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Girl of the Frozen North

16/08/202516/08/2025 Rob McKinnon🥉

Girl of the Frozen North Rating

★★★★★

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The Tea Tree Players, under director Barry Hill, transports the audience to the freezing Yukon for this very amusing sing-a-long melodrama full of merriment and entertainment well worth attending as Adelaide’s own wintery conditions draw to a close.

The fun begins as the MC (Tim Cousins) introduces the play and the cast as they burst into song. The story proper begins during a day in June 1890 in the lobby of a dingy hotel in the Yukon Territory owned by the story’s villain, J Harrington Cesspool (Brian Godfrey). Cesspool is ordering around his employee Nanook (Georgia Gustard) as a fur trader Klaxon (Joel Strauss) enters with a bag of furs and haggles with Cesspool about their purchase price. After Trader Klaxon leaves, Cesspool tries to grab Nanook but she screams and the story’s hero, Corporal Dashiell H Goforth (Clinton Nitschke) of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, enters the lobby to save her. Goforth then leaves but soon returns with Nettie Neetfoot (Charlie Klose), as she tries to evade the clutches of Cesspool, she explains that she is looking for her mother who has become lost in a blizzard as they searched for her kidnapped little brother. Nettie leaves the hotel to continue her quest.

As the story progresses, hotel guests Cleopatra Pannitt (Cathie Oldfield) the self-proclaimed “America’s gift to the Shakespearean stage” and her daughter Hyacinth Klutz (Selena Britz) both stuck at the hotel because the “touring troupe went broke at the local opera house”, are introduced. Goforth re-enters with the missing Mrs Neetfoot (Elizabeth Ferguson) and later Professor Fredrik Pjoole (John Hudson) from Washington DC arrives to study the local First Nations people’s “time-reversing experiments”. Goforth is accused of theft and tries to clear his name as the search for the missing continues.

Along the way, the MC emboldens the audience to “aaw”, “ooh”, “boo” and “cheer” but often the engaged audience is ahead of his prompting. Between scenes the audience is encouraged to sing along with the classics, “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean”, “Roll Out the Barrell”, “Knees Up Mother Brown” and “I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside”.

Additionally, between a scene change in Act 1, the audience is entertained by the dancing Harry the Hippy Horse (Ashlee Brown as the head and Lachlan Blackwell as the other end). In a scene change in Act 2, ballerinas Tatiana Orlovski (Lachlan Blackwood) and Olga Ripsacorsetoff (Ashlee Brown) perform “The World Famous Balloon Dance”, which is one of the hilarious highlights of the whole performance.

The production team including Beth Venning for props and set dressing, Barry Hill for set design, Damon Hill for scenic artwork, Merci Thompson for costumes and Robert Andrews and Mike Phillips for lighting and sound design and operation, are to be congratulated for producing an excellent set, costumes and a near faultless technical performance.

The cast all perform superbly, Tim Cousins is warm and enthusiastic as the MC binding the performance and the audience participation skilfully together. Brian Godfrey, with his Riff Raff like appearance, makes a first-rate villain and is outstandingly juxtaposed by the brilliantly often over-the-top performance of Clinton Nitschke. Selena Britz is also commended for her performance and her song and dance routine. The rest of the talented cast also deliver outstanding performances.

The Tea Tree Players’ Girl of the Frozen North is great fun and is full of melodrama and audience participation. Barry Hill, the cast and crew are to be congratulated for this exuberant and splendid production.

Girl from the Frozen North runs from Wednesday 13 August 2025 – Saturday 23 August 2025

Venue: Tea Tree Players Theatre

Cnr Yatala Vale Road and Hancock Road, Surrey Downs SA 5126

To book tickets to Girl of the Frozen North, please visit https://teatreeplayers.com/production/girl-of-the-frozen-north/.

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When We Dead Awaken

10/08/2025 Nicole V🥉

When We Dead Awaken Rating

★★★★★

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When We Dead Awaken, by Henrik Ibsen, follows the story of Professor Arnold Rubek, his wife, Maia, and his original muse, Irene, as they tackle their relationships, nostalgia, and acceptance of life and death. Ibsen was known to work with self-analytical themes, and When We Dead Awaken is the perfect example; written to make you consider life from the perspective of others, be honest with yourself (and your potentially declining artistic inspiration), morality, and mortality.

True to the time this piece was written, the play has three acts and two intermissions, with the beginning of each act providing a new location, soundscape, and sometimes lighting, for the story.

We join the gravelly-voiced Rubek and his wife as they return to their home country, a lovely soundtrack of birdsong offsetting Frau Rubek’s obvious frustration as she attempts to gain her husband’s attention. We learn the pair are staying at a Norwegian Spa and Mountain Resort, and Professor Rubek is enquiring after a woman in white being followed by a woman in black, whom he saw walking in the middle of the night.

This woman in white, we learn from the well-spoken Hotel Manager, is another guest from the hotel, but the woman is an enigma to the hotel manager. While the Professor is attempting to speak to the woman in white, his wife is enthralled by the life and stories of the loud, and sometimes not too subtly lewd, bear hunter. When the Professor finally has a chance to speak with the woman, it is revealed that the woman was the Professor’s first muse, the artwork of whom made him famous: Irene.

Irene has a voice of honey, but is not afraid to hold back and raise her voice to scold the Professor when it is needed. During her scenes we are witness to a woman with severe trauma and hysteria (which these days we would recognise as mental illness) doing her best to navigate her way through a life of pain, regret, and lost love, while battling her inner demons.

As the history between the Professor and Irene unfolds, there is a juxtaposition between them reminiscing on the past, and Maia being stubbornly set on future adventures with the bear hunter. The audience is gently rocked between past and present as our eyes ping pong between the characters on stage, glowing under the sunshine-like lights.

The only concern I found was that some of the more intense background sounds in Acts One and Three overwhelmed the voices of those speaking, but I am also aware this was probably done on purpose, because those sounds most certainly achieved their desired effects, and matching sound speaker volume with a human voice is a very fine line.

Each cast member melts into the persona of their character and bounces off their character’s partner with ease, the emotions weaving off the stage being almost palpable. Boasting minimal sets, props, and lighting changes to keep the focus on the characters, the story unfolds gracefully and ends in a way which will keep you thinking about the characters on your drive home.

The director made a creative choice to focus on the relationships between the characters, and some of the characters’ story arcs in Act three have been intentionally left out for the audience’s interpretation. If you are familiar with the play, be sure to come prepared to experience a fresh perspective on the story; if you are unfamiliar, allow the characters to carry you through a past-and-present experience of human nature.

To book tickets to When We Dead Awaken, please visit https://www.trybooking.com/events/landing/1385262.

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Neighbourhood Watch

09/08/2025 Rob McKinnon🥉

Neighbourhood Watch Rating

★★★★★

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The always reliable St Jude’s Players latest production is a journey from suburban Australia in 2007 to Hungary in World War Two with Lally Katz’s Neighbourhood Watch resulting in an excellent version of the play anchored by a marvellous performance by veteran actor Julie Quick as Ana.

Beginning the day after the election of the Rudd Labor Government in 2007 the play is centred in the neighbourhood of Mary Street in suburban Australia, where housemates Catherine (Ellie Schaefer) an out-of-work actor and Ken (Dylan Megaw) a diabetic want-to-be film maker are discussing the election. Across the road, an aging and often cantankerous Ana (Julie Quick) a Hungarian Australian refugee delivers a bag of leaves to her neighbour Katrina (Taya Rose) that have fallen from Katrina’s tree into Ana’s yard. Ana asks Katrina if she will pick her up from a specialist appointment the next day, but Katrina responds that she is too busy. Jovanka (Gail Morrison) an aging Serbian woman tries unsuccessfully to visit Ana.
As the plot progresses Ana and Catherine develop a friendship and as they talk Ana tells Catherine of her life story and the play travels to war time Hungary. As Ana’s journey unfurls, Catherine’s own story develops, affected by her own unhappy memories and life lessons are learned.

The multi award winning and one of Australia’s most performed playwrights, Lally Katz, based the character of Ana on stories that her real life aging Hungarian refugee neighbour told her. In Neighbourhood Watch, Katz honours her neighbour’s desires that her stories should not be forgotten. The plot explores the themes of isolation, friendship, war and the consequences of war, grief and the seeking of refuge. Katz weaves these themes cleverly throughout her play.

Director Lesley Reed, with many years of experience in professional and community based acting and recently directing productions for Galleon Theatre, Adelaide Repertory Theatre and the Stirling Players, has the formidable task of managing nine actors into around twenty five characters throughout the play and taking them from the Australian street to doctor’s rooms, chemist shop and cinema to war-torn Hungarian streets, tram, river crossing and dark fabric factory. This assignment she does seamlessly.

To help Lesley, set designer and construction coordinator Don Oakley, has provided innovative solutions to the staging given the limitations of stage size and budget, even if some solutions require a little creativity by the audience. Sarah Bradley’s original music is brilliant and adds another level to the production.

The whole cast, Julie Quick, Ellie Schaefer, Dylan Megaw, Nathan Brown, Taya Rose, Gail Morrison, Matthew Chant, Christopher Cordeaux and Megan Robson perform excellently, smoothly transitioning through their multiple characters. The experience of performing in over one hundred productions oozes from Julie Quick’s superb performance in particular. Her outstanding acting skills ameliorates the production.

St Jude’s Players’ production of Neighbourhood Watch is an ambitious project by this well-established theatre group, and they deliver an impressive result highlighted by superb acting worthy of the audience visiting Mary Street and beyond.

Reviewed by Rob McKinnon
Rating; 7 out of 10

Neighbourhood watch runs to 19 July 2025; remaining session dates and times are as follows:

Thursday August 14, Friday August 15, 7.30 pm.

Matinees Saturday August 16, 2pm.

Venue: St Jude’s Hall, 444 Brighton Rd, Brighton, South Australia.

Tickets (from July 17): https://www.trybooking.com/DCCMU
Or call 0436 262 628/email bookings@stjudesplayers.asn.au

To book tickets to Neighbourhood Watch , please visit https://stjudesplayers.asn.au/https-stjudesplayers-asn-au-wp-content-uploads-2024-11wp-content-uploads-2024-11-neighbourhood-watch_poster_final-jpg/.

Photographer: Les Zetlein

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Come From Away

10/08/202509/08/2025 Barry Hill OAM🥉

Come From Away Rating

★★★★★

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Therry Theatre have ‘hit the jackpot’ with their latest production of Come From Away!

It is not so much a musical as an experience in compassion, simply but powerfully done.

Come From Away takes place during the days following 11th September 2001, when 38 planes carrying 7,000 air passengers were diverted to the town of Gander in Newfoundland. This small town, with a population of just 11,000, opened its doors to passengers from all over the world, providing shelter, food, and most importantly, kindness.

It is an amalgamation of hundreds of real-life stories from the people of Gander and those stranded there during the events of 9/11.

The creators, Irene Sankoff and David Hein, visited Newfoundland on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 to meet the locals and passengers who experienced this first-hand. These interviews and stories became the foundation of the musical, turning it into a genuine celebration of the kindness that emerged in those challenging days.

Therry Theatre and respected director David Sinclair have risen to the task of such a complex show and had the audience ‘on their feet’ at the conclusion of opening night. While the musical is based in a unit set with trees (Mark Rogers), some tables, chairs, and the orchestra lurking in the sides of the stage, it is the multiple characters and the ensemble (or ‘family’) nature of the piece that makes it challenging.

Sinclair knows the Arts Theatre stage (with its notorious sight lines) and has used every centimetre available to its best advantage. His characters are ‘real’ and we identify with their stories. His vision had many of the audience in tears at the conclusion of the piece.

He is ably assisted by Associate Director and Choreographer Linda Williams whose choreography is clever, and drives the piece along, particularly the opening and closing numbers.

Musical Director Peter Johns’ band hits all the right notes and includes the little heard bodhran (an Irish frame drum). Johns also plays the piano accordion and keyboards, no mean feat!

Lighting plays an important role in any musical and Mark Oakley’s lighting matches the emotions of each scene. There were a few late cues but these will disappear as the production continues. Allpro Audios’ sound adds clarity to the balance of singers and band.

In an ensemble (or family) production each cast member is of vital importance and it would be remiss of me not to name everyone –

Trevor Anderson – (Kevin J and a brilliant portrayal of Ali) gives the performance of a lifetime alternating a gay boyfriend with a Muslim Master Chef.

Kate Anolak – (Beulah and others) give her character depth with her compassionate performance. Her scenes with Hannah are heart breaking.

Michael Denholm – (Nick and others) adds a touch of comedy and romance as a frustrated Englishman who befriends and eventually marries Michelle Nightingale – (Diane and others). Watching their romance develop is a highlight.

Dee Farnell – (Beverley and others) shines as the pilot of the plane and its passengers that are the focus of the musical. She nails every scene, every note and is a standout. Her ‘Me and the Sky’ is a joy!

David Gauci – (Claude and others) as the Mayor of Gander is a lesson in acting, especially when he changes characters, literally at the ‘drop of a hat’.

Josh Kerr – (Oz and others) is an audience favourite, particularly his Italian character complete with long flowing hair!

Brady Lloyd – (Kevin T and others) adds a tender touch as one of the two ‘Kevins’ whose relationship breaks up over the Gander tradition of ‘kissing the fish’, or perhaps it was destined to breakup anyway?

Claire McEvoy – (Bonnie and others) gives a touching portrayal of the ‘keeper’ of the animals on the flight. Her last scene is tear-jerking.

Eloise Quinn-Valentine – (Janice and others) adds depth to the villagers and the passengers on the plane.

Lisa Simonetti – (Hannah and others) gives us a portrayal that any mother can identify with. Her ‘I am Here” is beautifully and emotionally sung.

Stephen Tongun – (Bob and others) – gives us an important viewpoint of the way people of colour are sometimes till treated in our society.

The cast also includes Shelley Crooks, Daniel Hamilton, Dominic Hodges, Michelle Tan, Katie Packer and who are not only swings but villagers as well.

Come From Away is an emotional roller coaster that is moving from start to finish, and adds vital dimension to 9/11 and the lives it affected. Bravo Therry Theatre for a superb evening!

To book tickets to Come From Away, please visit https://therry.org.au/.

Photographer: Andrew Trimmings

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