Sons of Sun - The Sam Phillips Story

Sons of Sun- The Sam Phillips Story.

Written by Kieran Carroll from an original idea by musician and singer John Kennedy. Directed by Louise Fisher Originating Director Neil Gooding. Featuring the songs of Sun Record Company artists Howlin’ Wolf, Elvis  Presley, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison and Jerry Lee Lewis. White Eagle Club. The Polish Club. Saturday May 21. 2016

Reviewed by Peter Wilkins

 

 

 

 

They say if you can remember the Sixties you weren’t there. I do remember the Sixties and I was there, but it’s the Fifties that I remember more vividly. It was the time of Elvis, of Roy Orbison and Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis. Bill Haley and The Comets had already changed my world and Rock ‘n Roll left crooners out in the cold, although Johnny Ray still took me walking in the rain.

I knew the names and I sang their songs, but what I didn’t know was the one man who made it all happen. He could have been a lawyer if his father hadn’t died and the Great Depression hadn’t forced him to drop out of school with one dream dashed, but another still shining brightly in Memphis. Sam Phillips loved the Blues and the new music, bursting forth from the sounds of Gospel and the Blues and if he hadn’t dropped out, the world might never have heard of Sun Records and the sounds of Elvis (Jailhouse Rock), Perkins (Blue Suede Shoes), Jerry Lee Lewis (Great Balls of Fire), Cash (In Them Old Cotton Fields Back Home) or Orbison (Only The Lonely). Phillips was ahead of his time. He took on black musician Howlin’ Wolf (Wolf’s At The Door) when the South was still in the grip of segregation. He set up WHER, the first all=female radio station to play Sun’s songs. And he made the stars that shone most brightly in Rock ‘n Roll Heaven.

Matt Charleston as Sam Phillips in Sons of
Sun - The Sam Phillips Story. Photo by Dusk Devi Vision

Sitting comfortably on a couch on the stage of the Polish Club’s White Eagle Hall, I wondered why nobody had thought of telling the Sam Phillip’s story before. Even though the show has been on the road apparently for the past three years, this was the first time that I had heard of Sons of Sun- The Sam Phillips Story, written by prolific award winning Melbourne Writer Kieran Carroll as the support act for musician and vocalist John Kennedy, of Love Gone Wrong, and his backing guitarists. I am more accustomed to musicals where the music tends to support the script, or at least be a companion. In Sons of Sun, Carroll’s carefully researched and informative narration and interactive scenes serves chiefly to provide the links to Kennedy’s soulful, swelling sounds of the Blues and the thrusting force of Rock ‘n roll rhythms and lyrics of youth rebellion. Kennedy’s trio is a powerhouse of nostalgia and uncanny impressions. Loud and wailing, filling the club with Fifties sounds, Kennedy’s vocals, backed by guitarists, Paul Scott and Murray Cook, pulsate with energy, full blasted sound and song that seduces the audience into foot tapping, body jiving motion.

On the miniscule stage and with amps at full volume, the miked actors still have to burst forth to top the sounds, and Carroll’s script at times struggles above the music and the actors seem cramped into a tight performance area to play out the action of the script, largely consisting of narration by Ben Maclaine, and scenes between Phillips (Matt Charleston) and Victoria Beck who takes on several roles, like Maclaine, including Phillips’s partner and Muse Marion Keisker.  Carroll’s concise and effective script reveals Phillips’s tough childhood, his entry into the music industry, his early labels and finally his work with Sun Records and the discovery of a shy Elvis, black Howlin’ Wolf, the Perkins Brothers, Cash and Orbison and the erratic, loose cannon and wild man of rock ‘n roll, Jerry Lee Lewis. Maclaine acts out all the iconic male singers, while Kennedy takes us through thirty five songs, with snatches only of classic hits such as Peace in the Valley, Blue Suede Shoes, Walk The Line, Walking in the Rain, Ooby Dobby and many more. I’m in Seventh Heaven and a boy back in my home with the radio on.



Ben Maclaine as Carl Perkins. Matt Charleston as Sam Phillips
Victoria Beck as Marion Kreisker.

The small stage at the back of the White Eagle Club’s hall is hardly sufficient to effectively house  both Carroll’s script and Kennedy’s vocals and music.  Director, Louise Fisher, has allowed both the scenes and the musical numbers to separately occupy their own moments on the stage with some connection between the action of the scenes and the songs, but Sons of Sun deserves a grander stage. Carroll’s script is too interesting to simply be an appendage to the band, the performances too versatile and strong,  and the band is too good to be constrained by interspersed scenes. Sons of Sun deserves to be developed into a mainstage musical.

Murray Cook, John Kennedy and Paul Scott in
Sons of Sun - The Sam Phillips Story

 

If the success of any performance is to be gauged by the audience involvement, then the audience were soon into the swing of the music, jiving on the floor during the numbers and absorbed in the dramatic re-enactment of Phillips’s struggles and successes. The touring club circuit version is a sure-fire hit.

 

 

Unfortunately, Canberra only had a one night stand. If you were a Fifties guy or chic, then watch out for the return of Sons of Sun. You’ll have a night’s entertainment that will have you jiving to your car as you sing the songs out loud all the way home..

 

Counter Move - Sydney Dance Company

Review by John Lombard

Boxes are playful things. To a child, a box can be a fortress or a spaceship, a vessel or a home. The Sydney Dance Company captures that innocent spirit of box play in Cacti (the first half of the Counter Move double bill), an enriching and wry satire of modern dance.

The performers in this piece are boxed in, perched on white plates that confine them to a cramped cubicle's worth of space. But within that space they find a lot of freedom, exploring playful movements like children finding their arms and legs for the first time. As the dance develops these white squares become toys in further escapades, whether propped against each other to build an impromptu fort or as a hiding place for full body peek-a-boo.

The action is complemented with a pretentious voiceover, the preening and tortured prose of a slightly deranged auteur explaining the show as it unfolds. At a key moment, the dancers bring out cacti, and the unseen art snob rhapsodises on how the inanimate and superfluous cacti are where the action really is. More important than the dancers really.

The joke, of course, is that there is no meaning: modern dance is abstract and no one response or interpretation is "right". By trying to make sense of something purely abstract we only make ourselves ridiculous.

But this is belied by the clarity of the piece's physical language: rather than nameless contortions, the movements of the dancers are gestures anyone can recognise, even if we cannot perform them with such athletic precision. Movement is a universal language, and this piece sheds the difficult jargon of modern dance for the lucid communication of body language and gesture.

Cacti, then, is a daylight piece, clear and classical, with an energising self-awareness and humour. It is paired with Lux Tenebris, a difficult and obscure nightmare piece, Finnegan's Wake reimagined as ballet.

Lux Tenebris plays with the idea of light and dark, with lightning bolt flashes giving us snapshots of a routine that is often shrouded and obscured. The dancers are jerked around by their limbs like frenzied zombies. Eventually the infection spends itself and the dancers start to slow down as the fever breaks, but in its last moments the thrashing reignites, stripping the piece of any sense of hope.

This piece also plays with the idea of boxing in, with clever lighting creating tombs to confine the desperate dancers. Where in Cacti restriction freed the imagination, here the prison is in the mind.

Day and night is a natural thematic pairing, and the stylistic shift between acts can be very effective, for example in the ballet Giselle. Here the marriage is less easy, because Cacti roasts the humourless conceit and obscurantism of modern dance exactly as it is practiced in Lux Tenebris.

This is not to say that Lux Tenebris is a bad work: on the contrary, it is bold and expertly crafted and performed. But it suffers in the company of the gleeful Cacti. We watch a parody of modern dance and then... modern dance. After Cacti has primed us to laugh at how pretentious modern dance can be it is difficult to take Lux Tenebris seriously, stripping the work of its potential power.

At the risk of sounding like Cacti's deluded commentator, I see Counter Move as a meditation on dance as a universal language. In Cacti the physical words are crisp and clean, but in Lux Tenebris every second word is redacted. Cacti, by being more self-aware, achieves more: it embraces the mischief in seeing where a physical impulse can lead the body, that universal urge to dance.

COUNTER MOVE - Sydney Dance Company

Canberra Theatre Centre – 19^th May 2016

Reviewed by Bill Stephens

The Sydney Dance Company can always be relied on to come up with something extraordinary.  “Counter Move” consisting of two separate dance works, “Cacti” and “Lux Tenebris”, each entirely different in mood and intent, but each demanding astonishing physicality and virtuosity of the dancers, provides an absorbing and entertaining evening of dance.

"Cacti" - Sydney Dance Company
Photo: Peter Grieg

“Cacti”, created in 2010 for the Nederlands Dans Theatre to a cleverly fragmented score of snippets of Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert, played by an onstage quartet, Alexander Ekman’s delightful thumb nose at dance critics, remains as delightfully prickly as ever.

Po-faced dancers, each isolated on their own little dais, work at inventing individual moves. Ultimately the group dynamic insures that their moves turn out to be the same as their neighbours. As the string quartet drifts in and out of the action, each dancer introduces a cactus, which is treated, displayed and studied as if it were some precious art-work. All the while a patronising voiceover intones inspirational meanings for what we are watching.

Ripples of laughter burst continuously from the audience, especially during a sequence when Charmene Yap and Bernard Knauer perform a complex “meaningful” duet, while their waspish inner thoughts are broadcast to the audience.

Wickedly witty, brilliantly danced and hugely entertaining “Cacti” is enhanced by the clean lines of Ekman’s stage and costume design, and the stunning lighting of Benjamin Cisterne.

"Lux Tenebris" - Sydney Dance Company
Dancers: Nelson Earl, Holly Doyle, Fiona Jopp, David Mack
Photo: Peter Grieg

No less brilliantly danced, and equally absorbing, is Rafael Bonachela’s newest creation, “Lux Tenebris” which proves to be a startling departure from what we have seen previously from this choreographer.

Exploring the way light and darkness affects our moods and memories, Bonachela has worked closely with composer, Nick Wales, and designer Benjamin Cisterne to achieve an extraordinary environment in which disturbing images suggesting group violence or orgiastic sexuality are glimpsed as tantalising snapshots through ominous flashing lights.

Lone figures hurtle through the darkness, sometimes hooking up in rough duets, sometimes joining shadowy groups in complex couplings. The dancing for both the men and women is aggressive and muscular, and Bonachela has provided a moment for each member of the ensemble to shine, but a dazzling solo from Juliet Barton and a luscious duet performed by the remarkable Charmene Yap, this time teamed with Todd Sutherland, burn into the memory among images of complex ensemble groupings, inventive duets and solos, leading to the deeply unsettling climax in which the entire ensemble begin walking, then slowly and urgently running from, or perhaps towards, some unspecified danger.

This review published in CITY NEWS digital edition on 20th May 2016

Happy Birthday Play School

Happy Birthday Play School – Celebrating 50 Years.  Exhibition at National Museum of Australia, Canberra, May 7-July 24, 2016.

Tickets on site or online at www.nma.gov.au/playschool

Reviewed by Frank McKone
May 21

The only faces not always smiling in the Play School exhibition were the sometimes worried parents having to stop their very young children from taking the invitation to “Come Inside” literally, as they clambered over the transparent plastic barricades – space invaders of a very excited kind.

The see-through nature of the displays symbolises the central concept of Play School, which still has as much impact today as 50 years ago.  Long before ‘digital’ and ‘interactive’ became our established way of life, Play School played with the deep theatre issue – how to create a believable illusion of reality in a live performance.

This is also why Play School wins hands down over the USA’s Sesame Street.  I can claim to write about this since my first child, born in 1967, is only one year younger than ABC TV’s Play School.  I saw the differences between American culture and ours; and note too that even the BBC 1964 original Play School, which ABC borrowed and adapted, came to the end of its life in 1988.

My thinking at this adult level of apparently abstruse philosophy was stirred by observing, and then talking with, mother Katherine – who arrived here from Malaysia in the late 1970s – and her Australian born adult daughter, Jessica.  Their joy at recognising and remembering favourite episodes and presenters was palpable – a link in their family relationship forged by Play School in the 1980s.

Speaking later to the mother of a three-and-a-half year-old about the comparison with Sesame Street, I found she was adamant that her daughter prefers Play School.  And, watching a boy the same age using a touch-screen in the exhibition (where he realised that by moving the image of the moon he could change the time shown by the hands on the clock), his mother commented on the focussed attention he maintained and his learning in the digital interactive environment.

So the Happy Birthday Play School exhibition’s already a winner even before I analyse its importance.  What it shows is how original our theatrical artists were all that time ago.  Taking what was still a new performance medium (for example, television had only just had its first demonstration in 1965 in Broken Hill, for which I directed a short dance item), they discovered how to educate the imagination of the very young better even than through live performance on stage.

What happened?  And how?  Two major changes were underway in Australia, in theatre and in education. 

La Mama and the New Wave in Melbourne, and Jane Street, with the establishment of the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) in Sydney were in the process of happening.  NIDA produced the new young modern trained actors who became Play School presenters.  For me the great turning point was the 1966 production at Jane Street of Rodney Milgate’s A Refined Look at Existence, directed by Robin Lovejoy.  It began with the arrest of a member of the audience by policemen, including the inimitable Michael Boddy, co-writer with Bob Ellis of The Legend of King O’Malley.  Only when Boddy’s very recognisable rather large body appeared in the curtain call was I sure that the policemen had not been real.  In passing, let me remember the recent deaths of these indefatigable stirrers whose legacy we should never forget.

In education, as my career began in 1963, New South Wales at last began to break out of the strictures of teacher-down instruction, via the new Wyndham Scheme.  Teachers were now to take into account the particular needs of the actual students they were teaching, and devise programs to help them learn, instead of teaching nothing but the content of a predetermined syllabus, according to which every student in every classroom in the same year level at the same date would be being taught the same material.

This new freedom of thinking about how to do theatre and how to teach came together in Australia’s version of Play School. 

But there’s more.  To make television no longer a picture of a performance on a screen, being pumped out to absorbent viewers (that is, parallel to the old syllabus teaching), the Play School team engaged the viewers’ imagination in a brand new way.  Here’s a house.  It’s got windows and a door.  Come inside, through the door.  The presenters do things with toys and expect you to do things with them.  The children are not absorbent dishcloths, but are doing things – doing drama in their own house with the presenters in their house.

But then there’s even more.  From inside the house on television, we look through the windows and see what’s happening outside, and we find all sorts of new wonders.  In one episode I watched, the presenter had the children guess what the other presenter could see through the window, by describing and acting out what it looked like and what it was doing.  It was large – very large – and had something which it swung from side to side in front of it.  It was an elephant, which we then saw the other presenter patting and even feeding, and talking to the zoo-keeper.

This use of television was absolutely original at that time.  In comparison, even though Sesame Street today is modern in style, and highly entertaining, with the messages to be learnt built into the dialogue and songs, it’s still a ‘teacher-down’ process and the learning is largely by rote.  In watching Play School, the viewer’s imagination keeps them in their own reality in their own house while at the same time shifts them into the television house where they do things in that reality, including going out through the windows into exploring another reality ‘outside’.  This is the brilliant device which makes Play School maintain its place after 50 years, even as technology has changed to become digital, interactive and worldwide. 

What Play School has done is to create its own world wide web in the imaginations of all those children, and as they have grown through the generations, in the imaginations of all those parents – in the past, present and future.  The proof is there to be seen as you watch people from my age to two-year-olds thoroughly engrossed in this exhibition.

50 years!  I’m sure there will be Happy Birthday Play School – Celebrating 100 Years!  Because the theatrical device is brilliant, yet simple, and the educational principle is perfect.

So, this National Museum of Australia exhibition is a very important event.  It engages adults and children at all levels, including when talking to me in the cafe over lunch. 

But will the NMA and the ABC still be here in 50 years’ time, entertaining and educating us in the present and through our history?  There are conservative politicians who would dearly love to take us back to the 1950s – at least to the 1950s of their imaginations, where education was cut and dried and theatre was all about nothing but J C Williamson entertainment; where debutantes had balls, men were the breadwinners and women knew their place (and certain other sexes didn’t exist at all).

Funding cuts, to all the national institutions, in the recent May Federal Budget, are a serious worry, so take the opportunity to visit the National Museum of Australia now, before the July 2 election, just in case the world ends before July 24 when the exhibition closes.

National Museum of Australia, Canberra

DEATHTRAP

Written by Ira Levin

Directed by Kim Wilson

Tempo Theatre at Belconnen Theatre until May 28^th

Review by Len Power 20 May 2016

Ira Levin’s ‘Deathtrap’ was written in 1978 and holds the record at nearly 1800 performances for the longest running comedy-thriller on Broadway.  It was adapted into a film starring Christopher Reeve and Michael Caine in 1982.  Levin was also the author of the novels ‘Rosemary’s Baby’, ‘The Stepford Wives’ and ‘The Boys From Brazil’.

Without giving too much away, the plot involves a famous American murder mystery playwright who hasn’t had a hit show in years and who is sent a play by an aspiring young writer for comment and advice.  Recognizing that the play is perfect as it is and would be a smash hit if produced, the playwright considers the possibility of murdering the young author and pretending the play is his own work.  Much of the fun of the play occurs with the characters discussing what makes the perfect commercial murder play.  Levin appears to let us in on a lot of play writing secrets.

The play is a challenging one to produce successfully.  Tempo Theatre’s production is entertaining but falls short in a few areas.  The acting skills of the cast are uneven and often not up to the demands of the tricky script.  Laughs were lost as result.  The play needs to move at a good pace but the Tempo production lacks energy and seems somewhat under-rehearsed.  The murder sequences were not as convincing as they should be.

I enjoyed the performances of Sam Kentish as the young writer, Clifford Anderson, and Margi Sainsbury was deliciously dizzy as Helga Ten Dorp, a psychic who provides much of the comedy.  Paul Jackson shone here and there in the major role of the elder writer, Sidney Bruhl, but the pacing of the show worked against his performance.

The set design by Kim Wilson and Jon Elphick worked quite well physically but needed more contrast in colour and set dressing.  The costumes for the psychic, Helga Ten Dorp, were especially well chosen.

Some music or sound effects at the beginning and in the dark scene changes would have added extra atmosphere to the production.

Although Tempo’s production has its shortcomings, it is still a clever and enjoyable play.  If you have never seen it, you’ll have a good time experiencing its twists and turns.

Len Power’s reviews can also be heard on Artsound FM 92.7 ‘Artcetera’ program on Saturdays from 9am.

Florence Foster Jenkins

by  © Jane Freebury

It's fine to belt out a song in the shower when you can't hold a tune, the acoustics are good and no one is listening. But who among us wants to inflict this private pleasure on the rest of the world?

The extraordinary career of Florence Foster Jenkins during the 1930s-1940s in America begs a question or three. Few of which are answered in this pleasant comedy about a silly woman with more money than talent who insisted on appearing on stage in elaborate costumes to sing arias for a round of applause.

Apparently Jenkins got more than that, because sophisticated New Yorkers at her by-invitation-only soirees and music society events clapped hard to disguise the sniggers and the guffaws. She was a standing joke for years before the disastrous Carnegie Hall concert in 1944 and the press exposure that ended her career and, in short order, her life. Why so? We touch on this fleetingly in this new Stephen Frears film – was it the syphilis her husband gave when young?– but it remains pretty much unexamined.

Not one to criticise, British director Stephen Frears brings his light touch to bear on her story. He says Jenkins was preposterous, that he was nonetheless touched by her and it shows, but the best will in the world has bought mixed results, and for this viewer the conclusion that the film hasn't really got to grips with its subject.

Even the immense talent of Meryl Streep, the antithesis of the woman she was cast to play, can't compensate for the fact that the script is incurious about what really drove Jenkins, the reputed 'I can do it. I'll show them' mentality, and why she was indulged for so long. Shades of the 21st century comedy of cringe?

Patron of the arts and still an aspiring soprano in her 70s, Florence Foster Jenkins may have been tone deaf and deaf to criticism too, but the problem was really her associates, her common-law husband (Hugh Grant), and all the folk who depended on her for their livelihood in the arts. She was a victim of her own patronage because no one dared to confront her with the truth. She was, like, too big to fail.

We know Streep can do anything, however I think she has done better. Her portrayal of Jenkins as a girlish innocent, manipulated by her fond but faithless husband, and by others who benefitted from her largesse, is sympathetic but not compelling.  Did she need to be quite such a ditz? The steel that Jenkins apparently had in pursuing her career regardless is nowhere to be seen, nor does the Nicholas Martin script explore what it was about New York society at the time that allowed such nonsense to prevail.

In the Orson Welles' classic of 1941, Citizen Kane, Charles Foster Kane bought an opera house so that Susan, his wife of meagre talent, could take the stage as an opera singer. She was miserable. Florence needed no such encouragement, and was thrilled with it all. I'm still not sure quite what to make of it.

It’s in character for Frears to tackle stories of significance and lend his generous perspective as in, say, My Beautiful Laundrette, Philomena or The Queen. It's what we like about him. Florence Foster Jenkins undoubtedly had a fascinating backstory, however in neither this film nor the current French film Marguerite, also based on her life, do we ever quite get to the bottom of it.

3 Stars

also posted at www.janefreeburywriter.com.au 

CD Review – Fantasias – Rupert Boyd, reviewed by Clinton White

One of the feathers in the very crowded cap of guitarist and teacher, Timothy Kain, is Rupert Boyd.  But you don’t get to where Boyd has been, and is yet to go, without in-built talent, and Boyd has that in abundance.  Kain would only have had to help Boyd discover the nuances of his talent.

Boyd is Canberra-born and -bred (now based in New York) and studied at the ANU School of Music, Manhattan School of Music and the school of music at Yale University.  He’s performed all over the world, including at Carnegie Hall, where you only get to perform if you’re up at the top in your chosen field.

His latest album “Fantasias”, so called because there are four in the program, seems to bring all that together but at the same time sets him on a path to even greater heights.

What’s really interesting is that this album features music from across five centuries of music composition as well as from countries as diverse as Australia and Argentina, England and Brazil, Italy and Hawaii.  And it’s all played on one guitar.  But Boyd’s amazing tonal and stylistic controls in each piece are thoroughly intuitive to their time and place.

Boyd’s guitar playing is as authentic to the sound of the lute in John Dowland’s “Fantasie” as it is to the beautiful sound of the slack-key guitar in the “Fantasy on a Hawaiian Lullabye”.  Even folkies will whistle and dance to his folk guitar stylings in the set of four traditional Celtic songs – one from Ireland and three from Scotland.

Two pieces from the Australian composer, Phillip Houghton – almost essential on any Australian guitarist’s program – are included: “God of the Northern Forest” and “Kinkachoo, I Love You”.  Although written nine years apart, the composer, says the liner notes, “suggests that they be performed as companion pieces”.  Boyd seems almost to give them extra-special treatment.  And they do go quite nicely together.

There’s plenty more besides and in each piece Boyd’s playing is brilliant with wonderful clarity, dynamics and tonal definition.  The recording quality is excellent, too, giving the listener an up-close-and-personal experience.  At the same time there’s just a touch of spaciousness with the recording made in a church just outside of London in November 2015.

Presentation of the product is simple, but does feature a stunning photographic panorama shot, taken by Craig Yarbrough, with Boyd standing on a clifftop overlooking the Grand Canyon – the US connection.  Boyd wrote down-to-earth notes on each track and they provide interesting reading to accompany the listening pleasure.

The concert-like programming on “Fantasias” is thoughtful and entertaining.  The 19-track offering, giving just over an hour of music, starts and finishes with a flourish and leads the listener through every emotion and stylistic variety in between.  It is compelling “can’t put it down” listening; I almost wanted to applaud at the end and would have liked an encore.