BUBBLE BOY - THE MUSICAL

 

Bubble Boy. Book by Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio. Music and lyrics by Cinco Paul.

Directed by Tijana Kovac. Musical director Tara Davidson. Choreographer Sally Taylor. Costume, Set and Properties Remus Douglas. Lighting design Eve Perry. Sound design Telia Jansen (Eclipse) Production manager Benjamin Martin. Stage  manager Lucy van Dooren. Band. Band leader/Keybord Adam Bluhm. Drums Jarrah Palethorpe. Bass Callum Richens, Guitar Chris Bennie. Cello Nicky Philipse. Reeds Lauren Duffy. Queanbeyan Players. Belconnen Community Theatre. February 14 – 23 2025. Bookings: queanbeyanplayers.com or 0402353443

Reviewed by Peter Wilkins

 

Rylan Howard as Bubble Boy with the Ensemble

If the young talented team behind the current production of Bubble Boy – The Musical at the Belconnen Community Theatre is anything to go by the future of Queanbeyan Players is looking bright. Bubble Boy is a fun-filled feel good musical with a moral. Queanbeyan Players embrace it with gusto and the company of new and experienced performers bring this Canberra premiere to the stage with a confident grasp of character and story.

Jimmy Livingston (Rylan Howard) is born with a serious immunity deficiency that confines him to a carefully controlled germ-free environment. His obsessively protective mother (Aleisha Croxford) keeps him confined to the bubble and safe from any outside contamination. His father  (John Potter) retreats into a silent world of avoidance, leaving his wife to control the situation and read Jimmy children’s stories at bedtime. However, the arrival next door of Chloe (Kay Liddiard) upsets the apple cart when Jimmy finds himself falling in love. When it appears that Chloe may marry college friend Mark (an excellent performance by Andrew Taylor with his comedy act offsider Shawn played by Sam Thomson)), Jimmy has no choice but to break free and find his way to Niagara Falls to attend the wedding. On the way he meets the happy Bright and Smiley cult members, a bikie gang under the leadership of Slim (Valeria Arciniega Vidurrizaga), two State policemen and an immigrant  Indian doctor, Pushpa ( a very engaging performance by Roya Safaei),who, unable to practice, tellingly sells icecream. Writers Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio take well-aimed jibes at American society. Bubble Boy may finish in a flurry of schmalz, but Queanbeyan Players’ production, tightly directed by Tijana Kovac and energetically choreographed by Sally Taylor shines a light on human behaviour and attitude. It does so with energy and flair and the largely young cast revel in the opportunity to poke fun at the absurdity of human nature and touch the heart in the moments of pathos.

In a show full of catchy tunes, musical director Tara Davidson and her band members capture the energy and the fun of the large ensemble numbers such as Bubble Boy and Outa Here. as well as the tender duet by Liddiard and Howard (Falling for the Boy) or Croxford’s patter song Bring Back The Boy.. Musical director Davidson, choreographer Taylor and director Kovac work expertly as a team with a clear understanding of the obvious strengths of their cast and their limitations. This is not a flawless performance but the discipline, commitment and talent are unmistakeable in a show that bubbles along. There are excellent performances from the principals, supported by a bouncy ensemble and able musicians.

It is refreshing to attend a rarely performed musical that is sheer fun from start to finish, highlighted by believable performances, laugh out loud comedy , foot tapping melodies and off Broadway simplicity. At times I found the miking strident, and would have preferred natural voices in the small theatre, but it is a small quibble that did little to lessen the enjoyment of an audience that applauded heartily and had a great night at the theatre.

Photo by Damian Magee

 

 

BALANAS SISTERS

Kristīne Balanas violin

Margarita Balanas cello

Snow Concert Hall, Red Hill February 20

 

Reviewed by Len Power

 

Opening their concert with an exciting performance of the Halvorsen arrangement of Handel’s Passacaglia in G minor, Latvia’s Balanas sisters, Kristīne and Margarita, showed why they are two of the most talked-about rising stars in Europe. As well as playing superbly, their silent interaction with looks and smiles was electrifying, showing their joy in performing with each other.

Kristīne Balanas, violin and Margarita Balanas, cello

Violinist, Kristīne Balanas, is a 3^rd prize laureate of the 66^th International ARD Music Competition, 2018 Artist of the Year in the Grand Music Awards of her home country and has performed as a soloist for many of the world’s leading orchestras and festivals.

Kristīne Balanas, violin

Cellist and conductor, Margarita Balanas, is a winner of the Latvian Grand Music Award and has performed with many renowned orchestras internationally. She has conducted the Tonhalle-Orchester Zurich, Royal Academy of Music Symphony Orchestra, Baltic Sea Philharmonic and Järvi Academy Orchestra and Sinfonietta.

Margarita Ballanas, cello

Following their opening performance of the Handel, Kristīne Balanas played J.S. Bach’s Partita No. 3 in E major for violin solo. All three movements were beautifully played, especially the reflective second Loure movement.

Margarita Balanas then played J.S. Bach’s Suite No. 1 in G major for solo cello. All three movements were played with great sensitivity and the third movement, Courante, was especially memorable.

The sisters then played two contrasting movements from Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons - Summer and Winter.  Together, they brought out all the vibrant colour of Vivaldi’s Summer and their playing of Winter was equally colourful, passionate and exciting.

After interval, the sisters played Latvian composer Pēteris Vasks’ Castillo Interior. This 2013 work for violin and cello, with its slow, contemplative passages conflicting with rapid outbursts of emotion, was movingly played and proved to be the highlight of the concert.

The final work in four movements, Ravel’s Sonate pour violon et violoncelle, was also passionately played by the sisters, and was the perfect end to a great concert.

 

Photos by Peter Hislop

 

This review was first published by Canberra CityNews digital edition on 21 February 2025.

Len Power's reviews are also broadcast on Artsound FM 92.7 in the ‘Arts Cafe’ and ‘Arts About’ programs and published in his blog 'Just Power Writing' at https://justpowerwriting.blogspot.com/.

 

Until Justice Comes

Photography Book Review: Brian Rope

Until Justice Comes (Fifty Years of The Movement for Indigenous Rights. PHOTOGRAPHS 1970 – 2024) I Juno Gemes | First Nation's Resistance Photography | Large format flexibound, 284×234mm, 348 pp

I acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Islander People as The Traditional Owners and Custodians of Country throughout our Nation.

Cover of Until Justice Comes

Until Justice Comes is a most significant and important book which, undoubtedly, will become a valuable resource for teachers and leave a significant legacy. It is a landmark publication based on collaboration, and reveals the true history of Australia.

The author Juno Gemes was born in Hungary in 1944 and emigrated to Australia with her parents in 1949. A performer, theatre director, writer, publisher, photographer and activist, she was one of the founders of Australia's first experimental theatre groups, The Human Body. As an Australian activist and photographer, she is best known for her photography of Aboriginal Australians.

Gemes is one of Australia’s most celebrated contemporary photographers with many achievements. In 1982 she exhibited photographs in the group shows After the Tent Embassy and Apmira: Artists for Aboriginal Land Rights. She created a unique visual document of the historic Uluru Handback Ceremony 26 October 1985. In 2003 the National Portrait Gallery (Australia) exhibited her portraits of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander reconciliation activists and personalities, Proof: Portraits from the Movement 1978–2003, and has since acquired many of her photographs.

Using both words and images she has spent over fifty years documenting the changing social landscape of Australia, and in particular the lives and struggles of Aboriginal Australians, a process that culminated in her being one of just ten photographers invited to photographically document the National Apology to the Stolen Generations in the Parliament of Australia on 13 February 2008.

This book’s photographs cover crucial moments in Australia’s history including the Redfern Revolution, land rights campaigns, the aforementioned National Apology, the election of eleven Indigenous Members to the 47th Federal Parliament, and the preparations for the 2023 Referendum on the Voice to Parliament. The powerful collection of over 220 photographs brings Gemes’ current and continuing work together with her unique living archive. It portrays her career witnessing and advocating for change.

Elders from Aurukun - Denny Bowenda and Countryman Laurie Pantoomba have a meeting beside the flag on the bora ground, Mornington Island, QLD, 1978 ©JUNO GEMES

Terribly civilized, Aren't you? Photomontage published in Photo-Discourse, Sydney, NSW, 1981
©JUNO GEMES

At the 50th anniversary of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy. Matriarch activist Jenny Munro was first at the Tent Embassy in 1972: now her children and those of her sister Isabel Coe and founders Billy Craigie and Paul Coe take responsibility for running the Aboriginal Tent Embassy into the future, 26 January 2022
© JUNO GEMES

Sammy Wilson, Mutitjulu Community Leader, welcomes members of the Referendum Working Group to sacred sites at Uluru, 2023 © JUNO GEMES

This visual uncovering of an often-invisible history has been at the heart of Gemes’ engagement with the First Nations people she has known and worked with throughout all these years. The book shows us both well-known and lesser leaders, intimate community events, and activism. It includes new writings and poems by various contributors.

Gael Newton, a former Senior Curator of Australian and International Photography at the National Gallery of Australia, has said Until Justice Comes is the first fully retrospective testament to a woman universally revered for her artistry, activism, engagement and collaboration. It also shines with the warmth, wry side glances, acuity and determined end game that fill her images with life and hope.

Why did I say true history at the end of my opening paragraph? Because we are one nation. We are all Australians - Indigenous first people, descendants of those who established a British colony here in 1788, or those (including me as a young migrant child) who arrived later from numerous parts of the world to make Australia their home are part of our nation. My parents were. My children are. Juno Gemes is. Most people reading this will be citizens of Australia. Together we comprise our one nation and are all part of the true history of our nation. That was acknowledged by a banner displayed at the Tent Embassy on its 50th anniversary in 2022.

We have all contributed to the making of our one nation. All Indigenous first people from the very beginning until right now have contributed in many ways. The convicts, marines, sailors, colonial officials and free settler who arrived in 1788 and all their descendants added more. The migrants from many different cultures who have come over the years since have also brought different skills. Together everyone has played a part in making Australia what it is today.

This review is also available on the author's blog here.

An abbreviated version has been published by Canberra City News here.

Hub Fest 2025

 

Hub Fest Play Festival.  ACT Hub at Causeway Hall, Kingston.  February 16 – 22, 2025.
Hub Fest was devised by Lachlan Houen for ACT Hub

The Bestiary - An Interlude by Hannah Tonks
The Forsaken by Oliver Kuskie

Reviewed by Frank McKone
Feb 16



The two plays in this first Hub Fest are interesting, having in common serious criticisms of today’s social culture presented in short-form theatre.  The Bestiary is an Orwellian satire in 30 minutes of the world’s shifting towards authoritarianism at government level.  The Forsaken shows the breakdown of social norms at the personal level.

In theatrical terms, The Bestiary’s half-hour is more successful than The Forsaken’s 70 minutes.  

In both plays characters make a series of polemical statements which slow down the drama.  

In The Bestiary, the statements made by the rebellious terrorist artists serve to increase the dramatic tension about what they will do with the focus character: the hypocritical woman Minister for Aesthetics.  Their punishment – making her create a work of art – then results in her execution because she has broken the very law she is responsible for.  Just as she had had Wolf executed.  The shame is that Wolf’s partner, in bringing the Minister to justice, is herself shot by the firing squad as well.

In The Forsaken, the social issue about the isolation of the elderly and the impossibility of this old man’s ever being able to do anything practical about the family violence (on one side of his thin walled flat) or about the poverty-driven drug-driven theft and profiteering by the flat-sharing young (on the other side) is as powerful a theme as the issue of the need for government support of creative artistic freedom in The Bestiary.

But sitting listening to the old man’s recording of his frustrations, though very well performed, and faithful to my own feelings (like him I am in my 80s), started to feel a bit interminable.  The breaking away to the short scenes in the other flats – in the foreground on stage – took the dramatic action away from that central character.  We saw what was happening and understood his frustration and even fears, but there needed to be much more emotional interaction beyond just the peripatetic popping-in by the wild-haired young man from the share flat, before the effective scene with the wife from the family side.

Perhaps, as The Bestiary showed, maybe 40 minutes of intense interactions could have got the message through more strongly.

In the end, of course, the value of ACT Hub’s Hub Fest is exactly this – that for a small price you can make such comparisons and appreciate the creativity of the theatre arts, without being executed!

See https://www.acthub.com.au/production/hub-fest-play-festival

 

 

 

 

SONGS OF EVE - ART SONG CANBERRA

Jane Sheldon soprano

Jack Symonds piano

Art Song Canberra

Wesley Music Centre, Forrest February 16

 

Reviewed by Len Power

 

In a demanding but superb program, soprano, Jane Sheldon, and pianist, Jack Symonds, created an extraordinary world of atmospheric music that was dreamlike and haunting. The spell of the music evoked intensely individual memories, feelings and experiences.

Jane Sheldon is a leading Australian soprano and composer with an international reputation. Her own body of compositional work includes electronic music, chamber music, an opera installation, works for dance companies and large-scale sound installations for galleries and museums. She holds a doctorate in music composition from the Sydney University.

Jane Sheldon

Jack Symonds is a composer, conductor and pianist and Artistic Director of Sydney Chamber Opera. He studied composition at the Royal College of Music, London and at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music where he received the University Medal.

Jack Symonds

Sheldon introduced the order of the four program items at the start of the concert and then performed them without a break. She commenced with her own compositions to a text by Rainer Maria Rilke from her album, Flowermuscle, This was followed by Wolken (Clouds) by Pascal Dusapin to a text by Goethe. Gabriel Fauré’s La Chanson d’Eve with a text by Charles van Lerberghe was the third item and the final item was Francis Poulenc’s La Dame de Monte Carlo which had a text by Jean Cocteau.

Sheldon’s use of her clear soprano and ability to convey the meaning and different emotions in the works was quite extraordinary. The sly humour in in the words of Poulenc’s La Dame de Monte Carlo was especially well presented. Jack Symonds’ piano accompaniment for this program’s complex music was remarkable.

 

Photos by Peter Hislop

This review was first published by Canberra CityNews digital edition on 17 February 2025.

Len Power's reviews are also broadcast on Artsound FM 92.7 in the ‘Arts Cafe’ and ‘Arts About’ programs and published in his blog 'Just Power Writing' at https://justpowerwriting.blogspot.com/. 

Macbeth by William Shakespeare. Directed by Jordan Best. Lakespeare/The Q. Various locations Feb 12 - Mar 1 - see www.lakespeare.com

This is a tightly done  Shakespeare that survives the open air, the wheeling crying birds at sunset and the coming of night. (If you look at the performance schedule you’ll find both indoor and outdoor performances.) Outside specialists Lakespeare have joined forces with director Jordan Best and The Q for this year’s show and it’s a sharp version with clarity and drive. 

There’s a Macbeth (Isaac Reilly) and a Lady Macbeth (Lainie Hart) who are lean and hungry for the power they think a bit of murder will gain them. How their certainties are undone is the fascination.  Reilly and Hart  nail the unravelling of a brisk marriage between two morally blind people with a degree of ruthlessness and a twist which I will not reveal. 

They are backed up in this well paced show by a small but flexible cast that  includes a couple of thanes who look as if they could actually wield weapons. Max Gambale’s Duncan has a good royal authority, Lachlan Ruffy’s Banquo has honesty, Caitlin Baker as Malcolm has a youthful directness that plays well and Paul Sweeney as Macduff  is moving in his grief and rage. Then there’s Jane Ahlquist as an authoritative Ross (but also splendid as a nasty goblin of a Porter) and Annabelle Hansen wonderfully disturbing as a terrified Lady Macduff.

The concept of the witches (Caitlin Baker, Annabelle Hansen and Paris Scharkie) who are veiled and horned and glide around unsettlingly underplays their presence in a way that is much more sinister than a bunch of cackling hags might be. 

Seeing this haunted play under cloudy skies  with its climax at sunset and the chance of some serendipitous performances by the local crows made for an unsettling show on opening night. This tight production of The Scottish Play will chill  no matter which of its season’s venues, indoor or outdoor, you see it in. 

Alanna Maclean

BUBBLE BOY - Queanbeyan Players.

Rylan Howard (Jimmy-Bubble Boy) - Christina Philipp (Ensemble)

Book by Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio – Music and lyrics by Cinco Paul.

Directed by Tijana Kovac – Musical Direction by Sally Taylor

Set, Costume and Properties design by Remus Douglas

Lighting design by Eve Perry – Sound Design by Telia Jansen

Presented by Queanbeyan Players – Belconnen Community Theatre Feb.14 -23.

Opening Night Performance reviewed by BILL STEPHENS

Aleisha Croxford (Jimmy's Mother) - John Potter (Jimmy's Father) - Rylan Howard (Jimmy- Bubble Boy), Kay Liddiard (Chloe) and ensemble.

Queanbeyan Players has come up with another winner with its latest production "Bubble Boy" which opened in the Belconnen Community Theatre last night.

Although based on a potentially serious premise about a boy born without immunities forced to live in a plastic bubble room by his over-protective mother, the musical is given a playful, cartoon-like production, by first-time Queanbeyan Players director Tijana Kovac.

The tuneful music and lyrics of Cinco Paul’s songs are unabashedly derivative, while the comic-book style storyline by Paul and Ken Daurio delights in its own silliness.

Kovacs has embraced the possibilities offered by this approach by utilising colourful two-dimensional props and minimalist settings and successfully harnessing the exuberance of her large, predominately youthful cast to achieve a disarmingly entertaining evening of feel-good theatre.

Aleisha Crosford (Jimmy's Mother) - Rylan Howard (Jimmy - Bubble Boy)

As the bubble boy, Jimmy Livingstone, whose education in isolation consists of reading his mother’s copies of Better Homes and Gardens, Ryland Howard is immediately likeable and delightfully goofy.

His naiveness is cleverly contrasted by Kay Liddiard’s portrayal of Chloe, the girl-next-door, and the object of Jimmy’s affections, as a resourceful, confident young woman easily able to thwart the tactics of Jimmy’s controlling mother, portrayed by Aleisha Croxford.

To describe the obstacles Jimmy and Chloe meet on their path to true love would risk spoiling the fun, but suffice to say their journey offers endless opportunities for delightfully outrageous cameos, among them, Mark and Shawn the doltish best mates, Mark and Shawn, enthusiastically portrayed by Andrew Taylor and Sam Thomson, who miss out on the girl but discover each other instead, and Lorraine and Todd (Emilie Martin and April Telfer) the terrifyingly cheerful leaders of the Bright and Shiny Cult.

Valeria Arciniega Vidurrizaga is a stand-out as the biker, Slim, who offers Jimmy some useful advice, as is Roya Safaei as Pushpa, who hits a cow with her ice cream truck before stopping the show with her solo "It’s an Elk".

Throughout the large enthusiastic ensemble obviously delight in executing Sally Taylor’s quirky choreography while singing up a sometimes-ear-piercing storm to the enthusiastic accompaniment by Adam Blum’s funky six-piece on-stage band under the musical direction of Tara Davidson.

Despite the clunkiness of some of lighting and sound technicals, and some out-of-tune singing on opening night, Bubble Boy still succeeded in providing a remarkably entertaining evening of theatre in which director Kovac and her company’s embrace of the goofiness of the piece out-trumped any perceived lack of finesse.

                                                    

                                              Images by Damien Magee




       This review first published in the digital edition of CITY NEWS on 15.02.25