Category Archive: THEATRE
The Barber of Seville
(Opera Australia) (2007) Another can’t-miss piece, perhaps the greatest opera buffa of all, with typical Rossini touches – beautiful young lady, thwarted passion, a nasty guardian, identity confusion and a comically manipulative mastermind – was staged by OA over the country in 2007. Rossini’s score is uneven but joyous, featuring many popular melodies (e.g. the smash cavatina Largo al Factotum Della Citta – “Figaro sù, Figaro giù! Figaro quà, Figaro la!”). TVC saw the production in Melbourne (14/4/07), when there was last minute shuffling of the cast, Figaro being laryngeally inflamed, and replaced by his servant. The key role of…
Continue Reading →We Really Like the Theatre Guild
Whilst TVC is dubious as to artistic awards, the Theatre Guild of the University of Adelaide was justly honoured at the Adelaide Critics Circle Awards on 8th ultimo: Best Group Award (for Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land), which also took out best individual performance (Michael Baldwin). TVC saw this production, which it liked to a degree over the source material. At the risk of being a Sally Field, “We like you! We really like you!”
Continue Reading →The Illusionists 1903
Adelaide Festival Theatre, 15/1/2015 In The Wanderings of a Spiritualist (c. 1921), Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has this to say: “There is an excellent clairvoyante in Paris, Madame Blifaud, and I look forward, at some later date, to a personal proof of her powers, though if it fails I shall not be so absurd as to imagine that that disproves them. The particular case which came immediately under my notice was that of a mother whose son had been killed from an aeroplane, in the war. She had no details of his death.” On asking Madame B., the latter replied,…
Continue Reading →Birdman
(Dir. Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu) (2014) This is an interesting and well-made film that suffers from an empty space about its heart. The 1990s star of “Birdman 1, 2 and 3”, Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton – get it?) spurned Birdman # 4 when at the top of the Hollywood pile, and is now a penniless has-been with substance abuse issues and an uncertain relationship with reality, as evidenced by his schizoid exchanges with the alter-ego Birdman character, who comes and goes, alternately revving and razzing Thomson in a voice reminiscent of Frank in Donnie Darko. His comeback (or if you hate…
Continue Reading →Kata Kabanova
Palais Garnier. Image by P. Giraud
Palais Garnier (2 November 2004) A beautiful production of this sad tale of adultery and recrimination, with the set a series of flats that would be at home in The Bill, including an appropriately atrocious print of bison at a waterhole (just to rub in Kabanicha’s horrendousness) and leaf-swept patio – incongruous in the gilded truffle of this particular opera house. Angela Denoke and Jane Henschel, as Kata and mum-in-law respectively, take on the white and black hatted key roles magnificently. Peter Burian conducted.
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