Barry Crocker in Almost a Legend at the School of Arts Cafe, Queanbeyan. Wednesday to Saturday June 24 - 27.
Where can you meet Nat King C., Tony B., Al J., Johnny M., Billy E., Frank S., Johnny R., Jerry L., Humphrey B., Jimmy S., Boris K., Dean M., Mario L. and Elvis P. all in close proximity to venison, ostrich, kangaroo, duck and crocodile pie? Only at the School of Arts Cafe in the company of Bazza. Where else would you want to be on a night so cold that he, as only Bazza could, claimed to have had a certain part of his anatomy stuck to the toilet bowl in the back paddock not long before coming on stage.
So it's all a fun fantasy of the Life of Bazza from the days of the Geelong Musical Comedy Society, which he accidentally joined in pursuit of s-e-x. On the way from natural and presumably irrepressible mimic to Queanbeyan via Las Vegas, New York, London, Australian, American and British television, Carols in the Domain, a United Nations UNICEF Concert and 33 gold records, Barry Crocker has added technique to talent and probably sings better now than ever, even though people keep saying he's dead.
Though he whinged about being the same age as Elvis who's been resting for twenty years, it's salutary to remember that Bazza is still alive and entertaining. He presents a melange, or what in the fifties of his youth would have been called a flummery, which I will define as a whipped up medley of mainly old favourites which entirely suited potato and leek soup, Aussie mixed-meat pie (excepting the ring-in ostrich - where was the emu?) and apple and peach bread pudding.
It's a great night out at the School of Arts, but it may be a waste of time trying to book by the time you read this. Still you could drop by and purchase the new CD called Bazazz behind which there is a complicated story which we never heard the end of. We did hear about the accompanist Dave Macrae, pianist and backing tape-deck player extraordinaire who wrote The Goodies theme music and played for the real Frank S.
Missed Bazza? Catch Jeanne Little in July.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Thursday, 25 June 1998
Thursday, 18 June 1998
1998: Play Strindberg by Friedrich Durrenmatt
Play Strindberg by Friedrich Durrenmatt. Director Neal Roach. New Erektions Fringe Season, Currong Theatre, June 18 - 22. Professional.
"Critics are bastards." "But not imbeciles." Durrenmatt's attempt to undermine the carping class will not stop me. I will carp - about the play, and a little about the production.
Play Strindberg is a late play (1970) in the Durrenmatt canon. A re-working of Strindberg's Dance of Death, it feels as if it belongs to a Europe decades earlier than the social upheaval of 1968.
A "world-renowned military literary gentleman" can never become more than a major, and only then because he is "well-regarded by the colonel". He marries a "famous actress" who nobody has ever heard of. She should have married her cousin who on the rebound marries her friend.
The cousin's marriage breaks up; he spends 15 years "not doing much" except making millions in America; he visits the actress. The military man and the actress stay together despite hating each other. The actress is left at the end of the play with a dead husband and a lover who leaves her, presumably to make more millions. All this is played out absurdly in 12 rounds, like a boxing match.
I think even in 1970 this was old-hat. Ionesco, Beckett, Peter Weiss and Durrenmatt himself had done it all before, and better from the mid-1940's to the early 1960's. It's a play satirising a class structure which, even in Durrenmatt's Switzerland, was rapidly changing.
Yet done in the right style, Play Strindberg is a nasty nihilist farce about marriage. Sarah Snell (Alice), Peter Robinson (her husband Edgar) and Lachlan Abrahams (the cousin) have the elements of the style correct. First night was not well paced and only some of the unexpected changes in mood were done well enough to cause the nervous laughter that Durrenmatt aimed at, but the actors are good enough for this to improve through the season.
Roach's changed setting from a Danish island to "somewhere in or beyond far north Australia" doesn't work: the script is too European. The design needs a big expressionistic style, inspired by Andy Warhol or the later Super-Realist painters, to lift the play out of apparently ordinary intimacy.
An interesting but not thoroughly exciting production.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
"Critics are bastards." "But not imbeciles." Durrenmatt's attempt to undermine the carping class will not stop me. I will carp - about the play, and a little about the production.
Play Strindberg is a late play (1970) in the Durrenmatt canon. A re-working of Strindberg's Dance of Death, it feels as if it belongs to a Europe decades earlier than the social upheaval of 1968.
A "world-renowned military literary gentleman" can never become more than a major, and only then because he is "well-regarded by the colonel". He marries a "famous actress" who nobody has ever heard of. She should have married her cousin who on the rebound marries her friend.
The cousin's marriage breaks up; he spends 15 years "not doing much" except making millions in America; he visits the actress. The military man and the actress stay together despite hating each other. The actress is left at the end of the play with a dead husband and a lover who leaves her, presumably to make more millions. All this is played out absurdly in 12 rounds, like a boxing match.
I think even in 1970 this was old-hat. Ionesco, Beckett, Peter Weiss and Durrenmatt himself had done it all before, and better from the mid-1940's to the early 1960's. It's a play satirising a class structure which, even in Durrenmatt's Switzerland, was rapidly changing.
Yet done in the right style, Play Strindberg is a nasty nihilist farce about marriage. Sarah Snell (Alice), Peter Robinson (her husband Edgar) and Lachlan Abrahams (the cousin) have the elements of the style correct. First night was not well paced and only some of the unexpected changes in mood were done well enough to cause the nervous laughter that Durrenmatt aimed at, but the actors are good enough for this to improve through the season.
Roach's changed setting from a Danish island to "somewhere in or beyond far north Australia" doesn't work: the script is too European. The design needs a big expressionistic style, inspired by Andy Warhol or the later Super-Realist painters, to lift the play out of apparently ordinary intimacy.
An interesting but not thoroughly exciting production.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
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