Malthouse
REVIEW: The Threepenny Opera
The always-vexing question of the ‘right’ way to do a playtext is particularly vexed when it comes to Brecht; to stage Brecht is almost invariably to fail Brecht.
Malthouse season 2
Michael Kantor’s last season (just announced) looks strangely like a Best Of Malthouse 2005-2010 (subtitle: The Kantor Years), or a Tribute To… CD (Melbourne indie theatre does Malthouse OR Malthouse does Melbourne indie… you choose). And not just that, but a Christmas edition with two bonus tracks (Great International Name + the understudy makes an appearance).
RW: Elizabeth: Quasi per caso una donna
Perhaps the most unfortunate thing to say about Michael Kantor is that he seems to be capable of only a very narrow expressive range. Most of his work sticks to the same stew of camp singing, heavily applied Satire, sprinkled with poignancy until we all feel five years old. Too many of his works have looked like an educational poster: this is your ‘FUN’, this is your ‘SOCIAL RELEVANCE’, and this is your ‘MORAL’. Unfortunately, the dramatic mechanics of Elizabeth cannot withstand such treatment.
RW: En Trance
It is very rare that I go out of my way to write a reflection on a theatre piece I didn’t enjoy. Particularly considering that this was one evening I had spent in the theatre purely for pleasure, not for work in any way, that I was a paying customer in civilian clothes, and that what I am going to do can fairly be called a deliberate act of meanness.
RW: Happy Days
People who don’t go to the theatre often wonder why theatre enthusiasts are, well, such enthusiasts. The answer lies in the rarely achieved bliss of the curtain call: the actors on stage, the audience in commotion, the physical and emotional synchronicity of the long applause. It is one in a hundred, but that’s the magic [...]
RW: A Commercial Farce
Humour is possibly the most culturally specific of all the culturally specific things. You only true way, I would argue, to know whether you fit into a foreign culture is whether you can be funny on purpose. Once you can locate their funny bone, you have found the key to a people.
There are as many [...]
RW: Goodbye Vaudeville Charlie Mudd
Katz’s characters are always vaguely aware of their fictitiousness and, like suburban teenagers, less fight it than try to manipulate their own image, make willful exits, evolve, delude: and yet, they are always trapped in the strict girdle of a Lally Katz play, a self-aware machine of its own, that gallops with the unrelenting mercilessness of the grown-up world. Levels of discourse intermingle, predictable plotlines start and finish against all odds, while the unpredictable ones drift off, and the characters, like the repeatedly erased Daffy Duck in that seminal cartoon, struggle to assert themselves.
Dance Massive
While I’m catching up on sleep whenever I can find a spare hour - which makes my days wildly unpredictable for everyone else - you can find my reviews of Dance Massive performances accumulating, with painful regularity, on the RealTime website, some other website, as well as distributed around the Dancehouse, Arts House, and Malthouse [...]
This week / exhaustion
The quiet of the last few weeks, on GS, was just the backstage of the roaring thunder of Ms Gorilla managing no less than 6 jobs and one full-time university degree, adding up to something approximating 100 hours a week. If you think that this is bordering on literary figure and/or surrealism, well: there’s your [...]
RW: I Love You Bro
I Love You Bro is a perfectly wonderful thing to spend an evening watching - and I say this without irony - except that it would work beautifully on the radio.
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