The Sydney Morning Herald from Sydney, New South Wales, Australia • 12

XIThe Sjibnej) JRorninjj jeralb wwwsmhcomau FRIDAY FEBRUARY 11 2000 ARTS Too limp for Mardi Gras Opera alliance in the wings GAY LESBIAN MARDI GRAS one might call a Wagnerian elixir of frenzy and the abandon of Sydney's one-day-of-the-year gay and lesbian bacchanalia and its fluid pleasures thrills and ecstasies Benzie would have been better served had he paid no heed to what appears like the made-bycommittee contrivance of pouring his transformative potion into the obvious brew' of Mardi Gras The rough and raw attempt to break down prejudicial barriers tends to backfire amid lame dialogue and stereotypes sufficient to become an indulgent panto in which the most memorable sight is Ronald Falk prancing about as the ghostly Tristan (more a camp pensioned-off old Puck) Tamblyn Lord as the drag queen Todd who trades as Tina Turnover and the ferociously energetic Shayne Francis as the lap-it-up lesbian Deb Theatrewise it's a disappointing start to the Mardi Gras Festival In Bryce Hallett 's review of A Streetcar Name Desire published yesterday the last paragraph should have read: but it's in SteHas pleading cry to her sister Blanche and the Final image of man wife and child huddled together that the play turns its most unsettling least consolable "trick LOVE FIX East Coast Theatre Company The Performance Space Redfern February 9 Reviewed by BRYCE HALLETT In recent times the American playwright Terrence McNally has penned sprawling passionate works including Love! Valour! Compassion! Masterclass and the book for Livent's recent musical account of Doctorow's kaleidoscopic Ragtime His far shorter work Prelude Liehestod comprises his familiar melodramatic gestures and posturing of lifting ordinary human struggle and unexpressed desire up to the heavens through music Simply directed by Joseph Uchitel the spare whimsical work delves beneath the polite facade of the concert-going experience in this instance a performance of Wagner's Prelude Liehestod Gradually the difficult soprano and the sardonic conductor take their place on stage the conductor's groomed wife (Blazy Best) seated in a box and the zealous opera-lover (Tamblyn Lord) jumping out of his skin with excitable adoration at me" he entreats to Nicholas Eadie's conductor say if you stare at someone's left earlobe long fabulous flights of fancy experience in that area can help modify certain things so mistakes are she says Mistakes such as those made when the Sydney Opera House was built where the size of the opera theatre and its problematic pit make performance of large-scale repertoire difficult "It is a pity in a new house one can't perform the big repertoire as one should Simone Young is a conductor very much at home with Wagner and Strauss but she can't perform it there in the Opera House" she says A solution might be to put this work into the Capitol Theatre she suggests as happened with the recent production of Strauss's I Elektra During her Australian visit Schmidt Ganzarolli has judged the Opera Italian Opera award given to the young Victorian tenor Garrie Davislim The prize will allow him to study for Five months in Bologna at the Teatro Communale di Bologna where he may also undertake some roles Schmidt Ganzarolli who has judged the award since its inception four years ago says the standard of singing has improved and the singers are undertaking more appropriate repertoire first time I came here I was surprised that many of the young singers wanted to sing rather heavy repertoire I felt very strongly that that could damage them" she says none of the candidates are singing heavy repertoire They know they must not force their voice this development is very healthy" Schmidt Ganzarolli has had a long connection with Australia and Australian singers She First engaged Yvonne Kenny at Covent Garden after she became its artistic director at the age of 33 and Elizabeth Connell made her debut during Schmidt Ganzarolli's years She gave Elijah Moshinsky his' first Covent Garden production Peter Grimes She hopes the Valencia complex will provide a new avenue of performance for young Australian singers want to give an open invitation for young Australian singers to come to Valencia Financially they will need support for travelling and accommodation but they will not need to pay anything in what I am going to create an opera studio They will have the chance to study but also to work in my theatre" she said develop young people is something that has always been close to my heart and now I can put it into put the stage picture into a different scale And he employs large puppets that are almost more human than people in their expressions and manipulated movements there is one winding his way through Dedale to memorable effect Part of Genty's use of puppets is his often-bizarre presentation of the human frame: you don't know where real arms and legs begin or end as masks on human and puppet faces converge The mask of a face worn on the back of the head is an old trick but still effective when it is multiplied by eight the full cast of five men and three women and set in low lighting over second-skin tights The resulting movement is weirdly disorienting: are we being warned not to believe what we see? And what are we to make of other mask vari- ations? The gas masks of the opening sequence highlighted by a passionate kiss or the mask made of dough which is devoured as if it were human flesh being consumed? The eloquent body language of these performers is a delight and the production is fast-moving and skilfully devised to maintain the magic Dedale continues in Parramatta until February 1 9 before moving to Canberra on February 22 enough eventually it begins to burn a hole and they turn around" With moderately bitchy humour McNally gets into the mind of Wagner's conduit as he recounts the sexual ecstasy he experienced as a 22-year-old in Milan the enveloping music planting its seeds of death through love until the rapturous climax The music is played by the Eksase Ensemble a chamber orchestra secreted behind the audience the effect of which in positioning and scale robs Wagner of its usual dynamic force The companion piece Aria Di Messo Carattere by Australian writer Tim Benzie takes its cue from McNally's fanciful exploration attempting to wed the eroticism of Tristan and Isolde with the free-spirited Mardi Gras an idea that never takes flight owing to its muddled intentions and lack of focus The limp fairytale replete with predictable platitudes tries to combine what transformed into a sky with stars and a tiny plane flying across A miniature door opens high above it and a small suited male figure falls through Long-gloved arms mysteriously and gracefully emerge in the darkness plucking the stars in choreographed unison The sky becomes a wave-tossed sea in reality a webbing net stretched above stage level with gaps for performers and puppets unpredictably to appear and disappear At this point all kinds of images take over I gave up trying to pin them to Greek myth where does an accordion player disguised as a sea creature arising from a tub of suds fit in? Or a woman slicing off a piece of her false breasts and with gales of laughter feeding it to a fish? Yet while parallels w'ith the Daedalus story seem to fall away after the start there is a brilliantly timed sequence with a maze of doors a recurring motif and an angel with wings shaped like giant ears Even if I missed subtle references I nonetheless relished the range of ideas the sense of a journey and the playing with perceptions It's characteristic of Genty to jerk audiences out of reality with the use of miniature human figures that suddenly of physical reality By JOYCE MORGAN Australia could become a player in an international network of operatic co-productions if a plan by a former artistic director of Covent Garden gets off the ground Helga Schmidt Ganzarolli held talks with Opera Australia during her visit to Sydney this week about establishing a pool of opera theatres that would coproduce work which could tour internationally She believes the proposal would make better use of scarce resources and questions whether opera companies can keep mounting productions that are never seen beyond their home city "I have seen very good productions here and I would like Sydney to be part of it" she says She singled out Neil Arm-field's Jenufa and Francisco Negrin's Julius Caesar as top-class productions she would like to see tour overseas Opera Australia's general manager Adrian Collette says he's open to the idea of international Co-productions Opera Australia had already done some international co-productions with the Welsh National Opera including Der Rosenkavalier which it hopes to revive soon and Billy Budd a production neither company could afford to produce on its own The company is considering co-producing with WNO a new Marriage of Figaro "The idea (of international coproductions) new but where Helga's idea is interesting and more ambitious is that there would be a pool of houses and I would remain very open to that because we know it can work" Collette says While Schmidt Ganzarolli has discussed the project with a number of major opera houses in recent years including Covent Garden she believes her new role as artistic and general director of Spain's new Palacio de las Artes in Valencia will allow her to realise this dream She was appointed last month to head up the centre expected to open in 2003 As well as establishing a resident orchestra and ballet company in the three-theatre complex she is keen to see the centre become the co-ordinating body for the international coproductions Distance should not be seen as an obstacle to Australian involvement she argues is not true that the transportation of productions between Australia and Europe costs a lot of money It takes organisation CRITICS MISTAKEN The critics aren't always right as Peter O'Toole will testify from his infamous Macbeth days Sir Nigel Hawthorne received a drubbing for the King Lear that he brought back from Japan to the Royal Shakespeare Company in London It played to 101 per cent houses at the Barbican and is now doing the same at Stratford (they count the standing as well) His cast is having a "beach party" bring a bikini or trunks when it closes on February 26 They must also bring rubber gloves to clean the carpet before they leave all on tenterhooks Nigel won't say what he'll be wearing a company member told London's The Daily Telegraph SPEND SPREE Spend Spend Spend the low-budget British musical based on the rags-to-riches-to-rags life of Pools winner Viv Nicholson has been named 1999's best musical by the London Critics' Circle It beat such money-spinners as Mamma Mia! scored to the music of ABBA and the Disney musical The Lion King Best play went to Mnemonic a devised piece from actor-writer-director Simon McBurney and his Theatre de Complicite company The show is a fusion of stand-up comedy and millennium-era meditations Best actor and best director went to Henry Goodman and Trevor Nunn respectively for a Royal National Theatre staging of The Merchant of Venice that is in negotiation for a Broadway run AAP Co-operation Helga Schmidt Ganzarolli is putting her dreams into action Photograph by GEORGE fetting tic consultant to a number of prestigious European arts organisations including Covent Garden and the London Symphony Orchestra and representative of several Italian opera houses she has enjoyed the you organise for it to come to Europe and you put it on a ship If you organise it in time it cost much more than bringing it from America or some parts of Europe" she says After several years as an artis Art for the life of DEDALE Parramatta Riverside Theatre February 9 Reviewed by JILL SYKES Philippe Genty creates his art in a seemingly unbounded world of possibilities Even so he knows he is trying to achieve what is almost impossible in communicating complex ideas on stage to a world audience Yet for four decades he has succeeded in making people laugh cry and think about what they see and feel at performances by the Compagnie Philippe Genty His latest show Dedale continues the tradition With his customary mix of fantasy and reality humans and puppets movement and music Genty and his creative team produce images with meanings as varied as the audience's imagination The title refers to the mythical Greek Daedalus an architect and sculptor who was the father of Icarus Daedalus is credited with building the labyrinth for King Minos in Crete When he fell out of favour he escaped with his son by fashioning wings of feathers and wax only to see Icarus fall to his death in the sea when he flew too close to the sun and the wax melted Dedale begins with the stage No ordinary angel an exploration freedom this has brought But the chance to create an arts centre from the ground up was too good to miss "The architect and I are going to meet and go through the entire structure and see whether my When war looked imminent Appleton was called home "But on the way home 1 was determined to see Italy I never thought of myself in any danger yet it was like a rumbling cauldron: everywhere you went you saw fascists in uniform" The artistic climate in Australia was invigorated by immigrants and returned students "There were so many younger people The old ones like Howard Ashton who used to write the extraordinary articles for the newspaper condemning rubbish' had faded away" In 1943 she married the painter Eric Wilson a powerful personality evangelical about art and a it Seventh Day Adventist to boot Constantly analysing work he severely eroded her resolve to follow her own instincts "I thought I'll either have to stop painting or leave him Well he left me He Appleton returned to London in 1951 where she met painter Tom Green whom she married in Australia She won the Portia Geach prize in 1965 with a self-portrait and returned with Green to England but in the early '70s they came back to Australia and settled in Moss Vale where Appleton still lives It was here many believe that Appleton came into her own as a painter Unimpeded by the trends and distractions of Sydney she was able to pursue her love of structure and feeling through still life and interior painting When Green died in 1981 Appleton visited her daughter in Dharmsala in northern India was good for me to go after Tom died It was a wonderful place Just marvellous Right up in the They even gained an audience with the Dalai Lama Reflecting on her love both of Renaissance painting and modernism Appleton says: thought it was all one thing We say made a big break from the past because you never make a break from the past It changes but the fundamental way of thinking about art of looking at things is the same: it's a visual experience look back and you see the links It's when you look forward that not quite sure what's going to happen The ones who are looking forward look back enough" JEAN APPLETON Works on paper Sturt Gallery Until February 27 Reviewed by SEBASTIAN SMEE Creating art is a fraught activity for anyone but Jean Appleton is a reminder that for women particularly of her generation greater hurdles have to be overcome and more courage is required for success Now 88 a bright and shyly beaming woman Appleton has a show of works on paper dating back to the end of World War II at Sturt Gallery in Mittagong She lost two husbands to cancer and a brother to war and has in her modest way had to contend with male postures of superiority paternalism and neglect for a lifetime But despite periods of battered resolve she has remained convinced throughout that art was for her feel there's so much richness Just looking at things and wondering about them and seeing how they fit in relation to each other It all ties into something enormously valuable" According to Christine France in the recently published Jean Appleton: A Lifetime with Art Appleton knew she wanted to be an artist even in childhood Sydney's art world of the late 1920s was dominated by the Society of Artists contemporary group broke away from the society and they had more of an interest in what was later called "modern' That was how later a group like Enid Cambridge Grace Cossington Smith and myself got together We had the same kind of feeling about Jean Appletoivat Sturt gallery Photograph by Sebastian smee art We wanted life in it not something that was repeated all the time" Some lively watercolours from that new group can also be seen at Sturt Appleton realised the importance of studying abroad At 25 she was accepted into the progressive Westminster School of Art Influential teachers there such as Bernard Meninsky and Mark Gertler were inspired by Roger Fry's dictum about not seeking to imitate form or life but create form to find an equivalent for life" influence was enormous" she says "He showed you there's not only one way of looking at things".