Art Smitten

Super low-budget and full of charm, the Melbourne-made film Pawno, released in 2015 at the Melbourne International Film Festival to sell-out crowds, is the first feature from director John Ireland and scriptwriter Damian Hill, who also stars in the film.

Pawno takes place over one whole day, and is largely centred around a Footscray pawn shop, referenced in the title. The shop is inhabited by Les, the kind-hearted grouch of an owner (played by John Brumpton) and his youthful dogsbody assistant Danny (played by Hill). As well as these two characters, the film is populated by an assortment of locals who add an offbeat vibrancy to the day's proceedings. There's two women who work in a bookstore, one of whom Danny has a crush on, there's a pair of smart-arse layabouts, there's a violent thug, there's a woman whose son is missing, there’s a trans woman whose visits to the shop are a form of solace from the harsh outside world, there's an Indian taxi driver who was a dentist in his home country... the list goes on. It's not an outright comedy, nor is it an outright drama. There's a healthy combination of both, often at the same time, and there's a sympathetic, unjudging tone that seeps through the entire film.

In a world where so many films are overly preoccupied with a rigid narrative, the film has a refreshingly loose plot structure that nevertheless pushes the drama forward, even if it is sometimes a bit too loose for its own good. It doesn't always concern itself with tying off arcs, which in itself is not a bad thing, but the resulting mix of finished and unfinished storylines does feel somewhat disjointed. While it's nice to see so many characters on screen, the film does sometimes struggle to keep them all corralled in. The main handful of characters get most of the screentime and the rest don't really get enough time to breathe so it does feels like an extended sitcom episode rather than a feature film. That said, however much screen time particular characters get is taken full advantage of, with all cast members giving exemplary performances.

All in all, director Ireland and screenwriter Hill have created a sweet and simple film that's full of life and shows a promising start to their respective careers. Plus, it's always great to see film content come out of Melbourne.

Review written by Ben Volchok

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hosts Christian and Andrew were joined in the studio with cast members Paul Knox, Hannah Vanderheide and producer Jorge Tsipos from Unnatural Selection Entertainment’s latest production –PURGATORIO. 

PURGATORIO is playing at the Brunswick Mechanics Institute, 13th-16th & 20th – 23rd April at 7.30pm. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Curator of the Next Gen program, THOMAS CALDWELL joined hosts Beth and Talisse on the line to talk about the Next Gen program and where it fits within the Melbourne International Film Festival. 

Next Gen and the Melbourne International Film Festival runs 28th July – 14th August.

Photo: Still from Next Gen feature film - The Magic Brush

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hosts Beth and Talisse were joined in the studio with SCOTT HOLLINGSWORTH & JOSHUA FIELDING from Performance Management - In Cabaret.

Scott shares how Performance Management - In Cabaret captures the truth that the everyday office is madder than the circus! 

Performance Management - In Cabaret is being performed at the Wonderland Spiegeltent, 101 Waterfront Way, Docklands, Melbourne for 1 NIGHT ONLY – 9th July, 8-9.30pm.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hosts Beth and Talisse were joined on the phone with GABI BARTON from Retro Futurismus - a colossal future-focussed vaudeville featuring zero gravity circus acts, siren songs, boutique burlesque, and breathtaking performance art. 

Retro Futurismus is being performed at fortyfivedownstairs, 45 Flinders Lane Melbourne from the 6th to 31st July.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Talisse gave a live review of The Wheeler Centre’s election one-night special event - Stand Up...and be Counted. 

Comedians at the event included: Toby Halligan (MC), Denise Scott, Zoe Coombs-Marr, Sammy J, Aamer Rahman, Mathew Kenneally, Claire Hooper, and Gerard McCulloch.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hosts Beth and Talisse were joined in the studio with Producer Lauren to discuss female body modification/body art. Has it become more socially acceptable? Or is there still a stigma associated with the practice? 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Albert Einstein is the latest scientific genius to have lured a scriptwriter into the trap of biography. Jess Newman was clearly intrigued by the mind of the famous theoretical physicist when she started to write the sung-through musical Einstein: Master of the Universe. Watching it, you can feel her yearning to see the world as he saw it, if even for a moment, and to understand what he saw. Her audience, I’m sure, is after the same thing, but it quickly becomes apparent that this is something she either cannot, will not or has lost interest in delivering.

This is one of those biopics that gravitates more towards the “man behind the science” than the work itself. The bulk of the story is taken up by Einstein’s younger years at university, starting just after the turn of the century, until he travelled to America in the early 30s. His two marriages are used as a frame for his journey from patent office clerk to Nobel-prize-winning physicist. Mileva Marić, his long-suffering first wife, can only stand his obsession with his theories for so long, and his affair with Elsa Löwenthal is the last straw. Elsa marries the famous man whose mind mystifies her, but the mystery soon loses its novelty as it did with Mileva. There’s only so far you can go with someone who always keeps you on the outer.

Ironically, and perhaps even intentionally, the audience feels the same way. Despite the beautiful projection art and animation from Jack Crosby, and Newman’s impassioned tunes and lyrics, Einstein’s inner world remains inaccessible, and its highlighted connections to our human world are just a little too trite, even for a musical. We understand that this is an underdog story, one about an ambitious young man hoping to prove everyone wrong, because we’ve seen those kinds of stories before. The young academic’s contemporaries and rivals are amusing villains in their own right, but the substance of his conflicts with them, the science itself, is not given the space to be understood and appreciated. Much of it is stuffed into the throwaway lines of babble that fill up the more light-hearted comedic songs.

Most of the big pathos numbers are set aside for an equally expected story, that of the man who was a great genius but a failure of a husband and father. The more refreshing aspect of this subplot is Mileva, who, as a mathematics student, has much more to offer than Albert gives her credit for. Again, rather like the audience, she wants to be treated as an equal, and is tired of being shut out. She can see that her husband’s head is buzzing with thoughts, but, as she tells him repeatedly, her family cannot live on thoughts.

It is not enough just to watch a man sit at his desk and rave about his epiphanies in the vaguest of terms. We need something to take away from it. We want to hear something that we haven’t heard before, or at least something that we haven’t heard so many times before.

In this regard, it seems as though Newman simply made the mistake of picking the wrong years to focus on. While Einstein’s early career might not have offered much original material to work with, his time in America as a refugee, his involvement in the Second World War and in the civil rights movement, his religious writings, and the many other chapters in his later years may well have been theatrical dynamite.

Newman’s compositions, the talents of the triple-threat cast and the skill of the production team are all top notch, all impressively assembled and ready to deliver a fascinating, remarkable story. Unfortunately, it looks like the timeline was being held the wrong way up in the script development process, leading to the expansion of the years that play out more like celebrity gossip than historical biography, and the baffling omission of the meatier material.

Review written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On Thursday the 23rd of June, I went to see Melbourne Playback perform 'On Ours Shores' at the Footscray Arts Centre. The troupe are a many things, or rather, become many different things over the course of one night, being one of Melbourne's leading improvisation theatre companies.

The team consists of actors, organisers and musicians, with the roles interchangeable between the variously skilled artists. As with improv, you can expect that an evening with Melbourne Playback will direct the spotlight from the stage and into the audience at times. However, the theatre group conspires to engage audience participation to a degree I have never before experienced.

You might encounter any selection of their actors on a given night. On Thursday, Ernie Gruner and Karen Berger provided a two piece band. Throughout the show they accompanied the actors with violin, percussion and xylophone. The core cast consisted of Alex Sangster, Allen Laverty, Diana Nguyen, Mike Mc Kevoy, Michelle Hussey and Ananth Gopal, who all conducted themselves with the wit, foresight and perfect timing of improvisation-veterans.

You could expect the duration of the performance to be around two hours.

But it is not time for the actors yet. The evening began with four fifteen minute talks by guest speakers tackling a major issue effecting contemporary Australia, the refugee crisis, and our speakers were refugee and author Mariam Issa, CEO of Asylum Seekers Resource Center Kon Karappanyotiddis, refugee and advocate Mohammed Ali Baqiri, and representative from the Refugee Action Collective and St Albans teacher, Lucy Honin.

They were each eloquent, compelling, brave and shared some painful things while displaying a hope for the future that had survived the incredible test of their pasts. I encourage every listener to go and give them a google - they are an excellent source of highly educated information on the topic of the refugee. In the greater plot of the evening, their function was to grab the absolute attention of the audience and force them, both with kindness and a certain emotional brutality, to engage not only their intellect to the issue at hand, but their senses, memories, emotions - essentially, bringing deeper parts of our humanity to bear on the refugee crisis.

As the final speaker finished their speech, the audience left the theatre for intermission. We staggered around like shell shocked soldiers, surprised at how emotionally exhausted we had become. I had been turning over in my mind refugee or immigrant children I had known in primary school and high school, having grown in the course of an hour closer to understanding the magnitude of their experiences than I had ever had before.

But - it wasn't over yet.

Returning to the theatre, we were met by five actors dressed in black and shoeless, arranged in a single horizontal rank, seated on milk crates, were occupying the space in which the speakers had been. There was nothing else on stage. As the final audience members took their seats, the MC jogged energetically to the crowd and asked for people to call out a word the summarised how they were feeling after hearing the speeches.

After a brief self-conscious pause, he was answered.

'Tearful', 'ashamed', 'sad', 'empowered' came the calls from the crowd.

The MC bounded up the stairs to a woman. 'Tell me' he said into the mic, 'what makes you feel tearful, and why?'

The woman attempted to explain herself, to explain a feeling that was obviously more complex than a single word. After a minute or so of interview, the MC turned to the actors who were still seated silently on stage and asked them to perform a song based on what the woman had just said.

The lights dimmed. A green spotlight switched on, hitting the middle of the stage. One of the actresses danced into the middle of the spotlight and began to sing, joined gradually by the rest, which compounded into a symphony of voices. The cast had picked up on a few key phrases: 'open heart', 'clear mind', 'come here', which they sung layered over each other, creating a tumult of straining voices or calm voices, differing in cadence and strength. It lasted perhaps three minutes.

I was initially confused and embarrassed by the performance, until I realised that they had hit upon something in the audience members words. It wasn't just her words they were examining, it was her tone, her confusion, her sadness. They had interpreted this as best they could, and were reflecting it back to her and the rest of us through performance, creating it again outside her and in a way that was different but the same, to understand again in a new way.

Over the course of the evening, the audience was asked for their feelings, stories and thoughts, inspired by the initial speakers or by their own history with the refugee issue. With this deeply personal information, they made us at times giddy with amusement, then angry, then euphoric, then quiet with sadness. Song and music were not the only weapons of expression they deployed, utilising dance, mime, language and light to perform the things which the audience conveyed. Each act was around 3 to 10 minutes long. We left the theatre that night having examined and gained insight into some human parts of ourselves and our fellow audience members that are not so often brought into the public or the conscious eye.

Melbourne Playback's next show deals with climate change and will be in August this year. Tickets and dates are not yet announced, but head over to melbourneplayback.com.au for more information.

Review written by Jim Thomas

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Dancenorth Artistic Director, KYLE PAGE, joined hosts Michaela and Erin on the line to talk about the Melbourne premiere of IF_WAS – a double bill choreographed by Stephanie Lake & Ross McCormack. 

IF_WAS will be performed at The Substation, 1 Market Street Newport, Melbourne, from the 29th June to 2nd July.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.