Not quite fantastick: Wooden Horse & Hayes Theatre Co’s The Fantasticks

This review was originally written for artsHub.

Written in 1960, you could be forgiven for thinking that The Fantasticks is a period piece. But in the Wooden Horse/Hayes Theatre Co production directed by Helen Dallimore, Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt’s musical is brought forward in a clever and, for the most-part, considered staging which exudes a quirky kind of charm. Sitting somewhere between Romeo & Juliet and a Tim Burton film (think, Big Fish), with a dash of a twisted Elizabethan revenge drama, The Fantasticks is the story of two single fathers (Laurence Coy and Garry Scale) who want their children (Jonathan Hickey and Bobbie-Jean Harding) to fall in love, so pretend they’re in the midst of a bitter feud, and build a wall between their two houses. Unable to determine how to end the feud, they enlist the help of El Gallo, a Pirandellian narrator-cum-stage manager, who concocts a diversion to ensure everything ends well. Or does it?

Give yourself to the Elk: STC's Perplex

Described as a shape-shifting theatrical puzzle, Marius von Mayenburg’s Perplex is, well, a perplexing series of scenes, each interconnected with those immediately either side of it, but otherwise a standalone vignette of exquisite absurdism. Directed by Sarah Giles, Perplex is playing in Sydney Theatre Company’s Wharf 1 theatre, and it’s quite a giddy night of theatre.

Wearing his inspiration on his sleeve, von Mayenburg takes a leaf out of Pirandello’s legendary Six Characters in Search of an Author and spins a chameleonic rhapsody of a reality-fuck out of the endless possibilities afforded by two doors and four actors. Like a giant game of Thank God You’re Here or musical chairs, whenever someone decisively exits or enters through a door, the scene changes, and the scene starts anew, an endless series of possibilities and multiple universes just waiting to be explored.