2024: Master Class by Terrence McNally

 

 

 Master Class by Terrence McNally.  Ensemble Theatre, Sydney, June 14 – July 20 2024.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
June 29

Playwright: Terrence McNally
Director: Liesel Badorrek; Assistant Director: Miranda Middleton

Musical Director/Cast/Composer & Sound Designer: Maria Alfonsine
Cast/Composer & Sound Designer: Damian de Boos-Smith
Cast: Elisa Colla; Cast: Lucia Mastrantone
Cast: Bridget Patterson; Cast: Matthew Reardon

Set & Costume Designer: Isabel Hudson; Costume Supervisor: Renata Beslik
Lighting Designer: Kelsey Lee

Dialect Coach: Linda Nicholls-Gidley; Operatic Voice Coach: Donna Balson
Theatre Stage Manager: Jen Jackson; Rehearsal Stage Manager: Emily Phillips

Photos: Prudence Upton



I’m not sure if Ensemble Theatre has reverted to the hippy days of collectivism, but their program calls all the cast members merely “Cast”.  I agree all cast members are equal, as performers, but I like to know who played the different characters.  

Maria Alfonsine is the accompanying pianist for Maria Callas’s master classes.  She is astute and careful to play an unassuming role as Manny, recognising Maria’s emotional frailty and providing just the support she needs.

Bridget Patterson as the first inexperienced soprano student, Sophie de Palma, doesn’t understand why her teacher is so uncompromising, and gives up in tears, despite a top-quality singing voice.

Damien de Boos-Smith has no name as the unfortunate comic stagehand that Maria treats as an idiot.  But we also know him as the secret cello player who accompanies Maria Alfonsine so well.

Matthew Reardon is Anthony (Tony) Candolini, the student not only with a tenor voice to die for, but the sense of humour and confidence that his teacher cannot easily deal with.  Perhaps she lets him go because he doesn’t need her; or because she couldn’t teach him if she tried.

Elisa Colla as Sharon Graham is the one that Maria knows will make it as a performer, so long as she can cope with life in the theatre world – on stage and in personal relationships.

Lucia Mastrantone has the role as Maria Callas which links us, in our role as potential Master Class students, to her at the time in her life when her voice, health and personal relationships are failing.  If she cannot perform any longer, perhaps she can at least leave a worthwhile legacy through her master classes for the new performers coming through.

 

Damian de Boos-Smith

Bridget Patterson as Sophie de Palma
with Lucia Manstrantone as Maria Callas

Elisa Colla as Sharon Graham
with Lucia Manstrantone as Maria Callas
and pianist Maria Alfonsine as Manny

Matthew Reardon as Anthony (Tony) Candolini
with Lucia Manstrantone as Maria Callas
and pianist Maria Alfonsine as Manny

Lucia Manstrantone as Maria Callas
with Damian de Boos-Smith (cello) and Maria Alfonsine (piano)

As a one-time drama teacher myself I hear the truth in Maria’s attempts to make her students understand the shift they must make beyond technique, and certainly not by imitation – which my teacher, Anton Witsel, called “acting acting” – into acting from within yourself.

Ton Witsel also warned me of how easy it is in theatre to “fall flat on your face”.  It can happen in the writing.  It can happen in the set design, the costumes design, the directing, and in the actor’s acting.  Theatre is always at risk of a flop.

Terrence McNally could have got it wrong about the real Maria Callas – but he has not written a documentary.  This play is his imagining how things might have gone for her, and these characters are his creation.  The real Maria died of a heart-attack when she was 53 in 1977.  Are these characters costumed as they would have been then?  It doesn’t matter!  But they are costumed just right for the Maria we see to react to them as she does.

But the real risk in performing McNally’s play is that the actors, including whoever plays Maria Callas, have to understand and be able work in the way that Maria says they must.  This means those playing Sophie, Tony and Sharon have to be able to work from within themselves, acting and singing, showing us that their characters don’t understand – yet – how to work from within.

This really is risky theatre.  But, surely thanks to sensitive directing from Liesel Badorrek and Miranda Middleton and the wide range of experiences these actors already have (and presumably how well they learned from their drama teachers), there are no flops here.

Quite the opposite.  The audience rose to their feet in appreciation for a new understanding of this prima donna, not as the difficult personality, nor the aggressive competitor, nor the publicity hound, nor the money-grubber, nor the failure in marriage, but as the woman who found herself, in performing from within, and so became the greatest opera singer, even despite probably the worst that could happen, when her child was still-born.

The season runs until July 20 – there is still time to make the journey to the Kirribilli boathouse, Ensemble Theatre. https://www.ensemble.com.au

 

©Frank McKone, Canberra

2024: A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams

 

 

 A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams.  Free Rain Theatre at ACT Hub June 19-29 2024.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
June 26

Directed by Anne Somes
Associate Director: Dr Cate Clelland
Set Design: Dr Cate Clelland and Ron Abrahams
Costume Design: Fiona Leach; Lighting Design: Craig Muller
Sound Design: Neville Pye; Sound & Lighting Operator: Maggie Hawkins
Stage Manager: Maggie Hawkins
Vocal and Dialect Coach: Sarah Chalmers; Intimacy Co-ordinator: Karen Vickery
Marketing Director: Olivia Wenholz
Photography: Promotional – Janelle McMenamin; Production – Jane Duong

Cast:                                                            Ensemble:
Amy Kowalczuk as Blanche DuBois         James Morgan
Alex Hoskison as Stanley Kowalski          Mercy Lelei
Meaghan Stewart as Stella Kowalski         David Bennett    
Lachlan Ruffy as Harold Mitchell             Olivia Wenholz
Sarah Hull as Eunice Hubbel                     Rina Onorato
Tim Stiles as Steve Hubbel
Lachlan Elderton as Pablo Gonzales

“I don’t want reality” says Blanche DuBois in – perhaps – one of her more lucid moments.  What makes Free Rain’s production of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire brilliant is how real Amy Kowalczuk makes that terribly disturbed character understandable; and how our empathy is engaged by Meaghan Stewart’s realisation of the impossibility of her sister’s situation.
 
Williams, of course, was the brilliant writer.  Perhaps a bit like Blanche he had his fantasies, calling himself “Tennessee” rather than Thomas Lanier Williams III (March 26, 1911 – February 25, 1983), but then becoming considered, along with contemporaries Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller, one of the three foremost playwrights of 20th-century American drama.

Putting this all together I need a better word for the work of all the actors, designers, coaches, managers and directors in this Streetcar – Exquisite.  As in the best-cut jewellery, the natural brilliance is brought out in all the detailed facets.  In this play about the contrasting lives of the two sisters, Blanche and Stella DuBois, the horror of emotional collapse which Amy captures is matched by the struggle Meaghan reveals that we all must face in coming to terms with reality.

And only then do we see it is the same for the men, represented by the man full of self-entitlement, Stanley, whom Stella has married; and Mitchell, hoping for and seeking comfort in Blanche while having to compete with the Stanleys of the male world.

And then it is amazing to reflect on the surrounding figures: the next door neighbours; the poker players; the passers-by in the street, all played with just the right simple clarity by the ensemble members.

I had arrived on a freezing-cold night in a somewhat distant mood at the old wooden Hub.  I left positively excited at how such top quality drama could take me out of the immediate into such a warmer understanding of humanity.  

After that, there are more reasons to see the play and, I think, this production.  Though Free Rain is an amateur company, I would hope that a way can be found to extend the run of their A Streetcar Named Desire, or take it to other venues.  It would certainly suit my favourite intimate theatre, Ensemble, in Sydney.  It’s set would not need much adjustment there, and would also work on stages like the Canberra Theatre Centre Playhouse.

The quality of the acting, voice work and movement is all at professional standard.  The fact that this is true of Canberra’s small theatre productions at ACT Hub, The Mill and Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre has been under discussion for a long time, suggesting that we should be touring companies out as well as touring companies in.  In recent times Jordan Best's Playhouse Creatures was taken to the 16th Mondial du Théâtre in Monaco, and toured in Victoria, NSW and Queensland, but it’s a long time now since Women on a Shoestring, when I was writing in 1999:

At the Crossroads, reviewed in The Canberra Times at its first presentation in February 1998, was described as "polished theatre from a longstanding, very experienced team, designed to be toured to city and country venues around Australia".  Based on stories gathered from people in the bush, the play tempered an examination of racist attitudes - through the experience of a middle-class country woman whose mother is Aboriginal - with clever use of humour, movement and song.  How has the tour gone, I wondered, as I sat down at the café in Gorman House to talk with the Women on a Shoestring: Camilla Blunden, Julie Ross and Chrissie Shaw.
[ https://frankmckone2.blogspot.com/search?q=Women+on+a+Shoestring ]

I’m almost an historical monument myself now, but I think the issues of male and female relationships, with some touching on male-male and female-female lived experiences, which are central to the 1947 play by Tennessee Williams, are as important to deal with today is they were then – especially when it comes to women’s emotional and intellectual stability under the new pressures of what is called ‘social’ media and our new understanding of ‘cohesive control’.

As a homosexual man himself (before the word  ‘gay’), and having a sister who may have been a model for Blanche, Williams’ plays are surely exemplary for wider presentation today.  There’s an interesting study at https://theses.cz/id/7ogk1x/Sedlackova_bakalarska_prace.pdf .

And finally, in our local community, this production has a fascinating twist.  How could it be possible that Amy Kowalczuk, whom I mentioned in reviewing her first directing work [ The Boys - http://ccc-canberracriticscircle.blogspot.com/2022/04/the-boys_16.html ], - saying  that many will know her as Amy Dunham.  I must raise the possibility-of-bias flag, since I taught her parents, Kathleen Montgomery and Trevor Dunham, in the first drama class at Hawker College in 1976/77, when they directed, with Sue Richards, the first student written and directed show – a rock/folk musical Anna.  It’s great to see theatrical tradition continuing through the generations. – now has married into the Polish family Kowalczuk!

Not quite Tennessee Williams’ ‘Kowalski’?
Kowalczuk Name Meaning: Polish: patronymic from Kowal ‘blacksmith’. 

https://www.familysearch.org/en/surname?surname=Kowalczuk

So there is a special resonance when, in Streetcar, Stanley (what an English-sounding name) yells at Blanche in frustration that “Polish people are called Poles.  I am NOT a Polack.”  Which in Australia in 1947 would have been to call him a Wog.  Wogs in Australia have turned the insult on its head in recent times, as a joke.  Yet I remember, when performing, in 1965, Lick Jimmy, the next-door Chinese greengrocer in Ruth Park’s The Harp in the South, written in 1948, how the way my character was presented – though essentially sympathetically – as a bit of a joke because I couldn’t speak English.  My entrances, exits and returns were only because I had to use the Darcy’s toilet – with appropriate miming choreography.

In Free Rain’s production Alex Hoskison does a terrific job of making the deprecating insult a genuinely serious issue for Stanley Kowalski, as it should be today.  Yet it seems from the political use of anti-immigration sentiment that assumptions about social class and ethnic distinctions are not yet resolved.

In fact, the Poles in Williams’ American city seem to be as poor as the Irish in Ruth Park’s Surry Hills in Sydney in 1948.  Blanche can’t believe that her sister – born into the French slave-owning upper class of the Mississippi – could have married a Polack, even though she admits that their plantation property is ‘lost’.  It is Stanley who intelligently queries what has happened to the money, but Blanche can’t explain.  

So rather than see the play as a social-sexual psychological drama, you may see Blanche’s breakdown as the effect of social change bringing her down from seeing herself as part of French colonial aristocracy – an inevitable social change in an America which has just won World War II.

Stanley, then represents the new sense of self-entitlement that some would say is at the centre of the USA today.

What a play!  What a performance!  What a production success!

L to R: Meaghan Stewart as Stella Kowalski; Alex Hoskison as Stanley Kowalski
Lachlan Ruffy as Harold 'Mitch' Mitchell; Amy Kowalczuk as Blanche DuBois

Amy Kowalczuk as Blanche DuBois; Meaghan Stewart as Stella Kowalski
in A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
Free Rain Theatre, Canberra 2024
Photos: Jane Duong

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2024: TNA Budget Post

Posted by Frank McKone - Theatre Network Australia

 ©Frank McKone, Canberra