2019: Life - The Show by Strut & Fret

Life – The Show by Strut & Fret in The Spiegeltent, Canberra Civic Square, March 30 – April 21, 2019.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
April 2

Creative Director: Scott Maidment
    Artistic Associates: Spencer Novich and Nick Beyeler
    Choreographers: Hilton Denis & Rechelle Mansour
    Sound Operator: Tom Strode
    Costume Designer: James Browne
    Lighting Designer: Jason Raft
    Music Arrangement: Steve Toulmin
    Stage Manager: Cat Hobart
    Assistant Stage Manager: Dani Miller
    Visual Effects: Mik Lavage and Perceptual Engineering
    Original Cast: Helena Bittencourt, Hilton Denis, Tim Kriegler, Rechelle Mansour, Goos Meeuwsen, Elke Uhd, Yammel Rodriguez
    Musicians: Attis Clopton (drums), Blaise Garza (sax & flute), Fantine Pritoula (vocals), Lee Taylor (vocals)
    Aerial tube act created by Nick Beyeler for LIFE – the show and is used with permission.

Strut & Fret – an independent and dynamic company producing and managing theatre, artists, events, festivals and venues. We believe artistic experiences should be breath-taking, heart-gripping, unforgettable and entertaining. With almost 20 years experience and a collective of passionate and creatively inspired individuals, we deliver distinctive events nationally and internationally.

Tim Kriegler in Life - The Show

 

The aim is impressive but the only breath-taking and memorable experience is provided by the two aerial performers, Tim Kriegler and Elke Uhd.  Kriegler’s solo on straps, in which he becomes a human trapeze, is remarkable.  His control and flexibility is beyond any other performer I’ve seen.  Their pas de deux inside a transparent soft plastic 4 metre suspended tube is original in conception and technique.  This is the only artistically developed segment of the show, where the theme of reaching out for love, frustrated by the invisible boundaries of human life, is played out symbolically – and therefore much more powerfully than in the mimetic action, or purely dance and song entertainment of the rest.

When I look back at Spiegeltent shows, like La Clique (2007), Smoke and Mirrors (2011) and Tomboy Survival Guide (2017), or to burlesque by Moira Finucane and Jackie Smith over the years since their The Burlesque Hour (2009), Life – The Show seems like no more than a mildly funny entertainment for unsophisticated “young adults”.

You can check those other shows at www.frankmckone2.blogspot.com . 

The climactic moment of the show about a failure of a man who works all day and masturbates all night is finally reached when Goos Meeuwsen “accidentally” reveals his penis poking through old-fashioned underpants the like of which I’ve not seen (nor worn) since the nineteen-fifties.  Certainly the young women behind me whistled and whooped, but I mean to say…!

Goos Meeuwsen in Life - The Show

I am aware of the French clown tradition behind Meeuwsen’s training at the École Nationale de Cirque de Montréal, but I have never forgotten my teenage encounter with “Genial, bumbling Monsieur Hulot (Jacques Tati) [who] loves his top-floor apartment in a grimy corner of the city” [ https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=jacques+tati+mon+oncle  ] particularly in M. Hulot’s Holiday and Mon Oncle. 

M. Hulot certainly never revealed his penis but in my 1950s his clowning was funnier and his commentary by implication on social conventions was far more telling than Life – The Show seemed to understand.  I could, of course, go on to Rowan Atkinson’s Mr Bean with the same comment.

Goos Meeuwsen and Helena Bittencourt
in Life - The Show

But I mention the 1950s because the image of the expectations set up in Life – The Show about “the voice of a real man’s man” and the sexist fantasy of the clown as our leading man – including the admittedly slightly unconventional role of the wife with the vacuum cleaner – overlaid with music by Leroy Anderson (which might have been played by Tommy Tycho in Australia) left me thinking, this is a retro show.  But simple entertainment 1950s style without the satire it deserves from a 2019 perspective just isn’t enough to be “heart-gripping, unforgettable and entertaining” any more.  Particularly if you remember Tommy Tycho’s music backed The Mavis Bramston Show way back in 1964.

My life’s story is not stuck in the 1950s when I was a teenager/young adult, and I noticed in a full house that there were relatively few whistles and whoops.  The two young adult couples sitting immediately in front of me, for example, were amused a little more than I was, but….

Hilton Denis, Rechelle Mansour, Blaise Garza
in Life - The Show

© Frank McKone, Canberra