Audacious. That’s the word for this fifth edition of the Australian Musical Theatre Festival. The five-day celebration was capped by a full-blown show, thrown together during that time. Not only did artistic director Tyran Parke oversee this pressure-cooker operation, he also became its last-minute star, playing Guido Contini in Maury Yeston’s Nine (based on Fellini’s 8½), and proved ideal as the eccentric, fantasising Casanova.
His ingenious shortcut to mounting a credible production was to begin the show as a table reading, and then gradually add movement, lighting, musicians, costumes and props. Given Nine partly happens in Guido’s mind and the rest is about making a movie from scratch, this worked brilliantly. The classy cast included Kerrie Anne Greenland as Guido’s wife, Natalie Gamsu as his producer, Patrice Tipoki as his muse and Jodie Harris as his mistress, with Peter Rutherford directing the convincing little orchestra.
Lincoln Kirschbaum and Tyran Parke in Nine, which was mounted in just five days.Credit:
Parke’s other coup was his wildly imaginative and ambitious production of Marry Me a Little, the 1980 revue threading together songs discarded from Stephen Sondheim’s shows. This was an immersive event set during Melbourne’s 2020 lockdowns, using multiple rooms in a three-level arcade. With the audience moving between spaces for each song, the effect was like being on a series of film sets.
Parke included snippets of recorded interviews about lockdown challenges, and these worked without any sense of imposition because we physically shared the isolation of people in small spaces, while they sang of alienation or failed love. Standing out was a dimly lit Des Flanagan delivering Happily Ever After, like a charcoal sketch that had sprung to life.
If the idea of a musical theatre festival conjures up an overabundance of highly strung people, this actually felt more like a gathering of storytellers: of young people honing their craft, and stars revelling in the virtuosic lyrics that define the idiom’s best songs.
Jodie Harris gently animated When You’re Home from In the Heights.Credit:
Music festivals of all stripes have always been about the shared experience as much as the art; the sense of community engendered. Now in its fifth year, this one is still strengthening its beeps on the national radar, but Launceston’s ideal for the purpose, given its rich theatre history – once boasting more theatres per capita than anywhere on Earth – and variety of venues within grape-throwing distance of one another, plus use of the picturesque Cataract Gorge.
Natalie Gamsu was once awakened by a zebra’s breath on her cheek in a marijuana plantation, and Shrapnel, an hour-long monologue frosted with music, gave us raw slices of her remarkable life, including growing up during South Africa’s repugnant apartheid years.
Her version of being a musical theatre triple threat, she told us, was being fat, stoned and epileptic – yet she still bravely performed edgy cabaret in a police state. Life, she said, is partly about letting go of the need to be special. She might have let go, but she was the festival’s most potent performer.
