2014: They’re Playing Our Song by Neil Simon

They’re Playing Our Song by Neil Simon, Marvin Hamlisch and Carole Bayer Sager.  Produced by Chrstine Harris & HIT Productions, directed by Terence O’Connell, at The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, March 28 – April 5, 2014

Reviewed by Frank McKone
March 28

I thank Scott Irwin (as Vernon Gersch) and Teagan Wouters (as Sonia Walsk) for giving us a pleasantly entertaining performance of this 1979 play with songs, which surely must be one of Neil Simon’s least stageworthy efforts.

Simon’s strengths were first recognised in the previous decade (Barefoot in the Park 1963 and The Odd Couple, Tony Award 1965), and much later with his Pulitzer Prize in 1991 for Lost in Yonkers, but I fear that this association in between times with composer Hamlisch (A Chorus Line) and lyricist Sager fell into the old theatrical trap of self-indulgence.  Simon was certainly playing their songs, but the resulting script is dramatically thin and entirely sentimental.

Though Simon was famous enough for the romance of their lives to run for a couple of years in New York, London and even in 1980 at the Theatre Royal in Sydney – starring John Waters and Jacki Weaver – I suspect that Hamlisch and Sager knowingly ‘used’ Simon to write the ‘book’ for their ‘musical’ as a pot-boiler.

However, in this production at least Terence O’Connell and the performers realised that putting on an overlay of comic stylisation was the best way to go for them as actors, and to concentrate on the music.  We could always applaud them as singers for their musicianship.

Which reminds me that it is not clear in the program who was the excellent keyboard player behind the scrim, sometimes dimly lit.  Was it Alistair Smith, named as Musical Director?

Because the songs now seem terribly dated and old-fashioned, and with so little dramatic development in the script beyond a few fairly obvious one-liner jokes (and regular name-dropping of Elton John), Wouters and Irwin had to work hard, so here are some nice pictures of them:

Scott Irwin - Vernon Gersch in They're Playing Our Song

Teagan Wouters - Sonia Walsk in They're Playing Our Song

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2014: The Winter’s Tale by William Shakespeare.

Polixenes, Hermione, Leontes: jealousy

The Winter’s Tale by William Shakespeare.
Bell Shakespeare directed by John Bell; designer Stephen Curtis; lighting by Matthew Marshall; composer Alan John; sound designer Nate Edmondson; dramaturg John Kachoyan.  At the Sydney Opera House Playhouse: Season (including previews) March 1 – 29, 2014.

Paulina, Leontes: redemption

Polixenes, Leontes, Hermione, Camillo:
reconciliation

 Cast:   

    Leontes/Old Shepherd             Myles Pollard

    Hermione/Mopsa                      Helen Thomson

    Paulina/Dorcas                         Michelle Doake

    Polixenes                                  Dorian Nkono

    Camillo                                     Philip Dodd

    Antigonus/Autolycus                Terry Serio

    Cleomenes/Florizel                  Felix Jozeps

    Dion/Young Shepherd             Justin Smith

    Emilia/Perdita                          Liana Cornell

    Mamillius                                 Otis Pavlovic / Rory Potter

Reviewed by Frank McKone
Opening Night March 12

Beautiful!

That’s all I really need to say about this original interpretation of The Winter’s Tale.

But I want to say more: about how and why it works so well, and something about this production’s significance.

The Winter’s Tale and King Lear have always puzzled me on one point: why did Shakespeare let key characters – Leontes’ son Mamillius and Lear’s Fool – just insignificantly die.  They fade from the drama without much ado.  Late in Lear we hear that the Fool has been hanged.  In the Tale Mamillius sickens, but we do not see his death – despite the crucial role he plays in Leontes’ psychological state – and even his memory is effectively replaced by his long-lost sister, Perdita.

John Bell has solved my puzzle.  He was, I guess, impressed as I was by the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 1969 setting – in the famous ‘white box’ – of The Winter’s Tale, which we saw on their Australian tour in 1970.  Here’s Trevor Nunn’s image of the story beginning in the child’s nursery.

 

http://www.rsc.org.uk/images/content/Photo_Galleries-2009_earlier/winters-tale-1969-judi-541x361.jpg

Trevor Nunn's 1969 production of The Winter's Tale was designed by Christopher Morley and featured Judi Dench as Hermione. Photo shows Act 2, Scene 1 with Hermione (Judi Dench), Mamillius (Sam Rich, centre) and Leontes (Barrie Ingham).

Photo by Reg Wilson.

The key that Bell has found to unlock the puzzle is to set the whole play in Mamillius’ nursery.  It is a fairy story, told to us by the young boy as if the adults are like the toys that come alive in Léonide Massine’s ballet La Boutique Fantasque, though rather more like something from the brothers Grimm collection.  Although they were called "Children's Tales", they were not regarded as suitable for children, both for the scholarly information included and the subject matter.[Maria Tatar, The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales, p15-17 quoted in Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimms%27_Fairy_Tales ]

In Bell’s play, Mamillius does not die for us, but becomes a kind of wizard – rather like Prospero in The Tempest – as he plays the Oracle from Delphi with a magic wand that creates magnificent lightning and thunder.  This is a young boy at play, but his story is for adults.

And so, for the first time for me, even including the Trevor Nunn version, the revelation of the statue of Hermione, brought to life by the touch of her son’s spirit, brought real tears to my eyes.  At last The Winter’s Tale made sense, from the psychosis of Leonte’s irrational jealousy in falsely believing in Hermione’s and Polixene’s perfidy, to the importance of rational, clear-minded people like Paulina and Camillo, and to the possibility – or at least the hope – of redemption and reconcilation.

And, although I highly praise all the cast and stage creative team, I am left with a special sense of the enjoyment in performing for the young boy Mamillius – Rory Potter for me, and Otis Pavlovic on other nights – when he points his Oracle’s wand and creates wonderful lighting and sound effects, or plays with his torch to create the shadow of his teddy bear as it pursues the hapless innocent, honest and trustworthy Antigone to his gory death, or conducts puppet conversations among his soft toys, and finally as he brings his mother back to life. 

What a tremendous experience this must be for these young boys, just as this production is a beautiful theatrical work of art for its adult audience.

Otis Pavlovic as Mamillius, Terry Serio as Autolycus

Felix Jozeps as Florizel, Liana Cornell as Perdita
Michelle Doake as Dorcas, Terry Serio as Autolycus, Helen Thomson as Mopsa,
Otis Pavlovic (part hidden) and Justin Smith as Young Shepherd

Rory Potter as Mamillius as Oracle of Delphi

 Photos: Michele Mossop

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2014: Clybourne Park by Bruce Norris - Preview

Ensemble Theatre, Sydney, directed by Tanya Goldberg.
Season:     Wednesday March 19 – Saturday April 19 (Previews from March 13)
Bookings:     Box Office 02 9929 0644; Online www.ensemble.com.au


by Frank McKone

Perhaps the most famous American play about black-white relations is All God’s Chillun Got Wings, by Eugene O’Neill, first performed in May 1924.  Its first reviewer, Arthur Pollock in the Brooklyn Daily News, thought it was too didactic, and worse – in hindsight from 90 years later – the lead player, Paul Robeson, “was a sad disappointment”.  How things change!

In Clybourne Park Bruce Norris shows that although the issues may not have changed, even by 2010, the approach to dramatising a story of the acceptance of African Americans into a previously white conclave need no longer be didactic.  Reviews describe the play as “Indisputably, uproariously funny”, “A savagely funny and insightful time bomb” and “Ferociously smart...sharp-witted, sharp-toothed comedy” (Entertainment Weekly, Hollywood Reporter and New York Times.)

What’s more, though O’Neill was awarded the Pulitzer Prize three times between 1920 and 1928, but not for his race relations play, Norris’s “wickedly funny, fiercely provocative play about race, real estate and the volatile values of each” and in which “we watch supposedly civilised people behave like territorial savages” has won not only the 2010 Evening Standard Award after its UK premiere at the Royal Court Theatre in London, but also the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the 2012 Tony Award for Best Play, and the 2011 Olivier Award for Best New Play.

I disagree with Arthur Pollock about All God’s Chillun, which I think is a powerful psychological drama resulting from the 1924 attitudes against mixed marriage and upward social mobility (even if his description of Robeson as “an earnest, hard-working amateur and nothing more, apparently” was accurate), and I especially look forward to writing a compare and contrast for Clybourne Park.

It’s unfortunate, though, that I am unable get to the Ensemble until the very last night of the season.  So either you wait for a post-production review, or you go along to see for yourself.

© Frank McKone, Canberra