Friday March 29, 2024
SMOKE AND MIRRORS
Review

SMOKE AND MIRRORS

May 10 2011

SMOKE AND MIRRORS, York Theatre, Seymour Theatre Centre, May 4-14, 2011. Photos by Prudence Upton.

THE ORIGINAL VERSION of Smoke and Mirrors was devised for and as a celebration of the Famous Spiegeltent, the much loved and aged travelling venue without which no Australian arts festival is complete. Created by iOTA and Craig Ilott, the show was a huge success when the delicious wooden theatre-tent was raised in Hyde Park for the Sydney Festival of 2010. As a result of that success, Smoke and Mirrors took off on its own journey and was equally adored wherever it went.

I wasn’t the hugest fan of the original show. Twas not me wot wrote: “this is the most stupendously brilliant show you will see in your life”, for instance, not least because that kind of goofy hyperbole actually didn’t do it justice. Looking back into the StageNoise archive, it seems I liked its bits but didn’t think it came together as a whole. But I also wrote that I thought and hoped that more work would go into the show and so it would become as great a whole as it was in parts. It returned to the Festival and the Spiegeltent this year and some work had indeed been done, as well as a significant cast change (Wayne Scott Kermond replaced Todd McKenney as the vaudevillian song and dance man).

The biggest change of all, however, is that for this last ever season, the show has had to be adapted to a new and potentially disastrous venue: the cavernous York Theatre. This is an auditorium, in the notorious City Road Triangle, into which many brave shows have ventured, never to be seen again. Would it swallow up Smoke and Mirrors – a show built around and relying on intimacy with its audience? Hell no! The show brings to life the theatre as never before: it’s electric.

According to iOTA, S&M itself has also been “tweaked”, and the result of the tweaking is a story line – involving the mythical white rabbits which he so loves – that gives it a focus hitherto missing and which makes it a coherent, moving whole as never before. Now Smoke and Mirrors really is wonderful and it’s a great pity the season is short and that this is it: no more.

All the elements of the original are there, but the foregrounding of the white rabbits into a narrative arc means that the disparate acts are now linked – albeit tenuously – and by the end, the pathos underlying this whimsical structure is enough to make grown cynics cry. Queenie van de Zandt is, once again, a standout highlight with her turn as the Bearded Lady, yet she too now has a place in the scheme of things that makes her melancholic presence heart rending – particularly when backed, vocally, by iOTA in the song “Candyman/Candyland” that returns as her own theme later in the piece.

SMOKE AND MIRRORS

Smoke and Mirrors is a deliciously tawdry, transgressive, funny, naughty, sexy and woebegone evocation of the circus, vaudeville and burlesque traditions. iOTA dominates, as before, but now there’s meaning and logic in his androgynous clown that gives emotional depth rather than mere flash and dash. The transformation of the theatre is even more startling: circus lights make a tent of the auditorium, ratty looking mirrors reflect them from the back of the stage where the superb band turbo-charges the show with marvelous energy and musicianship. The tiny keyhole-shaped thrust stage effectively turns the place into that all-important intimate space, and it’s three-quarters surrounded by a crowd that feels obliged to duck when the acrobats do their thing.

Whether or not you’ve seen Smoke and Mirrors in its previous incarnations, you really ain’t seen nothing if you haven’t seen this one. It’s living, breathing evidence of how you can take a good thing, not rest on the laurels of public and critical acclaim, and make it so much better. It's always been a popular hit show. Now it's a great popular hit show.

You can also buy (from the theatre at the moment, online later) for $25, a cast recording of the show and that’s brilliant too, of course.

 

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