Reviews

Not all musicals have to be extravaganzas, or blow your socks off with show-stopping numbers. If you’re lucky, you find musicals that are funny and endearing and speak to you on a personal level. This is one of those musicals. Ideally pitched for a girls’ night out, women will (and do) adore it; but there are enough genuine laughs and humorous full cast songs to please even the most blokey of blokes.

When you condense such a well-known play, it is only natural to draw comparisons with the original text. What makes the tale of Romeo and Juliet so intoxicating is the lengths to which the lovers go to be together, the war between their families and the tragedy of their young deaths. Ben Power’s adaptation concentrates on the love story, injecting it with a contemporary story of an older couple. Also drawing dialogue from Shakespeare’s sonnets, it is fair to say that this is a radical adaptation.

At the moment Melbourne has an embarrassment of operatic riches. Thirty years ago we had the Australian Opera, Victorian State Opera and an occasional amateur performance. Now we still have Opera Australia, Victorian Opera, which emerged from the ashes of the VSO, and several semi-professional companies providing lots of work and doing exciting productions.

Melbourne Opera, based at the Athenaeum Theatre, broke away from CitiOpera and, as a point of difference, perform exclusively in English. Many roles were shared in early productions with varying degrees of success.

For the uninitiated, Forbidden Broadway is a parody of the Broadway Musical Theatre and the creation of author, composer, arranger and performer Gerard Alessandrini. The first season opened at Palsson’s Supper Club, New York in 1982 and has seen regular “up dates” over a number of years (I, myself, have 9 of the CD’s).

Amy-Louise Anderson has captured the spirit of Alessandrini’s hilarious interpretation of the musical in a fast moving, fun-packed show.