QUACK
Quack, Griffin Theatre Company at SBW Stables Theatre, 27 August-2 October, 2010. Photos: Alex Vaughan
Broad and bawdy ideas are sure to be in the wind when the heroine of the piece is called Fanny (Aimee Horne). And when she turns out to be a wall-eyed young thing with a wild streak as wide as Deadwood, it's pretty clear the night will turn weird and spooky before it's over.
Quack, Ian Wilding's new play, has nothing to do with feathered types and everything to do with ratbags, carpetbags and snake oil. He sets out to explore the underside of ordinariness in an outback mining town sometime around the turn of the last century, when gentle folk were rare and life was short and brutish - to the accompaniment of banjo and fiddle.
Quack begins with great promise: there is something unsettlingly familiar about Doc Littlewood (Chris Haywood) and his turns of phrase. While slurping on a patent syrup and extolling the virtues of reverse orcheotomies to the impotent burghers of the unnamed town, he cuckoos on about being "comfortable and relaxed" - and other white picket fence-style utterances of blessed memory.
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Victoria Longley
Victoria Longley - September 24, 1960 - August 30, 2010
Great talent, wonderful woman, beloved sister, daughter and friend. Funny, smart, deep and warm; an actor's actor and one of the very best. In her own last words she is now in a beautiful place. Bless you Victoria xxx
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The Imperial Ice Stars: Swan Lake on Ice
Swan Lake on Ice, Lyric Theatre, Star City; from 27 August; Canberra Theatre from 8 September, 2010
TONY MERCER, bluff Englishman and boss of the Imperial Ice Stars company is, on the face of it, an unlikely Balanchine of the ice rink, but this production suggests that's what he's become. The company has moved leaps and bounds and lutzes from its last Australian tour (can it be five years ago?) and even that show was light years beyond the clodhopping lack of imagination of the traditional ice shows. Swan Lake on Ice is now a discrete art form, combining the best of classical ballet and its music and the best of ice dance.
Mercer has taken the ballet masterpiece and reinvented it for blades, strength, grace and speed. The Tchaikovsky score has also been reinvented and laced through with strands of percussive rhythm that link the flying skaters to the earthbound world of pointe shoes but free them from gravity. The result is a set of combinations and differences that are uniquely exhilarating and beautiful.
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Growing up with NYTC
Growing Up, at Carriageworks, August 31-September 5, 2010. Tickets: $32.00, artist discount: $26. Lots more information about shows and how to get involved at: www.nytc.com.au
LINDSAY FARRIS is the visionary driving force behind the new-born National Youth Theatre Company (NYTC). It's a start-up theatre company of emerging young artists from all backgrounds, including indigenous communities and rural and regional NSW. Open to 15-25-year-olds, NYTC aims to nurture exceptional talent through industry exposure, mentorships and training with experienced and skilled arts practitioners from across the creative range.
The first crop of 24 actors have previously come together for a series of hands-on workshops, led by a committed and skilled team of slightly older (more emerged) artists. And now, this exciting new company will perform their first show - a collection of playlets that riff on the theme "Growing Up".
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A pox on both their houses
CONTEXT IS ALL. How did we get here from there? Amid the general detritus of the national vomitorium, aka the post-election landscape, this election campaign has thrown up two particularly scary bits of information: first of all, Labor's carelessly trumpeted $10m for the arts across Australia is the same figure that Prime Minister Gillard was happy to kick in for the development of just one sporting facility.
Secondly, arts companies have been told by a senior Abbott staffer to stop sending him invitations to opening nights: he's not interested and won't be attending any time soon. It's official - despite lingering Blanchett-fuelled doubt - that despite occasional hiccups of interest, the arts in Australia are irrelevant and anathema to the two major parties.
It all went hideously wrong with the hubristic if well meant royal variety show for PJ Keating, "Arts For Labor" at the State Theatre in Sydney. That was back in the last century. With the ALP's subsequent trashing at the federal election after that joyous evening, overnight The Yarts were revealed as neither necessary nor even useful to electoral fortunes. And, that was that.
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AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY
AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY, Steppenwolf at the Sydney Theatre Company's Sydney Theatre, August 17-September 25, 2010. Photos: Grant Sparkes-Carroll
TRACY LETTS, actor and playwright and author of August: Osage County speaks, in the program interview, of the "shared experience" of theatre; and he's not just talking about an audience and the players, or the recognition by an audience of characters and situations in the play: he means both. And the sensation of that joyous and special dual engagement is tangible from the middle of the Sydney audience for what is, to date, his biggest hit.
Steppenwolf, the fabled Chicago theatre institution, is unique in the USA and its work in this production tells you why. As STC co-artistic director Cate Blanchett said after the opening night performance, it was a revelation for actors to watch the tight ensemble - and, she might have added, for the audience too. All but one of the company has been performing the play since it began, but that doesn't account for the seamless integration of well-oiled familiarity with astonishing spontaneity and freshness. That's the product of a deep well of skill and talent and an uncommon commitment to the common cause.
August: Osage County is set in a dot on the map of Oklahoma; one of those deceptively picturesque-sounding parts of the United States where the river is wide and lazy, where little towns have cute names like Hominy and Wynona and the summers are suicidally sultry. The heat of this particular August is made even more unbearable - in what ought to be the comfortable, rambling three-storey clapboard home of Violet and Beverly Weston - by Violet's insistence on sealed windows, drawn blinds and no air-conditioning. The play opens with Beverly telling the prospective housekeeper, Johnna, that he drinks and his wife takes drugs; he hands Johnna a volume of TS Eliot's poems and despite being fairly warned of what she's getting into, Johnna takes the job. She needs the work, she says. Pretty much with that, Beverly walks out of the house and disappears - for good.
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QUACK
The Imperial Ice Stars: Swan Lake on Ice
Theatre / Review
Ice and fire fill the Lyric Theatre with wonderment
AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY
Theatre / Review
Home sweet home, where the summers are suicidally sultry
 in_opt.jpg "la sonnambula")
la sonnambula
Hansel and Gretel
Theatre / Review
Pacific Opera is small but perfectly formed
Victoria Longley
Rest in peace
Growing up with NYTC
This is definitely good news week
A pox on both their houses
The changing colour of the Australian landscape
HELPMANN AWARD NOMINATIONS 2010
This really is the living end
DARRYN KING – NEW VOICE
A good man is hard to find
Megan Washington and Paul Grabowsky
4 September (SA)
Yellow Moon
4 - 26 September (NSW)
Selby & Friends presents TRIOZ performing World Premiere
Sun 5 Sept @ 2pm (NSW)
The 2010 Helpmann Awards®
September 6 (NSW)
Inside Out, by Mary Rachel Brown
Tuesday 7 September- Wednesday 8 September 2010 (NSW)
Rain Man
7 - 18 September (NSW)
Bangarra Dance Theatre's Of Earth and Sky
8-11 September (SA)
Sex, Death and a Cup of Tea
September 9 -24 (TAS)
Two Gentlemen of Lebowski @ Verge Festival
September 9 (NSW)
