2016: Elmo’s Super Fun Hero Show by Sesame Workshop

The four ducks that the Count counts backwards
with Jessica Brown as Super Sparkleheart

Big Bird

The Count

Cookie Monster about to share his cookie,
while Elmo holds his Kindness Certificate

Elmo’s Super Fun Hero Show by Sesame Workshop, produced and toured in Australia by Life Like Touring (Au).  At Canberra Theatre Centre Playhouse, November 22, 2016.

Writer/Director: Theresa Borg
Creative Producer (Australia): Luke Gallagher
Designers: Craig Bryant – Composer (original songs) and Sound Design; Choreographer – Katie Ditchburn; Set – David Bramble and Luke Gallagher; Lighting – Dan Evans; Costume – Peri Jenkins.

Cast:
Super Sparkleheart – Jessica Brown
Sesame Street characters – Shaylee Murray, Many Vugler. Kaisha Durban, Dylan McEwan, Pauly Maybury, Kelly Hamilton, Chloe Gibson.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
November 22

I was surprised to see that the very young children (3 to 5) that made up the main part of the audience were not as excited throughout the show as I had expected.  After all Sesame Street began the year my youngest was born (1969) and I knew the attachment she and her sister had to the tv show.

I have also reviewed other stage versions of children’s tv and books, including Dora the Explorer, and several Garry Ginivan productions.  What was happening, I wondered?

Though the music was very danceable, as the characters on stage demonstrated admirably, I only saw one three-year-old bopping around in time – with her mother’s encouragement.  Other children and their adults were not responding to the music or even the story with any great enthusiasm.  What a shame, considering the highly worthwhile educational message about kindness, and the clear intention to teach emotional intelligence.

So why did this happen?  If you watch the (probably illegal) Youtube [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peeZzmQunqc] showing Sesame Street Episode 3857 you can see the problem.  The stage show creates a completely different atmosphere from the tv show.  From the reactions around me in the theatre, I think the adults were disappointed that the warm, gently humorous mood they have always known, which drew them in as it does their children, became a fast-paced razz-a-matazz show coming at them off the stage.  The children responded with cheers each time a new character, like the Count or Big Bird appeared, and the first time Elmo and friends burst into action, but Super Sparkleheart, despite Jessica Brown’s skillful playing of the role, did not engage them fully.  I noticed, in fact, that many of the children were talking to each other or their parents rather than being thoroughly focussed on what was happening on stage.

I thought back to Dora the Explorer – Dora’s Pirate Adventure (reviewed for the Canberra Times September 24, 2008).  That storyline was a very conventional adventure searching for a hidden prize.  It was superficial educationally, but the mass of children in the enormous Australian Institute of Sport arena were dancing in the aisles to the upbeat music and following the story step by step.  Elmo’s Super Fun Hero Show has a searching for a hidden prize story with a deeply important educational theme, but the format turned Sparkleheart into an explicit top-down teacher of the abstract concept of how to be kind. 

This killed the experience instead of enlivening the learning as happens on the tv Sesame Street.  Psychologically, the stage show uses extrinsic teaching/learning instead of developing intrinsic learning through emotional engagement.  I think in Australian culture the ‘hype’ of a ‘super fun hero’ show is suspect because it bombards the audience rather than welcoming them in.  This show seems to me to be at odds with the long-standing principle of the Sesame Street Workshop, which is from our perspective unusual in American culture.  Sesame Street on tv approaches our ABC TV’s Playschool, whose theme song is an invitation to ‘Come inside’, not too far from finding our way ‘to Sesame Street’.

Trying to understand where the Super Sparkleheart role went wrong, it was in the ending of each character’s story of seeking treasure that was the clue.  Good learning means being motivated intrinsically to be successful.  There is no reward for being kind except for internalising wanting to be kind for its own sake – because it feels and is good.  But in this Hero Show, Super Sparkleheart sets up the wrong motivation: if you find the hidden treasure you are rewarded with a certificate.  Even though she says everyone can be kind, the final message is about extrinsic motivation: you’ll get a certificate if you do what you are supposed to do.

Oddly enough, this competitive aspect in real life causes stress, and in the story the children are taught to handle this by learning diaphragm breathing or ‘breathing with your belly’.  Bellies are funny for little children and I had thought this would be great audience participation with lots of laughter (which also relieves stress).  But no.  Sparkleheart makes this a ‘very serious’ thing to do – and most of the adult audience, if they did it at all, did it quite half-heartedly, while the 3-year-olds were just too young to understand. 

So finally I worked out that the problem for this show also arose from the technical approach to the staging.  Good children’s theatre, with effective learning through modelling which provides intrinsic motivation (a major Sesame Street principle) has to be performed by actors with time and flexibility of approach, so that they can communicate with the children and respond fully to the children’s ideas and feelings.  Recently this was demonstrated wonderfully by a local company, Centrepiece Theatre, in Peter Best’s Goldilocks and the Three Bears (reviewed here January 24, 2016), and many years ago by Monica Trapaga in Monica’s House (reviewed in the Canberra Times, May 1996).

As I have been given to understand, Elmo’s Super Fun Hero Show had a pre-recorded sound track, including all the voices of the Sesame Street characters, singing and speaking, voiced “for this Australian produced show” by “the original cast of the Sesame Street TV series in New York City earlier this year”.  The only actor singing and speaking live was Jessica Brown as Super Sparkleheart, while the other performers (who were completely hidden inside their costumes) danced and moved to the sound track – like a kind of karaoke or ‘air’ performance.  Although the sound operator in theory could delay the next bit of track if Jessica had taken extra time to work with her audience, in practice the show ran strictly to time and speed encouraged very much by the over-the-top nature of the music – which controlled the characters’ movement and to which Jessica had to sing, dance and somersault.

So I must conclude that I am disappointed in Elmo’s Super Fun Hero Show because it didn’t feel like Sesame Street and didn’t teach like Sesame Street, even though the theme of learning how to be kind is such an important lesson we all need to remember.

[Reviews referred to can be accessed at www.frankmckone2.blogspot.com.au including those from before 2010]






© Frank McKone, Canberra

2016: An Evening with Groucho

An Evening with Groucho performed by Frank Ferrante with his pianist Alex Wignall; directed by Dreya Weber.  Produced by Jally Entertainment,  at The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, November 22-25, 2016.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
November 22

My earnest Socialist parents brought me up in England on Karl Marx, not Groucho Marx.  Perhaps they were in the audience in 1922 when, as Groucho remembers, the Marx Brothers’ attempt at zany American humour went down like a lead balloon in London.  Even when I arrived in Australia in the 1950s, though others tell me films like A Night at the Opera and Duck Soup were common fare for teenagers at the Saturday afternoon pictures, I never saw them.

So I approached An Evening with Groucho in some trepidation.  Fortunately I wasn’t seated in Rows A to D, or my fears may have been well-founded – for the aspect of Groucho Marx’s special skill in what we nowadays call stand-up comedy, which Frank Ferrante has down to a fine art, is very funny enforced audience participation. 

This can only work – and be thoroughly enjoyed even by those in the immediate firing-line – because Ferrante channels Groucho’s stage charisma, a kind of excruciating absolutely politically incorrect charm, so well that we are transported back in time.  If you are English you would recognise Arthur Askey as the equivalent performer of innuendo, or if Australian it would be Roy Rene (Mo).

Ferrante’s success is because he does not merely imitate Groucho’s talk, singing and ‘dancing’ – a forerunner, I’m sure, of John Cleese’s funny walks – but he inhabits the character.  This enables him to improvise his playing with the audience for lengthy periods between the official script, all nicely related to his venue, in Queanbeyan on this occasion, to the age of the audience, and then to the personal stories that people recount even as he makes fun of them.

At one point last night the modern political scene lifted its ugly head when one woman turned out to be American, though now has lived in Australia for more than 40 years.  “So you have dual citizenship?  Don’t ever go back!”  And turning to another couple who had been married for 39 years – after having pointed out that he (Groucho) had been married for longer – 44 years, to three different wives – he then proposed marriage to the woman.  “So he could stay here” didn’t have to be said, as the audience immediately picked up on the joke, thinking of Immigration Minister Peter Dutton’s and President-elect Donald Trump’s diatribes against refugees.

An important quality of the show is Groucho-Ferrante’s playful relationship with his Adelaide pianist, Alex Wignall.  Of course, Groucho uses Alex as his fall-guy, but always with a warmth of feeling between them.  Behind Groucho’s ‘front’ there is a sense of fragility, of needing the support which was supplied by his brothers, especially Harpo and Chico in real life.  Wignall’s top-rate piano playing, from the magisterial classical to the whimsical and cute, makes him the steady influence in the show, with his gentle sense of humour, which represents Harpo for Groucho.

So, despite my woeful lack of background experience of the Marx Brothers, Frank Ferrante’s An Evening with Groucho has filled me in, in a most entertaining way.  And for further entertaining background you can buy a wonderfully informative program in the form of a 2017 calendar to hang above your workdesk for a whole year of memories!




© Frank McKone, Canberra

2016: Seasons of Birth Art Exhibition

Seasons of Birth Art Exhibition.  Co-curators: Douglas Purnell and Lachlan Warner. 

Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture, Director – Stephen Pickard.  Cnr Kings Ave and Blackall Street, Barton, Canberra, November 13 – 26, 2016, Mon – Fri, 10 am – 4 pm.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
November 13

Artists exhibited:
Chris Auckett:  ‘Creation’ (the ties that bind)  Sculpture (steel rod, wire, found natural timber)

Julie Dowling:  Maran.ga (Being in love)  Painting (acrylic, red ochre on canvas)

Jeanette Siebols:  Fecundus  Painting (oil on canvas)

Jenny Little:  Conception  Digital animation

Anne Graham:  Annunciation: Lily  Sculpture (mixed media)

Dongwang Fan:  Seasons of Birth Diptych  Painting (acrylic on canvas)

Barbara Bateman:  Fluttering  Painting (acrylic on linen)

Shoufay Derz:  Golden Boat (after Tagore)  Pigment print on archival cotton paper
        Odysseus at Sea  Handwoven silk, dyed with pomegranate skin
        In Widening Circles (after Rilke) 1 & 3  Pigment print on archival cotton rag

Chris Wyatt:  Moment of Birth  Painting (oil on masonite)

Hilarie Mais:  10 Thoughts  Sculpture (mixed media)

Deborah Kelly:  After After del Sarto from The Miracles  Photomontage (gicleè print in pigment inks on Canson infinity cotton paper)

Mirre Van Dalen:  Dawn Breaking Over the Valley  (acrylic, graphite and fabrics on canvas)

Jumaadi:  Mother and Child  (chinagraph on hand made paper)

Ella Whateley:  The Giver, the Gift  Painting (acrylic, oil and wax on canvas)

Danica I. J. Knezevic:  within the shadows lie my true reflections  Video

Performance by a chorus of women:
The Canticle of Night and A Recipe for Peace lyrics and music by Glenda Cloughley
Peace is the Nurture of Life from A Passion for Peace – text by Jane Addams, music by Glenda Cloughley

In archaeological studies it is commonly thought that the mark distinguishing modern people homo sapiens sapiens from earlier stages in our evolution is the evidence from about 40,000 years ago of ceremony and art, which is seen as representing magical and religious beliefs.  Figurative art with symbolic significance has been a key feature of Christianity from very early in its history.  This exhibition continues that tradition, but now includes abstract as well as figurative works, not all necessarily falling within strictly conventional Christian theology.

The works are presented within a thematic arrangement, but the purpose is as much about artistic exploration as about telling a standard story.  I found, as an atheist, plenty to interest me about the nature of being born and especially about the central place of women in all our lives, independent of religious or specifically Christian doctrine.

The curators explain in their introduction to the catalogue:  We approached fifteen leading Australian artists who reflect different cultural, different faith and non-faith, different gender and sexual orientation backgrounds, and invited them to participate in the project leaving them free over a symbolic nine months to create the most appropriate work in the ways that work best for them.

So, though each work appears in the order listed above under 15 headings:

Phase 1 – Creation
Phase 2 – In the Beginning
Phase 3 – Impregnation
Phase 4 – Conception
Phase 5 – The Announcement
Phase 6 – The Early Growth in the Womb
Phase 7 – The Child Leaping in the Womb
Phase 8 – Anxiety of Waiting
Phase 9 – The Birth Moment
Phase 10 – The First Breath, The First Sound, The First Grasp
Phase 11 – Holding the Newborn Child
Phase 12 – The Song of Joy of the Whole Creation at the Birth of the Newly Born
Phase 13 – The Mother Feeds her Child, the Child Sucks at the Breast
Phase 14 – The Naming, The Blessing, and The Hope
Phase 15 – Connection of the New Birth with the Whole of Creation

you don’t have to think of the works as telling what looks like the story of the birth of Christ.  Leave out the Biblical words like ‘creation’, ‘in the beginning’, or ‘the blessing’, and the works speak for themselves.  Only one in fact makes a direct and very clever reference to traditional Christian art – Deborah Kelly’s photomontage in Phase 11: After After del Sarto from her larger work The Miracles, in which “The portraits were shot across Australia with the assistance of photographer Alex Wisser, using fabrics and clothing that Kelly collected to suggest the drapery-rich compositions of Renaissance art.” [https://www.artlink.com.au/articles/4000/deborah-kelly-the-miracles/] 

On the other hand, if you would like to be made aware of Christian philosophical interpretations of the works, although entry to the exhibition is free you should pay $5 for the excellent catalogue in which the reproduction of each work is accompanied by an erudite short essay.  These are 15 individual responses written by academics and church ministers representing the Australian Catholic University, the Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture,  St Mark’s National Theological Centre (Charles Sturt University), the Uniting Church and the Bishops Commission for Ecumenism and Interreligious Relations.

Dr Raymond Canning, the Executive Secretary of the Bishops Commission, demonstrates in one short quote the philosophical approach behind this exhibition: In the Qur’an 49:13 Allah is heard to reveal: “O mankind!  Truly We created you...and We made you peoples and tribes that you may come to know one another.”

The opening of the exhibition in Canberra was itself a ceremony not one of speeches of the conventional kind.  Stephen Pickard spoke briefly to thank the appropriate people, then passed proceedings over to women, the focus of the art works. 

Linlea Rodger took a political viewpoint, saying “Clearly something very new is coming to birth at BHP”, the mining and industrial business where research shows “that workplaces with a high proportion of women are happier, have a better safety record, and enjoy higher productivity” and so “is taking the giant leap of fast tracking the training, mentoring and placement of women.” 

She then looked at the results of the US presidential election, referred to T S Eliot’s saying that “birth and birthing can, at the time, feel and look more like death – bloody, dangerous, painful and uncertain”, concluding “As I see it, what each of these pictures conveys to us in different ways is the pregnancy of uncertainties...and I invite you to invite hope...that the power of life is stronger than the power of death, and that all birthings can also beget the kind of hope which has the power to wrestle with fear.”

Thea Pickard, whose own 18 month old son cutely gazumped her at the microphone, chose to focus on her own experience of birth.  Reflecting on the quite confronting painting by Chris Wyatt Moment of Birth, she found herself imagining the guardian of women’s mysteries, the patroness of midwives, Lilith – “the first wife of Adam” – in a substantial poem full of metaphor, ending

I am the wild woman within
that eternal place of reckoning
Always beckoning
Come in, come in
The door is open
The hearth is warm
The kettle on
Make yourself at home
And let’s get on...

Women’s poetry was powerfully complemented by the songs of Glenda Cloughley and a chorus of women, with a highlight performance of the words of Jane Addams, founder of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (1919) and the second woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.

Though they won’t be there when you visit Seasons of Birth, you can find, and join, a chorus of women at www.chorusofwomen.org , and see and hear them in person at this same venue on Saturday November 26, 2016 from 6 pm, after the final showing of the art.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2016: A Life in the Theatre by David Mamet

A Life in the Theatre by David Mamet.  Darlinghurst Theatre Company at Eternity Playhouse, November 4 – December 4, 2016.

Director – Helen Dallimore

Designers: Production – Hugh O’Connor; Sound – Jed Silver; Lighting – Christopher Page
Performed by Akos Armont and John Gaden

Reviewed by Frank McKone
November 5

I bet David Mamet has forgotten The Art of Coarse Acting (by Michael Green, 1964), but I haven’t.  It has a section on how to dominate a scene while hidden behind a sofa, which I actually used when acting in a British farce of that era.

But I bet John Gaden knew it well.  He applies several Coarse Acting devices, but in this play seen from the backstage viewpoint, which makes them even funnier.  The scene where Robert (Gaden) and John (Armont) are in a small boat expecting to die a horrible death, while the stage hand crawls behind to wave a cardboard cutout seagull at the inappropriate moment and steals the scene (from their audience’s point of view) was a great demonstration of the Green Principle.

Yet, though supposedly based on Mamet’s own experience in Repertory, where actors are forever changing costumes, props and whole acting styles, this very funny play is not a mere farce. 

Armont’s John is a young actor learning the game as the constant colleague of old-timer Robert.  As we see them in their horribly cramped dressing room manically change costumes, do make-up, rehearse, answer the phone on the stage manager’s desk in the Opposite Prompt corner, talk about anything and everything, shift props and perform bits of any number of shows (not real ones but imitations by Mamet) and leave to go ‘out’, or go home late at night, and arrive next day, the theatrical genre certainly looks like farce.

But what the play is about is the changing nature of the relationship between Robert and John, as Robert grows older, even towards frailty, and John grows into maturity.

The wonderful thing about this production is that Akos Armond is young, and already is in reality the mature highly professional actor that John becomes; while John Gaden is in reality Robert’s age – but in no way is Gaden showing Robert’s tendencies, not only to pontificate, or to lose his lines, or to fly off the handle in contradiction to his pontifications; and certainly not to become slightly Alzheimic and lose his bearings.  The details of Gaden’s characterisation in movement, voice, facial expression, and the chemistry of his acting relationship with Armond is as precise and fascinating as it ever was when I first saw him perform many decades ago.

The production design, lighting and sound are hugely complicated – backstage is just so full of bits and pieces in typical grotty wings which the actors have to negotiate at speed to meet their cues.  Once, when they forget their lines, they miss a cue – what horror!  While the jaunty music we hear is always just on the edge of comedy.  How well I remember the night when, somehow, a gust of wind got in backstage nearly toppling a 12 foot painted flat onto the actors on stage.  Only our quick-thinking fast-moving stage manager managed to grab it from behind, how I’ll never know, and hold it up for the rest of the scene.  Didn’t we laugh as we tied it in place during interval!

So the only disappointments I have are that the program does not acknowledge the costume designer, unless the supply of myriad costumes was done by the excellent set construction team of Brett Wilbe and Emily Polson; and nor is the role of stage manager named – after all he was a crucial actor, and certainly had his own personality while constantly flitting about, yet obviously always in control backstage.  Perhaps it was assistant stage manager Sunil Chandra we saw, since I don’t think the women Amy Morcom (stage manager) or Angela Atkinson (the other assistant stage manager) appeared.

I note that director Helen Dallimore has at one point in her career been assistant director to Jonathan Biggins (of Wharf Revue fame) on Sydney Theatre Company’s production of Michael Frayn’s famous backstage play, Noises Off.  I’ve no doubt she put that experience to very good use in this show.

And, mentioning the women in passing, I wonder a little why Mamet wrote only men into his play.  Perhaps the ‘business’ with props, costume changing and lack of space might have taken our attention onto issues beyond his key philosophical concern – is this play “Absurd Theatre”, or is theatre essentially just absurd?  Either way, the relationship between John and Robert grows as they work together and come to respect each other.  We in the audience in turn feel for them, and in our applause express our respect for all those engaged in great theatre – the actors, directors, designers and crew.

This season of A Life in the Theatre has only just begun.  Eternity Playhouse is at 39 Burton Street (just off Crown Street, opposite the now defunct TAP Theatre), with a program well worth the trip to Sydney.



© Frank McKone, Canberra

2016: Title and Deed by Will Eno

Title and Deed by Will Eno.  Presented by Belvoir at Belvoir St Theatre Downstairs, Sydney, October 13 – November 6, 2016.

Director – Jada Alberts

Designers: Set and Costume – Anna Gardiner; Lighting – Ross Graham; Composer and Sound – Kelly Ryall.

Performed by Jimi Bani

Reviewed by Frank McKone
November 5

Jimi Bani, a Torres Strait Islander of Mabuiag and Darnley Islands heritage, gives a moving performance, directed by Larrakia woman Jada Alberts, of a quite unusual American play by Will Eno.  Title and Deed  was included in the New York Times and The New Yorker’s Top 10 Plays of the Year 2012.

Bani’s role is The Traveller – away from ‘home’ and recently arrived ‘here’.  He speaks to us, surprised and thankful for our willingness to listen.  What he says is an internal conversation with himself in which he imagines us to be his audience.  Except that we are real.  Perhaps the weirdest moment theatrically was when the stage lights had faded on him in character and the house lights came up for applause.  It really felt as if we were applauding this engaging but ultimately worrying stranger rather than this highly accomplished actor.  Only on his exit (through the audience in the tiny Belvoir Downstairs) and reappearance did we feel that now we were applauding Jimi Bani rather than this rather strange but thoroughly recognisable character, The Traveller.

What was worrying was that he clearly had something out of kilter emotionally because of his occasional stammer when he would find himself unable to say the words he was searching for, because of his hearing things in his head that we couldn’t hear, because of his swinging from outgoing confidence to obsequious thanking us, with sudden retreats physically into moments of unexplainable despair – as he had seemed, leaning against the dirty brick wall, slightly twisted with head down, when we had arrived to take our seats.

We were clearly ‘here’, but he was, as he said at one point, not exactly ‘there’ – which might have been ‘home’ – but he was perhaps ‘somewhere’, which made him think he might be ‘nowhere’, leading him to think about how we have invented all our words to try to help ourselves understand life and death.  He looked into our eyes – actually into the eyes of one of us – and then quoted “The eyes are the window into our eyes” – not from some famous person, but from Brian, with whom he had painted a house. Later he thought perhaps he was quoting Shakespeare, but then remembered it was Brian.

And so we were engaged intellectually in a philosophical exploration of language, meaning and the impossibility of actually knowing what is in someone else’s mind, while emotionally we gradually became aware of the background to his anxieties derived from very ordinary parental demands like “Where do you think you’re going?” or “What do you think you’re doing?”  We even learned that he had not been breast fed, and after losing the rubber nipple from his bottle had been left to drink from a cup, which his mother had said was not very satisfactory.  And he clearly had been afraid of his father.

No wonder his apparently brief relationship with Lauren – he found a calendar in which she had blacked out all the days they had had together – was not as ‘here’ as he had thought it was.  Now his father had died (first, as Nature decreed, and without his being there) and his mother had also died (he had managed to get ‘there’ for her) his parents ‘are dead for me now’, he explained.  It was surprising what we laughed at, yet it was with sympathy as we now understood why he had to be The Traveller, and with empathy as we realised that like him we are ‘travelling’ until we die.

And so this is why I found it interesting to know how this play, written by a New Yorker, with all its imagery and references centred in a kind of American small town  life, could resonate for a Larrakia woman writer and now director from Darwin and a Torres Strait Islander actor who had travelled all the way to train at WAAPA in Perth, coming together to work at Belvoir in Sydney (with support for Indigenous theatre by the Balnaves Foundation).

As Jada Alberts wrote in her Director’s Note, “I hope you see and forget to see, the skin he’s in.”  And that was exactly what this production achieved – a moving performance of an unusual play, in which we were transported from ‘wherever’ to our immediate ‘here’, seeing as Jada hoped “yourself in the character you meet, or in the least someone you care for”.

Title and Deed travels very well.



© Frank McKone, Canberra

2016: The Lighting Designer: by Nigel Levings

The Lighting Designer: What is ‘good lighting’?  by Nigel Levings.  Platform Paper No 49 November 2016 (Currency House, Sydney)

Sydney Launch by Lindy Hume, artistic director of Opera Queensland
Monday November 14, 2016, 6pm at Belvoir Street Theatre, Surry Hills.

Adelaide Launch by Rachel Healy, co-artistic director of the Adelaide Festival
Tuesday November 15, 2016, 6pm at Imprints Booksellers, 107 Hindley St.

Free, but essential to book at info@currencyhouse.org.au

Media enquiries to Martin Portus at mportus@optusnet.com.au
Pdf available on request.

Posted by Frank McKone
November 4

Media Release: About The Author
Nigel Levings is one of Australia’s leading theatre lighting designers and in his early career was the first to be fully employed by an Australian theatre company as a lighting designer. In a distinguished career he has lit over 490 original productions including 174 operas and 28 musicals. He has lit opera in St Petersburg, Paris, Washington, London, Cardiff, Berlin, Baden Baden, Innsbruck, Bregenz, New
York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Dallas, Seoul and Toronto as well as all the major opera houses of Australia. 

His awards for lighting design include the Helpmann and Green Room Awards, the Los Angeles Ovation Award and the Canadian Dora Mava Moore Award. On Broadway he has won two Outer Circle Critics Awards, a Drama Desk and a Tony Award. He was awarded the Centenary Federation Medal by the Australian Government for his services to opera lighting and, in 2003, was honoured by the SA Great – Arts Award. 

Recent work includes: Die tote Stadt, Of Mice and Men and the world premiere of Bliss for Opera Australia: Maria de Buenos Aires for Victorian Opera; Romeo et Juliette for Korea National Opera; The Book of Everything at the New Victory Theatre, New York; The King and I for Opera Australia and Gordon Frost; Cloudstreet for State Opera of South Australia, Disgraced for Melbourne Theatre
Company; Machu Picchu for State Theatre Company of South Australia; Don Carlos for Opera Australia.

Contents
1. This Lighting Designer
2. The Craft of Lighting Design
3. Industrial Issues
4. The Technology
5. The Opinions
6. The Lighting Designer and Good Lighting

I, as a one-time drama teacher, am very pleased to note that Nigel Levings begins: “I grew up in Melbourne and in primary school our Year 6 teacher, Mr Edgar Seppings, gave me my first brush with the theatre. I was too young at the time for much recall but I do remember the magic of that lit space and the surrounding darkness.”

If I were still teaching I would be sure to invite Nigel to speak to my students, especially about the personal attributes they should aspire to. 

He writes: When I get it right, my lighting design springs from a desire to share with an audience this love of light: visibility, poetic density of meaning, but above all pure, succulent, sensuous, visual pleasure and Good lighting is intelligent lighting. It springs from deep thought about the text and the director's interpretation of it.

This is not a geek speaking, but an artistic designer.  His personal history informs his development in and experience of the craft, the industry, the technology and the changing perceptions – including of critics – since he “was offered the position of head of lighting for the Melbourne Theatre Company at Russell Street Theatre... at the beginning of 1971.”

The history and comparisons between his experiences in Australia and overseas would give my students an excellent grounding, while his enthusiasm 45 years later must inspire them when he writes The play of light on surface continues to be a source of constant delight and almost physical pleasure for me, an inspiration for my work. When I get it right, even if only to my partial satisfaction, my lighting design springs from a desire to share with an audience this love of light: visibility, poetic density of meaning—but above all pure, succulent, sensuous visual pleasure.

This is not so much a how-to-do essay, but rather a how-to-be reading experience – genuinely enlightening, indeed.  Nigel knows his stuff from the “small resistance dimmer board on a perch position behind the proscenium” to the “current lighting control systems [which] allow extremely complicated manipulation of the transition from one lighting image to the next [where] we are now well in reach of that dream of a totally fluid light plot, one in which the light never ceases to shift over the entire course of the play.” 

Yet he makes it clear in his final chapter that technical skills must be integrated with personal and interpersonal skills, like working calmly and quickly under extreme time pressure, making both spontaneous and planned creative decisions, being able to quickly comprehend both the surface meaning of a text and its underlying subtext, having empathy for the demands faced by performers and being willing to adapt, having knowledge of the physics of light and how the eye works with a psychological understanding of the process of perception, as well as a broad understanding of
electricity and electronics.

It looks like he’s given me the assessment criteria for judging my lighting students’ progress.  But there’s still “Above all—you need a thick skin and a not-easily-bruised ego.”  Hmmm!  Just what we critics need, too?

Don’t miss Platform Paper No 49, especially (if you’re a critic) Chapter 5 – The Opinions!

© Frank McKone, Canberra