NT LIVE - LONDON ASSURANCE
LONDON ASSURANCE by Dion Boucicault; NT Live in cinemas (Chauvel, Cremorne Orpheum in Sydney) 1pm, July 24-25, 2010
Nicholas Hytner, director of the NT and this production of London Assurance, said, in the pre-show interview, that the play is about laughter and entertainment and has virtually nothing important to say about the human condition. It's an honest, if tongue-in-cheek description and an excellent recommendation for a couple of hours of high class, low comedy.
It's the third globally transmitted production from the NT's South Bank home, after Phedre (starring Helen Mirren) and Alan Bennett's The Habit of Art, ostensibly starring Richard Griffiths but actually brilliantly stolen by Frances de la Tour. As live theatre-in cinema, the first was the least successful (although a huge hit - thanks Dame Helen) and The Habit of Art was simply scintillating. The camerawork was close to imperceptible and, with the rambling cast and visually rich, higgledy-piggledy set, it was so absorbing and at home in the Chauvel that coughs from the NT audience blended with the local coughers in the cinema stalls: spooky.
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Macquarie
Macquarie, by Alex Buzo; Parramatta Riverside Theatres, July 17-31, 2010.
IT MUST have seemed like a good idea at the time. On the face of it a production of Alex Buzo's 1972 Gold Medal-winning play would appear to be tailor-made to celebrate the bicentenary of the visionary governorship of Lachlan Macquarie. Further investigation reveals, however, that the medal was awarded by the Australian Literature Society, (my italics) while it was the Australian Writers Guild that recognized the year's best stage play and best script in giving its award for the year to David Williamson and The Removalists. This tells you something about Buzo's Macquarie that cannot be disguised by any amount of imagination, skill and sheer hard work by the play's director, Wayne Harrison.
There has been lively debate recently about whether a play is literature (viz the scandal of the non-hand out of a NSW Premier's award for best play), and it's arguable. What Macquarie proves, however, is that literature is not a play. Slabs of text apparently sourced from contemporary letters and journals do not make dialogue, and when dialogue is fashioned from such sources, it may be historically accurate but it's not necessarily good theatre. That's why drama and dramatic license were invented.
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Sir Charles MacKerras 1925-2010
Alan Charles MacLaurin Mackerras was born on November 17, 1925 in, of all places, Schenectady, New York. His electrical engineer father was doing postgraduate work in the US and the family - mother Catherine MacLaurin - did not come home to Sydney until Charles was three. Turramurra later became home for him and, in quick succession, his brothers Alistair and Neil, sisters Joan and Elizabeth and finally, twins Malcolm and Colin.
The Mackerras children were all encouraged to make something of themselves and the name is familiar in Australian public life not just because Charles is an international colossus in music.
Charles started on the violin when he was six and then switched to piano and flute; in his spare time be began setting poems to music. At 12 he wrote a piano concerto at Sydney Grammar - a convenient walk from the Conservatorium where he spent an awful lot of time. Quoted in the SMH, in 2005 he said, "I always wanted to become a musician. It got to be that I was hardly interested in anything else. From about eight or nine I had a sort of mania about it."
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LA FANCIULLA DEL WEST
LA FANCIULLA DEL WEST, Opera Australia at the Sydney Opera House, July 14-August 6, 2010; photos Branco Gaica.
Commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera and first performed in New York in 1910, La Fanciulla del West (Girl of the West) is Puccini's excellent Wild West adventure. It's not in the same tune-stuffed league as, say, Madama Butterfly, La Boheme, Tosca or even Turandot (although Andrew Lloyd Webber famously paid homage to its most memorable refrain in Phantom), yet it is richly musical in an early 20th century way - still Romantic but with pushes into modernism and impressionism. It has a happy ending, however, which also sets it apart from the more famous quartet of romantic tragedies.
At the time of its first performances, La Fanciulla del West was a contemporary tale and a reasonably realistic one, the ending notwithstanding. The opera is based on a stage play, Girl of the Golden West, written by first generation immigrant and Broadway legend David Belasco; and the mis n scene dreamed up by Nigel Jamieson and his creative team for Opera Australia is awash with the sights and scenes Belasco would have witnessed growing up in the San Francisco of the Gold Rush.
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WEST SIDE STORY
WEST SIDE STORY Lyric Theatre, Star City, July 1-August 15; Melbourne 19 August-26 September; Perth 7-21 October; Brisbane November 4-21; Adelaide from 29 December. See westsidestorythemusical.com.au for details. Photos Branco Gaica
MORE THAN 30 in the cast, a tasty, tight orchestra in the pit and one of the great scores and some of the most enduring lyrics in 20th century music theatre. That's West Side Story, of course, and in this new Australian touring production, it's as fresh and probably almost as shocking and emotionally gripping as it was in 1957, when it first opened on Broadway.
Fresh because the young, mostly unknown but wildly talented and able cast approach the material as if it's just arrived hot from Leonard Bernstein's piano and from the pen of new, hot kid on the block, Stephen Sondheim. There is a crisp, wide-eyed innocence and raw energy that crackles through the ranks of the New York street gangs, the Jets and Sharks, that is startlingly right and refreshing.
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Long Day's Journey Into Night
LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT Sydney Theatre at Walsh Bay in the STC, Artists Repertory Theatre & Commonwealth Bank production; 29 June-1 August; 13-29 August, Portland Oregon. Photos by: Brett Boardman.
ROBYN NEVIN gives one of the great performances of her career in carrying on her slight shoulders this production of Eugene O'Neill's fabled portrait of family disintegration. "Carrying"? Yes - on opening night at least the play's Oscar-winning Hollywood movie star draw-card William Hurt seemed not only missing in action but also miscast and out of his depth.
Long Day's Journey Into Night is O'Neill's painfully autobiographical catharsis that has the Tyrone family - mother, father and two sons - standing in for his own. The play seeks to dissect the crippling effect on him/Edmund (Luke Mullins) of a self-obsessed, morphine-addicted mother (Nevin) and a self-obsessed, self-addicted father (Hurt); the added trauma of a long-dead infant sibling and a semi-living elder brother Jamie (Todd Van Voris), whose bluff, buffoon persona fails to protect either brother from the toxic Tyrone nightmare.
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