Mean green mother from outer space: Luckiest Productions & Hayes Theatre’s Little Shop of Horrors

Filmed in two days and one night, Roger Corman’s 1960 B-movie The Little Shop of Horrors made inventive use of comedy, horror, and science-fiction elements in a pastiche which has since gained a cult following. Premiering in 1982, Little Shop of Horrors – Alan Menken and Howard Ashman’s perennial musical based on Corman’s film – is a mainstay of the amateur and community musical circuit, as well as spawning the 1986 film-musical directed by Frank Oz. Now, it receives a thrilling twenty-first century revival the hands of Dean Bryant and the team that previously brought Sweet Charity to life in Sydney in 2014.

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.

Doing the time warp, again: Richard O’Brien’s Rocky Horror Show

The Rocky Horror Show is a phenomenon bordering on a cult, which first sprang to life in 1973 in London, and the following year in Sydney. A mash-up of science-fiction and horror tropes, and gleefully set firmly within the tradition of the rock’n’roll musical, the Rocky Horror Show now rocks back into Sydney’s Lyric theatre in this 40th anniversary production. Despite the glitz and glamour with which it struts about the stage in its glittering stilettos, it feels tired, old, and more than a little bit more camp than it should be.

Our song: MTC’s What Rhymes with Cars and Girls

When Tom Stoppard’s radio play Darkside – based on Pink Floyd’s seminal album The Dark Side of the Moon – premiered in Britain in 2013, Sydney Morning Herald music writer Bernard Zuel wondered whether it might be time we saw an Australian version of the project, suggesting “Brendan Cowell adapting You Am I’s Hourly Daily; Hannie Rayson taking on Paul Kelly’s Gossip; Andrew Bovell diving into Sarah Blasko’s What The Sea Wants, The Sea Will Have; [or] maybe, David Williamson and Kylie Minogue’s Impossible Princess…” It’s almost as if playwright Aidan Fennessy heard Zuel’s challenge and decided to raise him one, as a year and a half later, What Rhymes with Cars and Girls opens at the Melbourne Theatre Company.

Very much inspired by – as well as emerging from – the fabric of Tim Rogers’ 1999 solo album of the same name, What Rhymes with Cars and Girls is the story of Johnno, a hapless pizza delivery boy, and Tash, a smart-mouthed singer who’s running from everything. While featuring a live three-piece band (led by Rogers himself), Cars and Girls is not so much a musical as “a play with songs” in the mode of Poor Boy, albeit with more charm and heart. But where Poor Boy’s songs were somewhat outside the action on stage and became ghostly musical refrains, Rogers’ songs here become integral to the play’s success and charm and, as in a musical, come to express the characters’ thoughts and feelings in a slightly heightened form.

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.

Alchemical love: Griffin, STCSA & Sydney Festival’s Masquerade

If you’ve read the little print at the back of a program for a Griffin Theatre Company production over the past five years, you might have noticed a play called Masquerade as being in development. In 2015, co-produced Griffin and the State Theatre Company of South Australia as part of the Sydney Festival, Kate Mulvany’s Masquerade completes its journey to the stage in a production bursting with life, colour, music and dance. But for all its joyous raucous rambunctiousness, there is a bittersweet and touching story which makes this story, this production, more raw and affecting than it might otherwise have been as a relatively ‘straight’ adaptation.

Do you hear the people sing?: Les Misérables

Les Misérables, as a phenomenon, needs no introduction. Victor Hugo’s novel was first published in 1862, and was hugely successful – critically and popularly – changing the reading public. In the guise of Boublil and Schönberg’s musical it, too, became a popular and critical success following its English-language premiere in London in 1985, and similarly changed the musical-theatre landscape. One of the longest running musicals in history, it first came to Australia in 1987 at Sydney’s Theatre Royal, before touring the country over the following five years. Reconceived and restaged in London in 2010 to celebrate its twenty-fifth anniversary, ‘Les Mis’ has been given a new lease of life and is again touring the world, and is now playing in Melbourne’s Her Majesty’s Theatre prior to its Perth and Sydney seasons in 2015.

“[It] is still playing to full houses and regularly breaking box office records after almost [thirty] years,” producer and impresario Cameron Mackintosh writes in the program. “New audiences are discovering the extraordinary impact of this exhilarating and emotional tour de force while existing Les Mis fans come back again and again for more.” As an international brand, it is impregnable, untouchable. As a piece of musical theatre however, it is not without its flaws. And therein lies the problem with this production, the experience, and the whole Misérables thing.

Falling quickly: MTC’s Once, the musical

In 2006, Once - a little unassuming Irish film, directed and written by John Carney and starring musicians Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová - won over everyone’s hearts and quickly established a name for itself as one of “the most delicate invisible love stories,” to quote Irish playwright Enda Walsh. As a film-musical, it seemed to go against the stereotype of big numbers, big names and big emotions, and for aficionados of the musical genre, it was perhaps only a matter of time before it was in turn translated into a stage musical.

Developed by the American Repertory Theatre, and originally produced Off-Broadway in 2011, it soon found itself on Broadway. Produced by the Melbourne Theatre Company and John Frost in its Australian premiere at Melbourne’s Princess Theatre, Once is a beautiful tender love story, and the perfect antidote to the big-budget musical juggernauts which dominate Broadway and the commercial musical scene. 

The night I was turned into a white mouse*: Griffin’s The Witches

Every child reads Roald Dahl at one point or another at school. Anarchic and more than a little bit brilliant, Dahl’s stories operate in a world where children are victims and heroes, where adults do bad things, and there is danger inside every glance, every smile and every heartbeat, but more than anything else, Dahl’s stories are about the unexpected, and revel in a kind of child-like logic where everything can be something equally different, unique and brilliant. Perennial favourites include Matilda, James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and, my favourite, Danny the Champion of the World. Dahl’s books have also undergone a resurgence in recent years, with several making the transition from the page to stages around the world: Tim Minchin wrote the music and lyrics for the RSC-produced musical of Matilda; Sam Mendes directed a musical of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; and now The Witches bursts onto Griffin Theatre Company’s tiny Stables theatre just in time for the school holidays.

And what a play it is.

Perhaps Perhaps Perhaps: Global Creatures & Bazmark’s Strictly Ballroom The Musical

You know the film, Strictly Ballroom. Scott, a young dancer, bored by the convention and rigourous boundaries of competitive dancing, longs to break free and dance his own steps at the championships. When he dances with beginner Fran, he finds a kindred spirit, and together (with the help of her Spanish family) they take on the dance federation and win their way into the hearts of everyone. You loved the film, you and countless millions the world over. You’re familiar, too, with Baz Luhrmann’s ‘red curtain’ aesthetic that pervades his first three films and which, for better or worse, continues to define his career. Now, thirty years after beginning life as a half-hour student production at NIDA, Strictly Ballroom the Musical explodes onto Sydney’s Lyric Theatre stage with as much colour, light, glitter and glamour as anything else Luhrmann has devised.

Produced here in partnership with Global Creatures – the Melbourne-based company responsible for the King Kong musical, the How To Train Your Dragon Arena Spectacular, and the Australian tour of War Horse – Baz Luhrmann and his usual collaborators have brought us a musical which wears its price-tag on its ruffled sleeve, figure-hugging sequined costumes and elaborate sets. Yet, while the film had heart by the bucketload, something is lost in translation here, as the story completes its circular journey from theatre to film and back again.

Pride and prejudice: Disney's The Lion King

Let me play the lion too: I will roar, that I will
do any man’s heart good to hear me; I will roar,
that I will make the duke say ‘Let him roar again,
let him roar again.’
 – Bottom, A Midsummer Night’s Dream [I.2.66-9]

Eight years ago, my year twelve English teacher showed us the first ten minutes of a film guaranteed to change the way we look at Shakespeare. In an empty coliseum in the dead of night, soldiers, dressed like figurines, poured into the ‘archetypal theatre of cruelty’ to the bold choric strains of a majestic fanfare. Horse-drawn chariots sat sidebyside with tanks and motorcycles, foot soldiers danced, their hands fused with their swords, and an old battle-wearied general addressed his people, cheered on by the echo of their ghostly cries. The film was Julie Taymor’s Titus, and that afternoon marked the beginning of many things for me, not least my fascination with Taymor’s work, both on stage and on screen.

In 1994, Disney’s thirty-second animated film opened in cinemas and set records instantly to become, twenty years later, the highest grossing hand-drawn animation in history. The film was The Lion King, and three years later, it roared onto the stage of the New Amsterdam theatre on New York’s Broadway as a musical, quickly becoming a critical and popular success, and spawning numerous concurrent productions internationally. Its director, Julie Taymor, had taken Disney’s beloved film and so thoroughly reimagined it for the stage that it was a beast in a class all of its own, without peer before or since. Where Beauty and the Beast, Disney’s first foray into theatrical musicals based on their film, was described as ‘animated Broadway,’ Taymor’s envisioning of The Lion King was pure full-blooded theatre. No other director working today has so audaciously mixed theatrical styles and techniques, or used cinematic conventions on a stage so audaciously, that no matter how hard you try to resist it, the story still affects you every time because its magic is so ephemeral and so vibrantly alive, so vividly present that you cannot ignore it.