Movies:

Mel Gibson recently told why he now prefers romantic comedies to action movies: “You don’t have to go out in some stinky field and get all sweaty and run up a hill.”  Sounds fair enough to me. I guess it would have been a real bummer doing The Mad Max movies in that case. (In the States they were the Road Warrior movies), but then he was straight out of drama school then and a bit hungrier I imagine. Braveheart brought all those smelly-kilted extras, and face paint and lots of hills to run up…well you get the idea.

The Australian Film Finance Corporation has green-lighted two productions for 2001.Garage Days directed by The Crow’s Alex Proyas and Deadly, Unna? to be directed by Paul Goldman.

Aboriginal members of the Warungnu Tribe claim that the producers of the latest Survivor, which was filmed on their land, ripped them off and didn't pay them award wages.

Sydney’s Fox Studios Australia the studio used for Star Wars 111 and Mission Impossible amongst other films sacked some 25 people, including communications manager Victoria Buchan, in a major internal bloodletting.  Apparently they were not making a profit, and needed some radical changes before Christmas.  

Toni Collette (Muriel’s Wedding) will star alongside Ben Afflek and Samuel L Jackson in Changing Lanes, Adam Garcia (Bootmen) has a supporting role in Riding In cars With Boys, Eric Bana (Chopper) has a role in Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down, Frances O Connor in John Woo’s Windtalkers and Cate Blanchett in Bandits.

Guy Pearce (LA Confidential) has signed on for the Oz production Blood And Guts, a dark comedy about greed, sex, cops, brothers and jail that will shoot in Melbourne in mid 2001.

Theatre:

Art & Soul: Melbourne Theatre Company.

One painting, seven playwrights, six actors and two directors bring this innovative and demanding piece of theatre alive. The brief given to twelve writers was to develop a play around the ideas and feelings of the painting Homage to Rembrandt by Garry Shead. Seven were chosen and the final product is a work that challenges and gives the cast enormous fun in the playing.

The Slaughterhouse: Writer: Aiden Fennessy. Director: Kate Cherry.

Ben Rogan is a painter who is living the life of artists everywhere, chasing the dollar but trying to reconcile this with his art. In a leather jacket with one small spot of paint on the front he is pacing the floor and worrying about the opening of his show, while chasing the money he is owed through his agent. Two workers (Robert Essex and Genevieve Morris) carry paintings through the gallery and occasionally stop to look at the stage, which is cleverly arranged with the actors in the exact positions of the painting. (Kim Gyngell as Rembrandt, Kate Kendall as the Angel and bound and gagged in the back corner, Louise Siversen as the woman.) Theworkers’ view of art is that if the eyes follow you it is good. They are fascinated as Kendall’s eyes follow them everywhere. Meanwhile inside the painting we watch the petty squabbles between the lecherous Rembrandt, the woman who used to be his angel, and the one who now is.

 Masterpiece: Writer: Glenn Shea. Director: Kate Cherry.

A dark and foreboding night, Olivia (Kendall) asleep on a beach, is found by Phillip (Essex) and taken home to his studio to dry out and sleep. She wants to look at the covered painting in the corner but he is very protective of the work, his masterpiece, unfinished. She takes off her wet clothes and sleeps while Phillip draws her and we see by his frantic work that his muse has returned. His wife whom he says is upstairs, we now realise is dead, and he has never been able to finish the masterpiece. In the morning as she dresses we see the marks on her shoulder. Welts from a whip or the remains of the one wing? The artist uncovers the painting to show the painting we already know above, except that the face is missing. But now he has it.

 Homage to Rembrandt: Writer Tee O’Neill. Director: Peter Houghton.

The Artist ( Essex) cannot get the inspiration he needs to start painting. He has the model hanging in mid air, he has his two muses (Kendall & Morris) and he has their wonderful stories of a soldier (Rogan) on the road, but he never puts paint to canvas. This play suffered its position in the program and was also possibly the weakest of the pieces.

 Whispering Death: Writer Matt Cameron. Director: Peter Houghton.

Zed (Gyngell) is a tragic and boring man. By day he is a filing clerk and by night a painter. His whole life however is in alphabetical order and so is the play. A Greek chorus of clerks intones the letters of the alphabet one by one as Zed, in rhyme, lives his ordered life. His angel, (Kendall) is his inspiration, bur there is always the mundane filing to be done. And then there is the woman at the back of his painting; she is a kind of Angel of Death (Essex) and is played with great fun as a cross between Miss Haversham and Diana Dors. This is an extremely clever and funny piece, but in the end it is Zed himself who is packed inside a filing cabinet, under Zed, or for those in the US, Zee.

 Untitled: Writer: Joanna Murray-Smith. Director: Kate Cherry.

The Artist (Gyngell,) sits alone in his studio waiting.  Woman (Kendall) enters and is treated just like a performer at an audition. “Take off your clothes, I told them not to send blondes why don’t they ever listen? Well take them off.” He needs a model so he can finish the painting at the back of the studio. It is his dead wife in the guise of the angel. He is stuck there, with this painting. He hasn’t moved forward from her passing. He talks incessantly about her to this naked woman who listens attentively while he rails and rants. Then it is her turn to answer questions. She knows everything. All that he wants answers to, she knows. She knows him too. Everything. Finally he hands her her clothes and she dresses. When she leaves we watch the angel fade and he finally has a new blank canvas.

 At Last the Famous Artist is Dead: Writer Tom Wright. Director: Peter Houghton.

The great artist (Essex) is dying surrounded by his aging and uncaring family (Siversen and Rogan) and his mistress Bogmila, (Morris) an ex-gymnast armless dwarf. A young artist (Kendall) has been commissioned to paint the great man one last time, the problem being that she is from Sydney; a place that the artist refuses to believe exists. As she sits mixing her paints, the artist sits in the corner painting, really badly. She can’t help but notice and then realises he is blind. Then he reveals that he always has been and that all his paintings were done without sight. The works that have inspired her and her generation with their vision and colour were done from an inner vision. Perhaps that’s why the colours were all wrong. Absurd and very funny.

Ray’s Painting: Writer Melissa Reeves. Director: Kate Cherry.

In the corner of the boat shed sits Lester the artist (Gyngell) not painting. Just sitting. Ray (Siversen) owns the shed with her husband Alan (Essex) and she is so excited to have an artist at the bottom of the garden. Excited? Obsessed would be a better word. She wants desperately to be included in his painting and to model for him. She is so excited by the prospect that she tears her clothes off and poses naked for him. This is Ray’s fantasy, the one that takes her away from the mundane day-to-day watering of the lawn with Alan. But Lester is more interested in Elli (Kendall), his angel, and as Ray fantasizes over the boys (Rogan,) that she didn’t have at school, he throws her a dress. “Put it on and sit up the back there.” Poor Ray is the woman in the white dress in the corner.

Verdict: Not a masterpiece but a defining work.

SHOUT!   The State Theatre - Victorian Arts Centre. Directed by Richard Wherrett. Written by John Michael –Howson, David Mitchell and Melvin Morrow.

Johnny O’Keefe (J’OK) was a legend of Australian rock and roll, the first home-grown rocker to grace an Aussie stage at a time when only the imported was seen as good enough. This was a time when our cultural cringe, which to this day survives, was at its absolute peak. If it wasn’t American or British it couldn’t be any good. The first time J’OK appeared on an Australian stage he was booed. But he wouldn’t leave, he said to the crowd, “you can boo me all you like, but you paid 12 shillings and sixpence to see me and you are going to love me.” Thanks to J’OK we can now hold our heads high on the world stage and this musical celebrates that coming of age. 

The performance I saw was the first with an audience, 4 days before opening night. There are no out of town tryouts and months of honing the show in front of an audience for these guys; they open to critics and public in 4 days. After only 6 weeks of rehearsals this show is already as tight as a fish’s bum, and with only very minor cuts and tightening of the blackouts and fixing of the inevitable technical glitches it will be right there. Already David Campbell as J’OK is a triumph as he throws himself through this show like a prizefighter looking for the knockout in the first round. Ably supported by a cast of 36 including a sensational onstage rock band and close harmony backing vocalists, they recreate the sounds and the dancing of the 50s, 60s, and 70s choreographed by Ross Coleman.

Almost at the beginning of the show we hear an amazing rendition of “Cry.” the old Johnnie Ray song, and the performer turns to us with glasses spraying water over his audience, it is Campbell strutting his stuff with an amazing vocal rendition. Apparently J’OK used to do this as a party trick, but I imagine he never sounded as good as Campbell. This is an amazing vocal performance where he sounds like J’OK at his best, and at his worst when times got bad and the old rocker’s voice cracked and faded. As the manipulative, self obsessed coffin dwelling Lee Gordon, O’Keefe’s American manager, Aaron Blabey gives a strong and confident performance and sets the scene for the sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll excesses of O’Keefe who became known to Aussies as “the Wild One.”  A moment I loved, and which delighted the audience was when the recorded version of “Rock Around the Clock” played and J’OK remarked “I could do that,” and then the onstage band takes over the song and Campbell sings the hell out of the it. We go to interval after a horrific car crash that almost took the life of O’Keefe and which in my memory was a defining time in his life. After interval we are swept through the early days of television when he was on our screens every week, his face gradually healing from the scars, singing covers of the great rock and roll songs from the US and England. He was our own Elvis or Cliff Richard, but on a promotional tour to England he was committed to an asylum where for two months he told them he was Jesus Christ. Then he told them he was the King Of Rock and Roll in Australia and they doubled his dose. He eventually borrowed a doctor’s coat and escaped back to Australia. However his star was waning and he found himself touring the country in tent shows as his self-destructive habits made him a very sad and bitter man. It was at this time that he heard of the 47-year-old Lee Gordon’s death. J’OK died in 1978 at the too young age of 43, but he achieved in his time a list of firsts unparalleled in this country.

http://www.shoutthemusical.com.au/pages/facts.html

The show finishes on a high note with a recreation of a concert from 1959 when he was at his height as a performer. A rollicking rock and roll show that has the crowd screaming for more. This musical is in the tradition of Buddy and Grease but for once it is about us. At the end of the show a neon backdrop floats into sight and when it lights up we see the names of some of the Australian performers whose careers were made possible by the trailblazing of O’Keefe. Among them are: A/C D/C, Little River Band, Peter Allen, Olivia Newton-John, INXS, Men At Work, The Bee Gees, Savage Garden and many others, and yes they all started in Australia. I must give a final word of praise for Tamsin Carroll as O’Keefe’s first wife and the delightful Trisha Noble and Doug Scroope as Mr and Mrs O’Keefe. Noble was a contemporary of O’Keefe in the days when as Patsy-Anne Noble she appeared with him on his TV shows. Her voice is like melted chocolate as she croons a lullaby, later reprised as Mockingbird, to the infant Johnny, and she manages to portray the ages from 20 to 63 effortlessly.

http://www.shoutthemusical.com.au/pages/show.html

Verdict: Scream, yell or shout for a ticket.

Television: - Water Rats and Stingers will both be returning to Nine next year.

© 2001 Don Bridges ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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