courtesy of the QTC)
  

Romeo & Juliet: From Abs to Aptitude.

Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet: Queensland Theatre Company. Playhouse Theatre. Stars Thomas Larkin, Melanie Zanetti. Directed by Jennifer Flowers. Season till May 13.

Little Billy Shakespeare is winning a new generation of fans in Brisbane Town, thanks to La Boite’s As You Like It, staged a couple of months back, and now a cracking new outing of Romeo & Juliet.

Both productions were pitched fairly and squarely at Gen-Y, while retaining their integrity, and that’s good news for the past, present and future of the Bard's work.

This Queensland Theatre Company production, directed by theatrical matriarch Jennifer Flowers, is winning praise on several fronts for displays of young male virility.

The trio of Thomas Larkin (Romeo), Ross Balbuziente  (Tybalt/Bathasar) and Tim Dashwood (Paris/Peter) have been deemed abs-fab, while the senior performers have, sensibly, kept their shirts well-buttoned.

Much was made of Juliet’s youthful churebic look when the production’s mildly seductive posters first hit the street, but that’s fizzled out as the production earned wide-spread praise on its own merit at last week’s opening.

Prize winning actor Melaine Zanetti (who took out a Matilda Award last year for the more sophisticated Liza Doolittle in Pygmalion ) is supposed to be a girl under 14 years.

The Nurse (Caroline Kennison) tells us shortly that after curtain-up and frankly it wasn’t unusual for young teenage girls from powerful families to marry young.

(For instance Henry VII’s mum, Margaret Beaufort, married Edmund Tudor in 1455, when she was only 12, and fell pregnant within the year. Needless to say it was a difficult birth and both mother and child were lucky to live.)

The now seemingly ridiculous union, at such an age, wasn’t about lust and perversion, but rather power and politics.

That apart Zanetti is suitably stubborn,  and at times bordering on hysterical, in her love for Romeo, while Larkin’s lover continues the great traditional of seemingly being immature and impulsive (although he and his friends are likely in their early 20s).

I have always been a bit cynical about the Romeo’s motives and ongoing consistency, if the pair had lived, but almost every actor I've interviewed preparing for the role has assured me that Romeo was honourable and there for the long haul with Juliet.

My reply? What you will!  

Our Romeo and Juliet were passionate enough, but I was particularly impressed with the ensemble characters and would  like to single out Veronica Neave (Mercutio), Steven Grives (Capulet), Caroline Kennison (Nurse) and  Steven Tandy (Friar Laurence).

Neave’s Mercutio was a firecracker of a performance, while Grives’ role as overbearing Dad to Juliet made me feel uncompromising force and Kennison’s salty, overwrought Nurse carried much of the production’s humour.

As for Tandy, his Laurence’s demonstrates that he could dither for Australia as his meddling and confusion confirms that the species forever walks that thin line between happy endings and tragedy.

Lastly I would like to make a comment on the famous Romeo, Romeo! Where fore art thou Romeo. It’s not, as some believe, Juliet asking, ‘Where the bloody hell are you Romeo?’ But rather why are you who you are, why are you a Montague?

It seems that in life we have to live with the cards we are dealt with, which explains why as both a young and old man I have never been tempted to unbutton my shirt outside of the privacy of the bedroom or the bathroom.