THE WHARF REVUE – DEBT DEFYING ACTS!
THE WHARF REVUE – DEBT DEFYING ACTS! Wharf 1, Sydney Theatre Company; 17 November � 30 December 2011. Photos: Tracey Schramm. Main pic: Jonathan Biggins, Amanda Bishop, Phillip Scott and Drew Forsythe. Right: Christine Gillard and Phantom Rudd.
The Wharf Revue creative team of Biggins, Scott and Forsythe has excelled this year. It's possible I said that last year, perhaps the year before and probably the year before that too. Memory gets a bit hazy over eleven years, except it's perfectly clear that pleasurable anticipation of "the new Revue" has rarely been in vain. These gents have Hill of Grace running in their veins: they get better year by year.
And, of course, they're turned into a foursome on stage with the death-defying Amanda Bishop (it takes a particular kind of reckless bravery to set out to measure up to these inspired clowns). Her background should tell you why she has it. They latched on to her last year and she was terrific, but very much the junior partner. Her turn back then as Julia Gillard led to a TV series and you may recall she was given 15 rounds of the ring for her temerity. (Depending on your POV it was funny or not funny; tasteless and uncalled for, or an invasion of the PM's bedroom; or a threat to national security and she should have been strung up – can't recall which, right now.) Either way, Bishop took a right old whacking, but she's bounced right back as a fully realized quarter of the troupe. Revenge is a dish better eaten cold and on stage, perhaps.
Bishop is very good as the Ranga and no more so than in partnering Scott in a wonderfully well wrought spoof of Phantom of the Opera titled "Rudd Never Dies", featuring the PM as the hapless Christine who's kidnapped and dragged down to the reservoir by the white-masked and still furious Kevin. As is the case with so much of the Revue's material, it's the tiny details that often make for the funniest moments: the white frocked Julia and caped Kevin punt across the lagoon in tiny, tiny tiptoeing steps as he wields the pole and booms balefully of his trials and longed for retribution.
The biggest surprise for some and musical highlight for many, in this Lloyd-Webber borrowing, is how easily and hilariously Bishop moves from soaring rich mezzo to nasal-Julia low notes: a mistress stroke. Similarly, there are few funnier or less self-conscious clowns than Jonathan Biggins. He only has to place his feet in Third Position and display his knobbly knees and manly torso while looking down his nose like a 1950s bank manager for an audience to crack up. Happily he does this and the laughter roars out with the simple, idiotic pleasure of it.
Each to his or her own: everyone will have a favourite sketch or character in a show that is high on quality and short on dud moments. Satire and lampoon are the order of the evening and the Revue is an equal opportunity ridiculer. Even the employer gets a gentle jab: the setting is the red and gold and tawdrily lit big top of Upton's Family Circus. Drew Forsythe is at his lugubrious best as King Rupert in a remix of King Lear. And truth is, it becomes clear why Rupe preferred his very own ranga – Rebekah – and his various Dengs to his ingrate brats.
A serious political highlight has to be the plainly rendered reminder of Alan Jones's most recent bouts of vile behaviour. It's told through his own recorded rantings as a Balinese wayang puppet show. It's known as giving a man his own rope with which to hang himself. Unfortunately, in this instance it's only symbolic. And as well as Bob Katter, Clover Moore, Bob Brown, Kristina Keneally and Muammar Qaddafi, there's much, much more besides in a technically dazzling, creatively stirring and laugh out loud-laugh a minute show. (That makes 90 laughs: that's a lot, no wonder it's exhausting.)
