By John Shand
Audacious. That’s the word for this fifth edition of the Australian Musical Theatre Festival. The five-day celebration was capped by a full-blown show, thrown together during that time. Not only did artistic director Tyran Parke oversee this pressure-cooker operation, he also became its last-minute star, playing Guido Contini in Maury Yeston’s Nine (based on Fellini’s 8½), and proved ideal as the eccentric, fantasising Casanova.
His ingenious shortcut to mounting a credible production was to begin the show as a table reading, and then gradually add movement, lighting, musicians, costumes and props. Given Nine partly happens in Guido’s mind and the rest is about making a movie from scratch, this worked brilliantly. The classy cast included Kerrie Anne Greenland as Guido’s wife, Natalie Gamsu as his producer, Patrice Tipoki as his muse and Jodie Harris as his mistress, with Peter Rutherford directing the convincing little orchestra.
Lincoln Kirschbaum and Tyran Parke in Nine, which was mounted in just five days.Credit:
Parke’s other coup was his wildly imaginative and ambitious production of Marry Me a Little, the 1980 revue threading together songs discarded from Stephen Sondheim’s shows. This was an immersive event set during Melbourne’s 2020 lockdowns, using multiple rooms in a three-level arcade. With the audience moving between spaces for each song, the effect was like being on a series of film sets.
Parke included snippets of recorded interviews about lockdown challenges, and these worked without any sense of imposition because we physically shared the isolation of people in small spaces, while they sang of alienation or failed love. Standing out was a dimly lit Des Flanagan delivering Happily Ever After, like a charcoal sketch that had sprung to life.
If the idea of a musical theatre festival conjures up an overabundance of highly strung people, this actually felt more like a gathering of storytellers: of young people honing their craft, and stars revelling in the virtuosic lyrics that define the idiom’s best songs.
Jodie Harris gently animated When You’re Home from In the Heights.Credit:
Music festivals of all stripes have always been about the shared experience as much as the art; the sense of community engendered. Now in its fifth year, this one is still strengthening its beeps on the national radar, but Launceston’s ideal for the purpose, given its rich theatre history – once boasting more theatres per capita than anywhere on Earth – and variety of venues within grape-throwing distance of one another, plus use of the picturesque Cataract Gorge.
Natalie Gamsu was once awakened by a zebra’s breath on her cheek in a marijuana plantation, and Shrapnel, an hour-long monologue frosted with music, gave us raw slices of her remarkable life, including growing up during South Africa’s repugnant apartheid years.
Her version of being a musical theatre triple threat, she told us, was being fat, stoned and epileptic – yet she still bravely performed edgy cabaret in a police state. Life, she said, is partly about letting go of the need to be special. She might have let go, but she was the festival’s most potent performer.
The event’s first international star, US songwriter/pianist John Bucchino, accompanied 17 singers in his It’s Only Life revue. His songs curl in the air like cigarette smoke exhaled by a recent divorcee, despite having musical touchstones ranging from Elton John to Sondheim. They also drip emotion as shyly as a candle drips wax – except when some singers overly fanned the flames. Jodie Harris gently animated When You’re Home, its refrain, “I miss you more when you’re home”, encapsulating the unforced irony of Bucchino’s finest work, and Kane Alexander caught the quiet optimism of Grateful.
Natalie Gamsu gave the audience raw slices of her remarkable life.Credit:
The Best of Broadway was blighted by excessive shrillness in the high notes of too many of the female singers, although Nicole Simms-Farrow evaded that sin in singing the gloriously zany Arthur in the Afternoon from Kander and Ebb’s The Act. Even better were Erin James delivering the morality tale that is The Stars and the Moon (Ordinary Days) and Gamsu’s vast contralto tearing up Pirate Jenny (The Threepenny Opera), which stood out from all else with its deliciously malignant world view.
The words “karaoke” and “epic” don’t usually cohabit the same sentence, but they did when a bar full of people sang One Day More (Les Miserables). Beloved as it might be by many, the song labours under its bald, schlocky lyrics, so the event would have been excruciating were it not so amusing and even touchingly communal.
Ghost Light began as an enthralling tour of the Princess Theatre, its history and ghost stories, but then degenerated into a concert by singers well below the prevailing standard. Kerrie Anne Greenland’s Pictures, a cabaret drawn from movie musicals was also disappointing, her accompaniment including a cellist with wayward intonation, and her singing too often lacking the subtlety she brought to Nine.
Many events, such as Parke’s interviews with stars, could only happen at a festival. Patrice Tipoki’s career has run all the way from appearing in The King and I when aged seven, to starring in Les Miserables in the West End. She provided insights into the unique pressures of being an understudy and of dovetailing performing with raising four children.
Chats with Flanagan and Greenland were equally illuminating: from Flanagan’s year-long audition process winning the lead in Moulin Rouge to Greenland’s 10-year hiatus between lead roles in the commercial musicals Les Miserables and Miss Saigon.
Solo performances from Victorian College of the Arts music theatre students suggested the future looks strong, with Elizabeth Victoria Pardallis especially effective at letting the words do the work on She Used to Be Mine (from Waitress), thereby uncovering the song’s truth, rather than using it as a vehicle to perform.
Some of her peers could learn from this, but the overall standard was close to a professional concert, and next year’s festival will return to developing new Australian musicals as well.
John Shand attended the AMTF courtesy of Tourism Tasmania.
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