Reviews

Ken Ludwig’s American farce Leading Ladies is Mordialloc Theatre Company’s final season of the year.

Taking place over a month in the Spring of 1952, the plot revolves around two British actors in York, Pennsylvania who are down on their luck. After reading about a dying heiress who is searching for long-lost relatives from England, they decide to impersonate the men, only to frantically discover that the missing nephews… are actually nieces!

Is it just synchronicity that five musical legends all died (mostly by their own hand) at the age of 27? Is that the age at which we have to own who we are and quit hiding behind the mask of being a “kid”? For some that transition to adulthood, seriousness, responsibility, is just too hard to make. On the ‘plus’ side, an early death brings a kind of immortality to performers who might otherwise have been swept up in the juggernaut of fame and ultimately replaced and forgotten.

The Carnival of Lost Souls is a macabre yet rather engaging piece of ‘circus theatre’ in the spirit, if not scale of Cirque du Soliel. The setting for the rather loose narrative that involves desire, betrayal and revenge, is an old gothic 19th Century Music Hall.

As the audience streams in to the theatre, two old women are sitting on the stage in a typically 1950s kitchen – featuring a wooden table, a Kooka stove and an ancient Kelvinator refrigerator. What follows is a spirallingly surreal conversation which covers their lives, their ideals, death, children, their increasing loss of mind and memory and one of the funniest and most tragic shows you will ever see.