fringe: sound and fury's cyranose

Many, many times when watching Sound and Fury's previous shows I've wondered to myself just how in control Richard, Patrick and Ryan really are at any given moment and how close to spinning off the rails the show really is.

In the best possible way, you understand. It's one of the things I love most about them.

Tonight I think we came as close as humanly possible to that. And it was glorious.

With the lovely Clayton subbing in for Ryan on this tour and Andrew, aka the emergency version of Patrick (who had to unexpectedly head home due to an emergency a few days ago), who had a whole four shows under his belt and his script firmly in hand, Cyranose was barely controlled chaos. Again, in the best possible way.

Clayton is a perfect fit for Sound and Fury, and did remind me of the illegitimate lovechild of Richard and Patrick (is it any wonder given how they're looking at each other in the poster image)... He also reminded me a lot of Patrick performance-wise (that barely controlled comedy whirlwind I always associate with my favourite redheaded Fakespearean... so that's definitely a compliment), and I can only imagine a show with Clayton and Patrick together would have been something to see (pssst Richard, please bring Clayton again another time).

He's also incredibly cheeky and charming and very easy to look at, which never hurts. He also had the "quick change after quick change after quick change" role in the show, and did very well.

Andrew is still white-knuckling his way through the show right now, but that's not without it's own charm and moments of pure improvised/unexpected comedy, but for basically picking up the script at the last minute and this being his fourth or fifth performance, he's doing incredibly well.

And poor Richard has to keep this train on the tracks as it careens around the corners at breakneck speed. But he does it as stylishly as always and in verse more often than not (which I didn't realise was a feature of the original play they're riffing on).

This show does to Cyrano de Bergerac what they've previously done to Hitchcock, Shakespeare, Sherlock Holmes and the entire fantasy and fairy tale genres. And between jokes about the letter N and the invention of sarcasm, I can't quite decide if it became funnier because the show threatened to dissolve at any moment or if this was already one of their better shows or some combination of both, but I did laugh myself silly more than once.

As always the show hovers between the very high and the very low brow, which is how I like it, and I would definitely say that as far as Sound and Fury shows goes, this one is more than a little unique, so get in and see it before this trio goes their separate ways.

Also, we're sending much love and thoughts to Patrick and hope to see you again next year.

yani's rating: 5 croissants out of 5

it's my (44th) birthday

It's a repdigit birthday... I always like those. Although I didn't actually know there was a special name for the numbers until I looked it up just now.

And as always, happy birthday to those gentlemen who happen to share my birth day and month... including basketballer Stephen Curry, Johan Paulik, Jamie Bell, Taylor Hanson, Michael Caine, Chris Klein, Albert Einstein, Corey Stoll, Daniel Gillies, Ansel Elgort and Demetrius Joyette.

Today was fairly standard for a Wednesday, a day during the Fringe and as far as my birthdays go to be honest.

I headed into town this morning for DnD, picked up my free birthday Boost Juice on the way in, had an extra long but not uneventful game of DnD (not the game I was expecting to play, but that DM couldn't make it in today), came home to find Ma waiting for me along with my presents, then we headed into town, had some dinner and headed off to a Fringe show.

Then because it turned out that our tickets to that show also got us free tickets to another show in the same venue about half an hour later we stuck around for that.

So I basically walked out of the house around 9am and came back long enough to put my DnD stuff down and change my t-shirt before I headed out again and got home at about 11pm.

Current Mood:

fringe: that daring australian girl

Muriel Matters was an "Australian born suffragist, lecturer, journalist, educator, actress, and elocutionist".

And given that 2018 is the 100 year anniversary of when women in Britain ("over the age of 30, meeting certain property qualification") were granted the right to vote, this one woman play written and performed by Joanne Hartstone and directed by Nicholas Collett feels all the more appropriate.

Especially since she was a name I wasn't familiar with, and she was born and raised here in South Australia.

On a related note, I also had no idea that women in SA had the right to vote and were the first to be able to stand for parliament in 1895.

Hartstone does a fantastic job embodying Matters, not only through a very proper British accent (even more difficult because Matters was a trained elocutionist), but also through a very energetic physicality.

Initially I was worried that the story was jumping too quickly from one moment of her life to another, but the initial jumps just lay in who she is before the show really gets down to explore it. Also by the end of the play you realise that while Matters had passions that lasted throughout her entire life, she also jumped quickly from one thing to the next, so it feels appropriate in that way.

Tom Kitney's production/set design is great, allowing Hartstone to use and adapt pieces of set dressing into other items as she tells her story... it feels very theatrical, but in the best possible way (especially given that Matters definitely had a flair for the dramatic).

Likewise the costumes by Nikki Fort seem period appropriate but also allow for various costume and character changes throughout the show.

I also need to give Hartstone addition kudos for finishing the play after it was halted for a good half hour when a woman in the audience was taken ill. Not only did she calmly stop everything and get the woman assistance (and kudos to the staff at Holden Street Theatre for everything they did), but she came back once the situation had been taken care of and picked up right where she left off.

yani's rating: 4 sashes out of 5

fringe: a simple space

Gravity and Other Myths and I go all the way back to 2011 when we saw Freefall... then it was A Simple Space in 2013, 2015 and 2016 followed by their Festival show, Backbone in 2017... then this year we went back for another viewing of A Simple Space

To put it simply (pun entirely at your discretion), A Simple Space is a show I could watch 100 times and not get bored.

Not only because the show keeps evolving, even if only in small ways, or with the addition of new performers, but because I love being a part of the energy that GOM has, if only for an hour at a time.

I've said if before and I'll say it again (and in fact I said it to someone while waiting in line), GOM are the group I judge all other acrobats against. They're the gold standard as far as I'm concerned, both in the way they put their shows together but also in how they interact with each other and with the audience.

And there's also the fact that they're all so goddamn talented.

Joining the original cast of Lachlan Binns, Jacob Randell, Martin Schreiber and musician Elliot Zoerner once again are Lachlan Harper and Joanne Curry along with new(er)comers (both of whom were in Backbone) Meike Lizotte and Jack Manson.

I know I say this every single time, but the Lachlans remain my personal favourites... Binns because of his cheeky energy (and I was very lucky enough to get given an excellently rendered balloon dog from him during the show... although thanks to an unfortunate picnic table accident after the show it didn't live long enough to be photographed) and Harper just because of the way he moves through space (and those backflips... so many backflips).

The fact that they're both so damn gorgeous doesn't hurt in the slightest.

It was interesting to see some of the tricks I'm very familiar with performed by different people, made it all feel fresh again.

I also love the way they ramp the energy up the longer the show goes on, especially during the sequence were the female performers are being tossed from hand to hand, they should all be exhausted by that point in the show, but the chatter back and forth really lifts the energy in the room (doubly so because of how damn hot it was during the midday show).

I could ramble on all day about this trick or that trick or how great a particular sequence was, but at the end of the day they're always excellent, they're always worth seeing and there are too many reasons to list as to why they're my gold standard for circus and physical theatre.

So if you've never seen them, you have 7 chances left this Fringe... don't even wait, just do it!

yani's rating: 5 balloon animals out of 5

photo saturday: green grafitti

This week was fairly busy all things considered.

Sunday I had two Fringe shows, not quite back-to-back, but close enough together that I just hung around in the city between them. And then I went and misbehaved for a while afterwards, which was nice, since it's been a while.

Then Monday was DnD, which wasn't perhaps as bad as last week's game... although the more I play the more that either Munchkinism (in the less pejorative sense) or Min-Maxing bothers me. I mean I get the idea of putting together a character who does the very best they can, but those people who don't really have a character with a personality, they're just a collection of stats, tricks and a massive amount of damage... that bugs me. Suffice to say there was one of those players in the game on Monday.

Also, those people who barely pay attention to what's going on until it's their turn bug me too. I mean why are you even playing the game if you're not interested in the game.

But anyway... nerd related whinge over.

Tuesday was Haircut Night... and the first time I've driven up to Tink's place in the hills in the evening... which wasn't too bad, all things considered. The haircut was the same old same old, this time was a colour as well... perhaps not quite as silvery as previous attempts, but still good.

Wednesday was also DnD, where my character who is trapped in Barovia got her finger bitten off by a werewolf. This is the same character who has also accidentally been turned into a werewolf (temporarily), died and been resurrected with the Dark Gift of an upside down male face on the back of her head, magically aged 20 years (not so bad for a dwarf who was essentially in their version of her 20's)  and had a streak of white appear in her hair (I could have made it all of her hair, but this suits her aesthetic better). I mean it's not the worst Barovian experience I've seen or heard about, but she's definitely been through the most trauma of all my characters.

Yeah, creative storytelling...

Then after DnD, Ma and I had a Fringe show, so we went to dinner at the Empress Restaurant around the corner from my place. I've been meaning to go there since it opened just after I moved here, but never got around to it... which turns out to have been a mistake since it's really, really, really good.

Thursday was more DnD... and I had been intending to check with my regular group to see what we were doing, but I figured they were all big enough and ugly enough to make their own decisions... which of course didn't happen. And so I ended up running. Because of course I did. I mean I didn't mind, and I did put the module in my bag before I left the house because I had a feeling. And I got to run for someone who I think of as a great DM, and who has DMed for us a lot in the past, so that was nice. Plus I'm in love with more than a few of his characters, and this was a new one that was no exception.

Friday was mostly a whole lot of nothing, but I did have my chiro appointment in the afternoon... which was a bit of a pain just because the weather is a bit rubbish (ie too damn hot again) at present.

Today has been... actually not terribly exciting overall to be honest... but we did have two Fringe shows, including a midday maintee.

This morning was a little bit of a blah shopping expedition... neither of us really bought a whole bunch, which isn't really surprising given the amount we've been out and about of late.

Before the first show, we had a bit of a pointless wander around town, saw the show, grabbed some lunch and came back to the car only to discover that the car park fee had accumulated up to $30... which, can I just say, is a big case of fuck the fuck off.

Then we came back here to kill some time in the air-conditioned comfort of my place (after a brief stop off at Haighs to get our Easter shopping sorted) until it was time to go to dinner before the second show. I mean dinner was a complete disaster and we should have gone back to Empress instead of the incredibly crappy place we ended up instead.

There was also a bit of drama during the show when a woman was taken ill towards the end and the show was stopped and we all went outside while the ambulance came, but the performer was able to finish her show eventually for those of us who were left.

Current Mood:

fringe: box and cox

Mrs Bouncer has a room to let. Mr Box is at work all night and home all day, Mr Cox is at work all day and home all night. Mrs Bouncer sees an opportunity. So long as they never meet, what could possibly go wrong.

Box and Cox is a one act farce written by John Maddison Morton (based on a French original) in 1847 and performed in 2018 by Maniacal Arts.

Or more specifically by Jake McNamara as Box, Declan Carter as Cox and Emma Austin as Mrs Bouncer.

The three of them are wonderfully over the top and ridiculous in that Victorian farcical way but everything they do suits the material perfectly. Carter is wonderfully pompous and McNamara is equal parts sly and dimwitted.

I do wish that we'd seen a little bit more of Austin, as she regularly stole every scene she was in, which is no small feet up against McNamara and Carter.

The play itself holds up impressively well for being over 170 years old and reminded me more than once of something like The Importance of Being Earnest (although perhaps not as sharply written as Wilde, but still good), with all the kind of ridiculous happenstance and coincidences that abound in farces.

The staging is simple but effective, I did wonder initially if we, the front row of the audience, weren't a little close to everything, but once things started it didn't feel that way at all.

yani's rating: 4 lucifers out of 5

fringe: intoxication

Christopher Bryant's show, Intoxication, is a very intimate show. Especially when it's his last show and there are only ten people in the audience. And it's a very small room.

But mostly because Bryant gives a lot of eye contact, regularly, and throughout the show.

Intoxication is the result of a traumatic accident and an addiction and finding a way out of bad relationships.

According to Bryant's prologue the show is pieced together from numerous bits of writing he did while recovering from the accident and the addiction. It's part stream of consciousness, part yell into the void, railing against those parts of the modern world that make us closer and further apart at the same time and part break-up letter to a self involved asshole boyfriend.

And there's a lot of great writing and performing from Bryant, but I think that the thing that really pulls the whole thing together into a consistent whole is that sense of intimacy. Because it's hard not to really hear what someone is saying while they're looking you straight in the eye and you're looking back.

There is also a lot of the show that is as relevant to a 20-something self confessed millennial like Bryant as to a 40-something like me and I found myself wanting to nod in agreement at a number of the things he said as he made eye contact with me.

While some of the things he talks about come from a specifically gay sensibility, others are just about people trying to work out what love is and why is it so hard.

If this hadn't been the last show I would be urging people to go and see it right now... but if you run across the show anywhere else, go and see it.

yani's rating: 5 sequinned jackets out of 5

fringe: 6 quick dick tricks - a dirk darrow investigation

This is the third time I've seen Dirk Darrow.

The first time I was the last part of the show. The second time I made $5. This time I didn't get picked for anything at all.

But I think this was the most I've seen an audience screw up their participation. And I'm saying this as someone who couldn't read the time on a watch correctly.

I don't know if it was the fact they were a Sunday crowd, or an afternoon matinee crowd or a post car racing crowd or all of the above... or what... but wow. Not least of all because people were still showing up 15 minutes into the show.

But on to the show itself.

Dirk Darrow (aka Tim Motley) is still a hard-boiled 1940's detective who... fell through a hole in the space time continuum and ended up in Miami? I think. I'm not sure exactly... I know he started to tell that story at one point, but I feel like there was a gap between him in the 40's and the Miami thing.

He's here to amaze us with his keen mind and powers of deduction. Also puns... terrible, horrible, groan inducing puns. I mean they're funny... while being awful. But there are a lot of puns and dad jokes.

Unlike the previous two shows, this one feels a lot more broken up by the tricks of the title (and for the record, it's "dick" as in private dick aka detective... not the other kind). Which isn't bad... there's still something of a throughline but it's a lot more focused on the tricks themselves this time.

When he can get people to actually play along properly, Darrow/Motley is good at what he does. Every time I go to see this kind of show I come away from it with the shape of some of the tricks... I know that for this trick I've just seen to work, these three elements have to have happened. And I might know how one of them is done... but there's always something were I just have no idea what the hell happened. Or at least how it got from A to B. And sometimes I know precisely what has to have happened. But I never saw any of it.

And I like that... I like being able to feel the edges of these tricks, because then if you can do all of that and I don't see any of the seams, you're putting on a damn good show. Which is exactly what Motley delivers.

yani's rating: 4 gumshoes out of 5

fringe: when there's no strength in men

Following on from last year's Hamlet and Shakespeare's Ménage a Trois, the Raw Shakespeare Project returned this year with When There's No Strength in Men.

Shakespeare has a lot of strong female characters, and characters from three plays are on show here, Lady Macbeth, Katherine of France from Henry V and Rosalind from Orlando and Rosalind.

In fact there's a double dose in the Orlando and Rosalind section, as they take the cross dressing and deception of Shakespeare to the next level by having Orlando also be a woman disguised as a man.

Leah Anderson reprises her role as Lady Macbeth from Menage and while she does well, I still find her a little stiff, although clearly that's an acting choice. Her habit of delivering much of her dialogue very fast through clenched teeth however does make some of it difficult to understand. And it's odd because she's a lot easier to understand in the comedy roles.

Russell Slater makes for a good Macbeth, and I think the first one I've maybe ever seen wearing a kilt.

Isabella Shaw is impressive as Katherine of France, a little like last time she commands attention whenever she's on stage, and I was most impressed that she was managing not just Shakespeare but Shakespeare in French during this sequence. Slater makes for a menacing Henry during this sequence and Damien White has a good turn as the foppish King Charles of France.

Then after the tragical and the historical, it was time for the comical. And a play I am mostly unfamiliar with, As You Like It. Shaw returns as the genderbending Orlando while Amelia Lorien becomes her Rosalind.

Lorien was also doing brief interludes between the sections, singing various sonnets and a part of Loves Labours Lost with musical accompaniment from Kim Orchard. She has a beautiful singing voice and Orchard is a skilled musician, so they were quite lovely sections.

But Lorien excels as Rosalind/Ganymede and steals almost all of her scenes while pretending to be a man. In fact everyone seemed to be on top of their game in this section... Lorien and Shaw as the lovers, Anderson as first Rosalind's cousin and then a slightly lusty shepherdess, White as the fool, Touchstone and Slater as the lovesick shepherd.

The staging of the whole production was interesting... presented not so much "in the round" as "in a line between two banks of audience", the set was virtually non existent, being two standing boards at either end where the actors could duck away and a central lighting rig (and more than once I'm sure the actors semi blinded themselves by looking directly into those lights), but it all works.

I'm hoping at some stage they just put three of Shakespeare's comedies together... that would be a fun evening.

yani's rating: 4 maidens fair out of 5

movies: black panther

While the overall quality of Marvel movies is pretty high, every now and again they absolutely hit something out of the park.

Black Panther is that something.

Writer/director Ryan Coogler and his co-writer Joe Robert Cole have put together a story that both fits the mould of a Marvel movie but at the same time breaks it. It's an origin story without being an origin story since everything you need to know about the origins of the Black Panther is covered in the opening narration.

And for once there's a villain character that actually has a personality and more of a backstory than any of the previous ones.

A lot of this is the story, some of this is the directing, but I think that a lot of it comes down to the fact that Coogler has put together an outstandingly talented cast. There really isn't a single bad performance from anyone in this movie.

Chadwick Boseman showed us what he was capable of in Captain America: Civil War and he continues to do that in this movie but at the risk of having the internet beat me up and steal my lunch money, as good as Boseman is, he's probably one of the least interesting (major) character in Black Panther.

And a lot of that is because of the women of Black Panther... Danai Gurira as Okoye, Letitia Wright as Shuri, Lupita Nyong'o as Nakia... hell, even Angela Bassett as Ramonda... these are strong, capable women with personalities and dimension. For me though, it's all about Gurira, she manages to make the warrior general of the king's guard interesting, funny, graceful, strong and magnetic. And watching her and some of the other Dora Milaje when they're being bodyguards... they never stop looking around, scanning everything and everyone. It was a tiny detail but they got it so spot on and it added so much.

Michael B. Jordan plays, I think it's safe to say, the most interesting Marvel movie villain yet. And the one who looks absolutely amazing with his shirt off too. But the character has actual reasons for what he's doing and while what he wants to do is bad, he's doing it for the right reasons.

That's one of the things that struck me about this story to be honest... there are many conflicting viewpoints and some people clearly want to do or are doing "the wrong thing", but almost everyone is coming at it from the exact same place or as I said before, for either right or understandable reasons... which is fairly unique is superhero movies in general and Marvel movies specifically.

And speaking of beautiful men... Winston Duke sprawled on his throne in his mountain lair is a beautiful man. But again, M'Baku is the kind of character you don't expect to be who he turns out to be. Which just proves how much Coogler understands character and story.

I also think the fact that Coogler brought people he's worked with before over to work on this movie, including cinematographer Rachel Morrison, production designer Hannah Beachler and composer Ludwig Göransson... which was obviously a very good choice. Especially the former two, because this movie looks amazing.

From the aforementioned mountain lair throne room to all of the costumes, weapons, buildings, all of the graphic design, basically everything visual. It's all so, so good.

If I had any quibbles, it would be the very, very, very minor one that I kind of prefer the Black Panther costume from Civil War, mostly because of how much I was in love with the first helmet. But they've changed the Captain America suit, what, like five times now? I'll survive.

Given how much money this took on it's opening weekend, I'm not sure I need to suggest to anyone that they should go and see this movie... but just in case... go and see this movie.

yani's rating: 5 vibranium gadgets out of 5