DeObia Oparei and Amber McMahon in Belvoir’s Angels in America Part One. Photo by Robert Catto.
If you tried to see every performance staged in Australia in 2013, you’d need a time machine and the constitution of an ox.
Even if you limited yourself to just a single art form – opera, for instance, or circus – you’d still be faced with a punishing schedule and an even more challenging travel budget, not to mention the inevitable timetable clashes that are the bane of any seasoned festival-goer’s existence.
In 2013, ArtsHub’s many and passionate reviewers saw more than 1015 events across the country, ranging from major touring productions and symphony orchestras, to tiny Fringe shows in make-shift venues and intimate operas staged in suburban lounge rooms. We couldn’t see everything, but what we did see has left us thrilled with the work of Australia’s talented theatre-makers, musicians, directors, designers, ensembles, actors, conductors and companies, from the smallest independent outfit to the major performing arts organisations. We can’t wait to see what’s in store for the new year.
It’s almost impossible to write a definitive ‘best of’ list for the performing arts nationally, but to whet your appetite, here are 10 of the most exciting and rewarding productions, events and performances staged around the country in 2013. And yes, we know we’re cheating by listing a couple of festivals rather than individual productions; and yes, we know we’ve missed out on quite a few favourites, including some of our own – so please tell us your own 2013 highlights in the comments below.
Angels in America : A Gay Fantasia on National Themes
Belvoir’s starkly powerful production of Angels in America – Tony Kushner’s two-part, seven hour epic about community, identity, politics and faith – reminded audiences just why the play has won so many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize. Stripping away the stagecraft – under Eamon Flack’s assured direction, angels climbed stepladders to deliver their speeches instead of descending on wires from the heavens – the production focused squarely on Kushner’s electrifying script and the fine performances of his cast, including Luke Mullins, Ashley Zukerman, and Marcus Graham as the vicious, manipulative right-wing lawyer Roy Cohn. Achingly, painfully human, Angels in America was without doubt one of the finest productions of the year.
Barry Humphries’ Weimar Cabaret
A musical highlight for many in 2013 was this touring production by the Australian Chamber Orchestra, which played to rapturous audiences in Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth in late April – early May. The ACO’s talented musicians performed songs from the Weimar era – arranged by Iain Grandage – to great effect under the direction of Rodney Fisher, with the inimitable Humphries as MC, or ‘conférencier’, to use the appropriate French noun. Together with special guest artist Meow Meow, Humphries and the orchestra perfectly captured the gaiety and cynicism, decadence and despair of the era, in a performance that was both soulful and cynical and thoroughly entertaining.
The Bolshoi Ballet – The Bright Stream and Le Corsaire
With the help of Tourism and Events Queensland, the Queensland Performing Arts Centre’s now-annual presentation of the world’s most prestigious ballet companies has become a must-see event for Australian balletomanes. Described by QPAC Director John Krotzas as a ‘$3 million gamble’, this year’s tour by the strife-prone Bolshoi Ballet seems to have very much paid off, with critics hailing the two productions, Le Corsaire and The Bright Stream as ‘magical’, performed with ‘unswerving elegance and deceptively effortless, buffed and polished virtuosity’. No doubt 2014’s tour by the American Ballet Theatre will be just as rewarding.
End of the Rainbow
A Queensland Theatre Company production at QPAC, this impressive production of Peter Quilter’s play featured a stand-out performance by Christen O’Leary as the rapidly-declining Judy Garland. ‘If there’s a better performance than O’Leary’s in Brisbane this season, we’re in for a very good year,’ wrote ArtsHub reviewer Peter Taggart. He wasn’t alone in his praise for O’Leary’s performance. ‘This is the sort of heart-and-soul performance, risking all, that wins awards,’ wrote The Australian’s Martin Buzacott, while Crikey’s Alison Cotes said, ‘O’Leary is the perfect Garland, capturing her coquettishness, her vibrant sexuality, her vulnerability and her agonies to make this an entirely credible portrayal’. An already excellent production made all the stronger by a truly bravura performance. Ms O’Leary, we salute you.
Hedda Gabler
Produced by the State Theatre Company of South Australia and directed by its Artistic Director Geordie Brookman, Joanna Murray-Smith’s sensitive adaptation of Ibsen’s proto-feminist classic featured a magnetic and intelligent performance from Alison Bell in the title role. Geoff Cobham’s modern yet classic set design captured the between-times nature of the adaptation, and DJ TR!P’s dark electronic sound design added palpably to the atmosphere. Despite some strong supporting performances, though, this was absolutely Alison Bell’s play, and she owned every moment she was on stage. ‘She conveys Hedda’s manipulative, desperate nature with subtlety and intelligence, giving the performance a unique sense of realism and resonance,’ said our reviewer, Paige Mulholland, in a production that was ‘stimulating and enjoyable’.
The NEON Festival of Independent Theatre
Part of a national trend whereby the country’s best independent theatre-makers present works in collaboration with main stage companies, the Melbourne Theatre Company’s NEON Festival of Independent Theatre presented five new works by five different companies: the Daniel Schlusser Ensemble; Fraught Outfit; The Hayloft Project; The Rabble; and Sisters Grimm. The results, while not without its critics, were electrifying. From Sisters Grimm’s epic, hilarious and transgressive satire of Australian myth-making, The Sovereign Wife (pictured) to The Hayloft Project’s compelling triptych, By Their Own Hands, an exploration both of theatrical form and the tragic myth of Oedipus and Jocasta, NEON was an exhilarating, must-see event, bringing new audiences to the MTC and giving the company’s older subscribers an exhilarating shot of theatrical adrenaline.
Proximity Festival
An ‘intense interaction between artist and audience’ at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA), the Proximity Festival billed itself as a celebration of intimate, one-on-one performances over several days in late October-early November. Exhilarating and unexpected, the three parts of the festival program were very warmly received by one of our Perth reviewers, Nerida Dickinson. There ‘was never a dull moment’ in Part A of the program, she wrote in her review, while Program B was ‘full of memorable moments for the participant willing to get involved’. Program C saw works that played with ‘intelligently subversive honesty, finding the repulsive and embracing it’ in a program that was ‘exquisitely organised’. Sounds like a trip to Perth might be in order next year…
The Ring Cycle
Speaking of travel, one of the destination events of the year was Opera Australia’s recent production of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen at Arts Centre Melbourne. Presented with the financial support of former Lonely Planet co-founder Maureen Wheeler, this mammoth cycle of four major operas – Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried (pictured) and Götterdämmerung – attracted opera buffs from across the country and around the world. Director Neil Armfield stripped away some of the anticipated extravagance of sets and costumes to focus on the cast’s fine voices and Wagner’s stirring orchestrations; the result, according to ArtsHub reviewer Michael Magnusson, ‘delivered everything it promised and more’.
Vandemonian Lags
Created for and presented at the inaugural Dark MOFO in Hobart in June, Vandemonian Lags – new songs of transportation from the prison without walls was a visually impressive, aurally thrilling musical/theatre production inspired by Tasmania’s convict past. Drawing upon entries listed in the Founders and Survivors project (the records of more than 73,000 convict men, women and children who were transported to Tasmania between 1804 and 1853), brothers Mick and Steve Thomas wrote songs, shot footage, and enlisted friends to help them present an epic production involving some 14 musicians, including Tim Rogers and Brian Nankervis, who provided linking narration. The resulting concert, which premiered in Launceston on 12 June before transferring to Hobart’s Theatre Royal, was resonant, haunting, inspiring and magnificent. A CD of the songs written for Vandemonian Lags was released in July, through Popboomerang Records while a DVD of the performance was released in November.
War Horse
In Melbourne, the new year kicked off with the National Theatre of Great Britain’s spectacular War Horse at Arts Centre Melbourne (a venue that would go on to star in a few bad news stories of its own as the year progressed). While one could quibble that the story of War Horse was somewhat thin and its characters underdeveloped, such criticisms were rendered mute in the face of the incredible work by the team from Handspring Puppet Company, whose talents brought to life the production’s real star, the puppet horse, Joey.
An early sequence in which Joey transforms from nervous, shaky colt into adult horse was pure theatrical magic; it brought a tear to this writer’s eye and provoked spontaneous applause from the audience. Later scenes, such as the cavalry charge which ends the first half of the show, and a face-off between Joey and a tank in no-man’s land, are equally powerful, while at the production’s heart-tugging climax, there was barely a dry eye in the house. Sentimental and manipulative it may have been, but War Horse was also thrilling, epic, deeply moving, and absolutely one of the most spectacular stage productions of 2013.
Let us know your favourite performances of 2013 in the comments below.
