Clever Girl: Squabbalogic’s Triassic Parq

In an expertly-timed coincidence, Squabbalogic’s second show for 2015 is the Australian premiere of the 2010 Off-Broadway musical-comedy parody Triassic Parq. Inspired by Steven Spielberg’s beloved 1993 film, Triassic Parq takes the idea of the dinosaurs running amok in Jurassic Park and tries to work out why. Directed by Jay James-Moody, and staged in the Seymour Centre’s Reginald theatre, we are given front-row seats to roaring, dancing, sex-changing, scientifically-inquisitive dinosaurs. Dinosaurs that sing and dance. Oh yes.

The impossible dream: Squabbalogic’s Man of La Mancha

Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote is one of those books which, like its titular character, has assumed a life much larger than anything its author could have dreamed of upon writing. It’s a sprawling beast of a tome, written in two parts, and published ten years apart in the early seventeenth century, and is very much about stories, telling stories, living stories, and ultimately, becoming a story ourselves. It’s a mercurial book, too, constantly shifting and changing, dropping in and out of layers of metatextual conceit like Russian dolls or Chinese puzzle boxes; just when you think you’ve got a handle on the narrative, it twists, disappears, and journeys on to another adventure. In brief, it is the story of a man who believes he is a knight errant by the name of Don Quixote, and along with his squire Sancho Panza, journeys forth to right wrongs, and restore justice and order wherever he goes. In one sense a satirical riposte to the proliferation of chivalric stories at the time, it quickly becomes much more than just that, and becomes a rhapsody upon life in all its complexities and contradictions. Ever since reading the book two and a half years ago, I’ve had the impossible dream of wanting to see it come alive, to watch the pasteboard knight gallivant across the Spanish mountains with as much presence and life and aliveness as he has in the book.  

Enter, then, Squabbalogic and their production of Man of La Mancha. Written by Dale Wasserman (originally as a one-act teleplay), with music by Mitch Leigh and lyrics by Joe Darion, and premiered in 1965, it is not so much a musical of Don Quixote or a musical of the life of its author Cervantes (though it certainly draws heavily on elements from both), but rather a musical based on the world of Don Quixote. Taking a page from Cervantes’ own book and methods, the musical opens in a Spanish prison some time in the late sixteenth century, with Cervantes and his manservant charged with foreclosing on a monastery unable to pay debts. Accosted by the inmates, Cervantes pleads guilty to the charges laid against him, and seeks the opportunity to offer his defense in the only way he knows how: a story – a play – acted out by the inmates themselves. The story of the man of La Mancha.