Tripod: Men of Substance

13 Jan 2013 - Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House

from 3pod.com.au

I hadn't been sure of what to expect actually - this was the first time I'd seen Tripod perform something closer to a comedy set, rather than their D&D musical 'Tripod versus the Dragon'. As we sat down in our great seats (third row, in the middle) my friends nodded approvingly, but joked that we didn't need this good a view as we'd had in my previous feat of excellent ticket karma that saw us admiring the um, talents of the bare-chested cast at Pirates of Penzance. 

"No shirtlessness here!" we chortled - then BAM! Tripod opened with pasty middle-aged beer guts for comedy. ;) It made me wonder what the 'substance' in their show title referred to. Thickening waistlines? or maybe the experience gained with age, after more than 15 years together as an act. They milked this for all it was worth throughout the show, memorably about Yon not changing in all that time ("He's like Benjamin Button - on pause!"). 

Other highlights in the compact show (a little over an hour) included the opening song, Adult Contemporary ("Haven't had a new musical experience since 1994!"); Close all the Local Pubs Down ("Let's move to where the music is - and stop it."); the tax song that becomes a Barry White parody to great effect (and was educational too!) and Yon's hilarious paen on looking back on your twenties with unrealistic fondness ("I think I would've remembered sacrificing a child..."). Oh, and encore song YouTube Party though my only complaint would be that there weren't enough references to cats. :)

In fact, this show felt like it made just for me and my friends - I mean, it featured stupid dancing, age anxiety, musical geekery and just plain geekery, things we're all extremely familiar with. Tripod even sang about Waiting for the Game to Load when we'd literally had a conversation about the days of cassette-loaded games before walking in. What were the chances of that?!

All in all, this show was terrific fun. It was a great showcase of their ability to knowingly and lovingly parody a wide range of musical genres. And apart from being good musicians with great harmonies, I appreciated how nicely constructed the set was, jokes upon jokes that set up for even bigger laughs later in the night. It left wishing for a longer show, more jokes, more songs...so here's to another 16 years!

Theatre 2012

So Al and I have been joking that you can tell we're getting old because we're starting to swap music gigs for theatre productions. 


26/10/2012 Les Miserables @ Riverside Theatre (Riverside Lyric Ensemble)

Musically the cast and orchestra of this production were very good; at the start, it even sounded (spookily) similar the CSR but the main actors managed to give their very well-known parts a bit of their own character. My only quibble musically would be that the whole show was played at a quicker tempo than I'd like, which gave some of the more emotional moments a rushed feeling (though it possibly allowed the quite long show to end at a decent hour??). 

The actor playing Valjean was the standout, vocally and in acting. Eponine was also great in her part vocally, and she had the best death scene with a fantastically judged performance of A Little Fall of Rain; but bizarrely, she also decided to play all her scenes with Marius with hunched shoulders and sagging posture as if she were Gollum watching over his precious...it was very distracting. 

The major problem with this production was probably direction, or lack of it. It was particularly noticeable in how movement around the stage was terrible; often actors were left to sing their solos at the front of the stage as if in recital rather than in a theatrical performance, and in some group scenes the energy of the main performances would be sapped by background characters haphazardly moving across the stage into each other's paths and in distracting ways.

I went with a mixed group of friends, from Les Mis diehard fanatics to someone who turned to me after the show and asked, in all seriousness, "So tell me about this French Revolution thing". So I think the fact that everyone really enjoyed it speaks to the appeal of the musical despite the flaws to be expected from an (semi-)amateur production. 

20/10/2012 Much Ado About Nothing (Globe Shakespeare on Screen)

This would've been so much fun to see in person, I think, and even on film it comes across as a really charming production that handles the balance between comedy and drama in this play really well. Beatrice and Benedick's sparring never gets tiresome and still gets laughs, no matter how many times I've seen/heard it. Nice, simple staging and I loved how the actors used the audience as part of their performance!

30/9/2012 Private Lives @ Belvoir

Fairly straight-forward adaptation, though in modern-dress with some other anachronistic touches that mostly worked (still not quite sure about that Phil Collins moment). Very funny, and the actors did well with the furious pace of Coward's cracking script, but there's still a weird disconnect when your brain registers the casual racism and the violence against women that's just laughed off.

6/7/2012 The Duchess of Malfi @ Playhouse, Opera House (Bell Shakespeare)

Oooh, depressing. I mean, any synopsis of the plot would make that clear but geez, when it's compacted down like this it's just one terrible thing after another. Coupled with a dark, claustrophobic set full of sharp edges and it was all a bit much after a while. Lucy Bell delivered a nice, subtle performance of as the Duchess but the male cast veered between OTT villainy and blank ambiguity. 

19/5/2012 Les Liaisons Dangereuses @ Wharf 1 Theatre (STC)

Simple and elegant staging, overall really good production with particularly strong performances by the female cast. Justine Clark was heartbreakingly lovely as Tourvel. Pamela Rabe was great too, though almost unrecognisable in her grey wig. But - and it's probably an unpopular opinion - I thought Hugo Weaving was a bit too arch in this, even allowing for the source material. 

21/4/2012 Macbeth @ Drama Theatre, Opera House (Bell Shakespeare)

Hm. Great staging - instead of the traditional stone walls of Scottish castles, it all takes place on an empty, grassy stage with a mirror above casting a reflection that serves to make the emptiness seem ever darker and more foreboding. Interesting choice to collapse the three witches into one portrayal, using body shape and voice distortion to bring a creepy, eerie tone to Lizzie Schebesta's intriguing performance. 

But overall, I didn't enjoy this - didn't enjoy the choice to sexualise Macbeth's connection with the witches, didn't enjoy Katie Jean Harding once again histrionically playing another bereaved mother, didn't enjoy the way it dragged and dragged even as it got closer and closer to everything falling to pieces. 

24/3/2012 This Is Our Youth @ Drama Theatre, Opera House
Really enjoyed this. Despite it being a play written in the 90s about kids in the 80s it still felt relevant and applicable to the predominantly (and unusually) young audience watching 20, 30 years on. I like that Lonergan managed to capture a portrait of youth that's going to feel true even if the clothes, the drugs, the phones and presidents keep changing. 

The three young actors were all very good. Michael Cera played to type as the hapless perpetual screw-up Warren, and at first his distinctive voice took a little getting used to in a live setting, but he is a very good, subtle physical comedian and he also managed to bring to surface surprising moments of joy and choked-up sadness in turn. Emily Barclay was all coltish teenage girlishness and nerves, perfectly performed. But Keiran Culkin was the best as the fast-talking Dennis, full of barely-suppressed rage. He owned the part so well that we were surprised to find out afterwards that he'd originally played Warren in a NY production! 

**


I also saw the all-male production of Pirates of Penzance at Sydney Theatre, which was very enjoyable and provided a lot of food for thought about gender roles, but I forgot to make notes on that...

Anyway, I have a Belvoir subscription for next year (5 plays!) and I'm hoping to get some tickets to some of the major productions STC will put on, so bring on 2013! 

Opera Australia: My Fair Lady

I enjoyed this production of My Fair Lady at the Theatre Royal, which was musically sound and handsome on a small scale. The production stuck very closely to that of the film in aesthetics (sets and costumes) and staging.

I was so happy that we did get Richard E. Grant as Professor Higgins, and he didn't disappoint - he's a decent singer, and very much Henry Higgins in his delivery of those cutting lines. He's much more physical in his performance that I'd expected for the role, constantly in motion, but it works since he is a much younger Henry than usual. When they took their bows at the end, he was a little teary-eyed, probably out of relief at successfully pulling off his musical theatre debut.

Taryn Fiebig has a good singing voice, but I found her a little harder to hear in dialogue, since she seems to swallow her words - I don't know if that's an operatic training thing. She looked lovely though in the Ascot and ball costumes. And John Wood was very funny as Alfie, though I question the amount of eyeliner they used on him...why would a common dustman wear so much eyeliner (or any at all, really)? The supporting cast were good too. There was a slight tendency towards the hammy (from the whole cast, though I'd single out the actor playing Freddy as a particularly notable example), but it's always had that feel, especially in the 'cockney' folk-of-the-street numbers.

The 'romantic' ending (that of the original musical and film, not Shaw's Pygmalion ending) worked better for me here, this time. They chose to play up the romantic tension from earlier on, and in the scene at Mrs Higgins' house they make it much more explicit that both Eliza and Henry have feelings for each other, but it's more a battle for Henry to acknowledge Eliza as more than his marvelous creation, as her own self instead. Which makes their reconciliation sweeter, and more understandable.

STC: John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt

It's a very simple play - four actors in total, and a spartan stage that has a very clever backdrop doing triple duty as church, the garden between the convent and the rectory, and Sister Aloysius' office. The twistiness comes in the form of the complex and varied themes in the situation, and the solid dialogue between the characters.

Sister Aloysius is the principal of a Catholic school (up to our equivalent of year 8) in the 1960s in a largely Italian-Irish Catholic district. She's tough and principled, observant and sharp. A young nun, Sister James, is newly in charge of 8b who are six months away from graduation and high school. At the beginning of the play, she has a meeting with Sister Aloysius, where she gets a dressing down of her rather enthusiastic and empathetic teaching from the much more formal older nun, and also a veiled warning to be on the lookout for anything unusual in regards to her class. Sister Aloysius won't elaborate, for fear of putting ideas into Sister James' head, but she is very insistent on asking about the welfare of their newest student, the only black kid in their midst.

Later, Sister James almost unwillingly tells Sister Aloysius that Father Flynn, the charismatic and popular parish priest, has become a mentor to the boy, calling him in for a private meeting that results in the student coming back to class seemingly upset and with alcohol on his breath. Sister Aloysius is sure this indicates that Father Flynn is having an inappropriate relationship, confirming her suspicions. Sister James is then wracked with the doubt of having told Sister Aloysius this news as she is not at all certain that Father Flynn is guilty of anything.

In a great scene, Sister Aloysius sets up a meeting between herself and Father Flynn, with Sister James as an unwilling chaperone, and confronts Father Flynn, who angrily denies the allegations, and comes up with a plausible explanation that does not implicate him except in his cover-up of a misdeed of the student's. He later manages to turn Sister James to his side completely, even as Sister Aloysius tries harder and harder to find proof that he is guilty of pedophilia. She even talks to the student's mother, only to be confronted with a very different kind of parenting - the mother knows her son is "that way" inclined, and Father Flynn is a blessing because he spends time with her bullied child, and she refuses to acknowledge any wrongdoing by the priest.

Up to this point, we are definitely asked to sympathise with everyone but Sister Aloysius, who seems to be putting on an almost hysterical witchhunt against a man who appears to be very noble and good and hard done by. Even with the shadow of pedophilia over the whole play - the uncomfortable hindsight that there *were* many cases of hidden abuse within the Catholic school system of priests against students and altar boys in that era of 'don't ask, don't tell' - it's hard to believe that Sister Aloysius with her black-and-white sense of justice and cold exterior is in the right.

In the pivotal scene, Sister Aloysius butts heads with Father Flynn for the last time. She tells him that she talked to a nun from his last parish, that she knows this is his third parish in the last five years, that she knows he has a past of misdeeds. Father Flynn doesn't admit guilt, but she tells him she expects him to resign, and we leave the scene with him telephoning the bishop.

At the end, we find out that Father Flynn has left their parish. Sister Aloysius admits that she lied about finding out about his past parishes, but the fact that Father Flynn leaves on hearing this news is proof that he *was* guilty. However - the kick is that instead of leaving with his reputation in tatters, Father Flynn has been 'promoted' to a new parish and a new school. We leave with Sister Aloysius finally showing her compassion and human-ness, breaking down in tears as she admits that she now has doubts that she did the right thing. It's an entirely depressing ending, and yet, entirely fitting for the scope of the story and themes.

Who is the monster? For most of the play it seems to be Sister Aloysius - holding on to out of date rules, the old Roman-Catholic ways of heirarchy and starched appearances - but in the end, it's harder to say who is right and who is wrong, who is the more human and kind and compassinate and caring.

The actress playing Sister Aloysius, Jennifer Flowers, is very good. She makes her a zealot for most part, outwardly hard, but in a way that makes her revealed humanity by the end completely believable. She is the same person throughout, it just takes a deeper look and understanding to see what she does has motive in the right place. Alison Bell plays the young nun well as sweet and confused. Christopher Garbardi, as Father Flynn, slipped up a few times - accent changes, flubbing a line here and there - though he has a difficult job pulling off the likeable swagger that looks a lot more like arrogance in the safety of the patriachal church system by the end.