SYDNEY FESTIVAL - YOUNG, HARD AND SOLO

January 18th 2012 11:42 pm | Music | Review - By Diana Simmonds

iOTA -YOUNG, HARD AND SOLO, Playhouse Theatre, Sydey Opera House; 17-21 at 9pm, 21 January at midnight. Photos: Prudence Upton.

AT AN HOUR and 15 minutes, iOTA's semi-solo concert show is sharp and sweet in equal measure. He's accompanied by a first-rate trio of guitars, bass and drums (no program: sorry guys), plus The Geek and a guest appearance by The Rabbit. After the immense effort of the recent Smoke and Mirrors, this Festival outing seems to be in the form of a mini-retrospective and regroup before the next big creative push. 

Young, Hard and Solo is raucous, rude, witty, clever, fun, sad and utterly charming. If more rock stars where more like iOTA there'd be mass outbreaks of uncontrolled groupie behaviour, so it's as well that he's unique. He has a wonderful voice and a wicked sense of humour. He's also an iconoclast and, on stage, unafraid to push himself and the audience to the limits. On opening night, the audience was thrilled to go along with him: obediently reciting ever more outrageous and silly stuff. The reason for the obedience quickly becomes evident: the rewards are delicious.

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I'm Your Man

January 17th 2012 2:57 pm | Theatre | Review - By Diana Simmonds

I'M YOUR MAN, Belvoir and Sydney Festival in association with BYDS; Downstairs Belvoir, 14 January-14 February 2011. Photos: Heidrun Lohr. Main: Justin Rosniak; right: Michael Mohamed Ahmad and Billy McPherson.

CREATED AND directed by Roslyn Oades, I'm Your Man is the end result of a chance meeting 10 years ago in London with an ex-boxer and, more recently, with Bankstown actor-writer Michael Mohamed Ahmad - also an ex-boxer. Both wanted to make a play about the sport. Oades hung out at the fabled Lakemba gym where fighters such as Tony Mundine and Jeff Fenech trained and talked to them and many others. The opportunity arose to follow Australia's IBF World Featherweight Champion Billy Dib for more than a year. During this time he talked to them, they accompanied him on the daily gym grind of training; he won the vacant title, then successfully defended it. And he is the central figure in this dynamic 70 minute play.

The action is set in a working gym - one of those sweat, leather and liniment-scented establishments where exhortations such as "It's better to give than to receive" are stuck on the walls. And the sentiment is not meant in the gentle Jesus meek and mild sense, lest you be even slightly naive. The walls are plastered with posters of fights and fighters - Muhammad Ali in his beautiful prime is prominent - and there are mirrors for checking your form and all manner of punch bags to belt and dodge. (Ralph Myers is listed merely as "design consultant", and whomever is responsible for the transformation of the downstairs theatre seems to have absorbed the sense and feel of a boxing gym as if by osmosis.)

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Tony Sheldon in NYC

January 17th 2012 9:04 am | Theatre | News - By Diana Simmonds

SOME 300+ of Sydney's finest whooped and knees-upped at the Paddo RSL and the 2011 Sydney Theatre Awards on Monday night. Meanwhile, across the other side of the globe our much-loved Tony Sheldon was enjoying a celebration of his own. He sent this email:

I am very chuffed about this. BROADWAY CARES/EQUITY FIGHTS AIDS has donated $20,000 on my behalf to our Aussie equivalent OZ SHOWBIZ CARES in honour of the Priscilla company's fundraising efforts last December. How jolly!

xxx

And the message to him reads:

"Thank you Tony for leading the cast of Broadway’s Priscilla Queen of the Desert in the recent fundraising campaign that raised $107,000 prior to the performances of the 23^rd Annual Gypsy of the Year Competition on December 5 and 6! We are proud and happy to share some of the wonderful resources you have made possible for us with your friends and colleagues back home."

"OZ SHOWBIZ CARES /oscefa.org.au

"Tom Viola"

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SYDNEY FESTIVAL - NEVER DID ME ANY HARM

January 15th 2012 11:54 pm | Theatre | Review - By Diana Simmonds

NEVER DID ME ANY HARM, Force Majeure and Sydney Theatre Company; Wharf 1, 11 January-12 February 2012. Photos: Jamie Williams.

A SHOW that is devised and staged by Kate Champion's Force Majeure physical theatre company is pretty much guaranteed to demand that you expect the unexpected and check your own preconceptions at the door. With long-time collaborators, set and lighting designer Geoff Cobham and co-creator Roz Hervey, Champion has given us - most recently - the memorable Not In A Million Years and The Age I'm In and the quality and variety of their work goes back to Same, Sam But Different and altogether they place the company in a unique and hugely admired place in Australian performance.

The least likely and oblique sources tend to launch Champion's imaginative leaps and Never Did Me Any Harm was sparked by Christos Tsolkas's The Slap. It's merely the spark, however, and the creative heat caused by it has fashioned something else entirely. Over the past couple of years, the Force Majeure crew has conducted some 60 hours of interviews with people who have shared their thoughts and beliefs on kids, parenthood, corporal punishment, discipline (notably its absence), breastfeeding, disability and so on. Fragments of these recordings begin the evening, anchoring it in the place of "real" and "ordinary" from which the theatre and spectacle then take off.

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SYDNEY FESTIVAL - LITTLE MATCH GIRL

January 15th 2012 11:39 am | Theatre | Review - By Diana Simmonds

MEOW MEOW'S  LITTLE MATCH GIRL, The Famous Spiegeltent, Honda Festival Garden, Hyde Park, Sydney; 5-29 January 2012; photos by Prudence Upton. 

DO YOU have a torch app on your mobile phone? If so, be prepared to be dragooned into assisting the performance artist known as Meow Meow, or suffer the consequences. It's hard to imagine anyone resisting her demands, blandishments, charms - whichever she decides to turn on you - but nevertheless, it's all part of the shock and awe of her theatre. It could all so easily go horribly wrong, falling flat or going awry if her adventures on the precipice of performing life take a step too far.

Meow Meow pushes the boundaries with the wide-eyed naivete that masks extreme bravado: the show begins conventionally enough, but then suddenly there's a bang and the lights go out – the power's blown. She improvises with matches, but they're unsatisfactory, hence the call for phones and, eventually, torches. This is one little match girl who has no intention of being abandoned by heedless passers by.

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LOVE NEVER DIES

January 13th 2012 10:52 am | Theatre | Review - By Diana Simmonds

LOVE NEVER DIES, Capitol Theatre, 12 January-25 March 2012. Photos: Coney Island set, main, and Sharon Millerchip and her gals.

IN THE program notes Andrew Lloyd Webber writes, inter alia, that "Love Never Dies is, I am unashamed to say, the most personal of all my works to date." What does he mean? This is the story of the languishing, anguishing Phantom (Ben Lewis) when, ten years after skedaddling from Christine (Anna O'Byrne) and the nether regions of the Paris Opera, he is now going by the name of Mr Y, the gent who runs the Coney Island amusement park. There, happily, in among the freaks and tawdries who inhabit the place, no one seems to have noticed that the ugly, half-masked man is anything out of the ordinary. More than that, he has been nurtured and cosseted by dance mistress Madame Giry (Maria Mercedes), and her hoofer daughter, Meg (Sharon Millerchip), whose altruism has been only slightly tempered by blind ambition.

The show opens with Phanty sitting at his organ desperately trying to compose a halfway decent tune. (Is this the personal bit, perhaps?) Unable to scribble more than a few bars of nothing much, he lures his still adored muse Christine to New York to sing for him. This is accomplished by faking an invitation from (real) opera impresario Mr Oscar Hammerstein for now mega-diva Christine and her hubby and feckless gambler Raoul (Simon Gleeson) to perform at his opera house.

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