The show must go on: Belvoir & Sisters Grimm’s La Traviata

Billed as “part opera, part protest, part drag show,” Sisters Grimm’s La Traviata – co-produced with Belvoir, and playing in Belvoir’s Downstairs theatre – is a curious mash-up of Verdi’s opera (which was recently playing in Sydney), protest against the recent cuts to arts funding, and awkwardly gratuitous breaking of the fourth wall. Unlike Sisters Grimm’s other shows – Summertime in the Garden of Eden in particular – their customary verve for “queer DIY drag-theatre” does not quite shine here, and I’m not sure if this production is as powerful yet as it could be, as it is intended to be.

The seven ages of John Bell

This is a slightly edited version of an article written for the Australian Writers’ Guild’s Storyline magazine, published in August 2015 in Volume 35.

For thousands of young people across Australia each year, Bell Shakespeare’s Actors At Work programme brings the plays of William Shakespeare alive in an accessible and vibrant way. A core part of Bell Shakespeare’s learning programme since the company’s first season in 1990, Actors At Work travels the country with little more than the Bard’s words and their imaginations, and provides many students with their first experience of Shakespeare and/or live theatre.

Like many of these students, John Bell’s first introduction to Shakespeare came when he was at school. “I had a fantastic English teacher at that time who taught Shakespeare, and took us off to see the Shakespeare movies, and any live theatre that came to town, so I’d already got hooked on language and Shakespeare, poetry, some novels of course… we did about six Shakespeare plays in my high school years – two a year in great detail, so we got through it very thoroughly – and then I got interested in performing.”

There and back again: Spectrum NOW’s Orfeo ed Euridice

Produced without adornment, Shannon Murphy’s staging of Gluck’s opera Orfeo ed Euridice as part of the inaugural Spectrum NOW festival is a treat to savour. Staged within the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ entrance hall, restaurant and old courts, it is a moving processional presentation of one of Gluck’s reform operas which seeks to invigorate and reform our perception of opera itself, what it is, can be, and can be capable of, and it succeeds with an elegant simplicity and ingenuity which is beguiling.

Golden summers: Opera Australia’s The Elixir of Love

“Once a jolly doctor rode into a country town
Handing out potions and pills for a fee
And he sang as the soldiers and gentlefolk all gathered ‘round
Who’ll come a-wooing Adina with me?”

You could say that Australia grew up on the sheep’s back. The pastoral dream of an idyllic Arden beyond the cities and town centres persisted until relatively recently – ‘over the hills and far away’ was where the pastures and grazing land were, where the romance of an unhurried lifestyle lived on and off the land was tantalising. Dorothy McKellar wrote “I love a sunburnt country,” and not so long ago the same could be said for many people. In Simon Phillips’ production of Donizetti’s The Elixir of Love for Opera Australia, we are transported to the summer of 1915, a country town beyond the mountains, when the Heidelberg School’s vision of golden summers was still conceivable; an Arcadian moment on the cusp of the “imminent loss of innocence.”

In the Valley of the Kings: Opera Australia’s The Magic Flute (Regional tour)

Fifteen or sixteen years ago, I loved a series of books about an archaeologist (and little-known poet) called Cairo Jim who had as companions a blue-and-gold macaw and a telepathic ‘wonder camel.’ The brain-child of author Geoffrey McSkimming, the intrepid trio criss-crossed the once-ancient world, foiling the nefarious schemes of Captain Neptune Bone, restoring wrongs to rights, discovering immeasurable wonders and falling in love with Jocelyn Osgood. My favourite was the very first volume in the long-running series, Cairo Jim & Doris in Search of Martenarten – there was something about it that grabbed my nine-year-old imagination and kicked it into the stratosphere. There was adventure by the bucketload, sand (lots of sand), and some very silly puns; it was almost like an Errol Flynn film, or the Indiana Jones films, except in a book, for younger readers. Like a lot of kids (and, I suppose, adults too), I loved the mystery and intrigue that surrounded Ancient Egypt, all the gods and tombs and treasures, the mummies wrapped in kilometres of bandages, the colossal temples, pyramids, statues. Once I discovered the series had ended (at least for the time-being, or so we are reassured), I read them all again, and ‘Martenarten’ is still the best.

Imagine, then, my delight when I discovered Opera Australia’s regional touring production for 2014 was a new version of Mozart’s immortal The Magic Flute, set in 1930s Egypt a la Indiana Jones. Inevitable quibbles of Hollywood B-movies and Saturday afternoon serials aside, this Magic Flute, directed and adapted by Michael Gow, is full of the adventure, danger, romance and magic that Mozart’s music so perfectly captures, and is an inordinate amount of fun.