Toni Lamond: Times of My Life
With Michael Tyack at the piano, Toni Lamond’s one-woman show about her tempestuous life and brilliant career delivers the answer, if one were needed, to the question - why do so many people prefer biography to fiction?
Lamond’s life story - she is a gorgeous 75 not out - would scarcely be believable if it were not true. Born to vaudeville stars, she grew up in theatres across Australia. She followed her mother and father onto those stages and eventually to the fabled Tivoli - and beyond.
Lamond is an entertainer whose career survived the extraordinary shifts in popular entertainment that occurred throughout the 20th century. As a child she thought she would be Australia’s answer to Baby Gumm (Judy Garland). And as she grew into a sassy soubrette and skilled comedienne, she turned into Australia’s own Toni Lamond and didn’t have to be anyone else.
Not that she had it easy. When Lamond was trying to break into musicals it was a given that the leading roles would go to foreign “star” imports. (Often has-beens and never-wases.) Then television arrived and that was the end of vaudeville. Rarely daunted, Lamond and her husband Frank Sheldon took to the club circuit. But she was too good to languish anywhere for long and television in the shape of a young and brilliant Graham Kennedy soon came knocking.
Now known as “the golden age of television”, the rich and illuminating archive footage that punctuates the show, together with Lamond’s anecdotes, illustrate that this is no empty cliché. The young stars were literally inventing their medium as they went along. It was hair-raising at the time and, in this anodyne age, scarcely credible, but Lamond simply twinkles as she tells the most outrageous stories.
She is also honest about aspects of her life that must still cause pain: the break-up of her marriage and Frank’s subsequent suicide are handled without sentimentality but with the emotion and frankness that tragedy demands. She is then as scrupulous and, it must be said, entertaining in relating the sorry tale of her so-common but rarely discussed descent into depression and the addiction to prescription drugs which followed.
The show is co-written and directed by Lamond’s best-ever production: her son, Tony Sheldon. (Currently holding the fort on the other side of the harbour at the Lyric theatre in Priscilla Queen of the Desert.) Sheldon is a skilled comedy writer and director; he is also an astute judge of when less is more, as well as of the rhythms and nuances needed to keep this rollercoaster life on the rails.
The setting (Graham Maclean, with lighting by Michele Preshaw) is simple: Tyack and his piano, a comfy armchair, a hatstand of props, marquee lights and high above them: the screens on which a treasury of old footage and photographs are displayed. (Video design: Matthew Aberline, video editor: James Taggart and Sean Costello of Big Day Media.)
The result is a well constructed drama, punctuated with songs from the fabled shows in which Lamond starred, starting with Pajama Game and continuing through a virtual history of the form with Mame, Oliver!, Gypsy, Hello Dolly, Cabaret, Annie, 42nd Street, Follies (head spinning yet?) and on to the present with her award-winning cabaret show and now - this one.
Set to tour nationally, Times of My Life is virtually sold out in its premiere season. It’s that rare thing: an enthralling, amusing and heartwarming entertainment that also tells you an awful lot about Australia. Don’t miss it.
Times of My Life Ensemble Theatre then touring (Christine Dunstan Productions); ph: 02 9929 0644 or www.ensemble.com.au
