Reviews

It’s Pantomime time, and the first to open this year is Wanneroo Repertory’s Puss in Boots. Having been on the planner and delayed for a couple of years, it has finally reached the stage - the final production before the Limelight’s big renovation.

A cast of 31 performers bring this traditional pantomime to life, and it features some standout performers.

This gritty, evocative Pulitzer Prize winning play is set at a time during the second Bush Administration when working class Americans are about to have their lives irrevocably disrupted.

The main setting is a bar where close-knit employees meet to drink, talk, party and fight. Inspired by the plight of steel workers in Pennsylvania, the audience hears that the factory is hard work, leaving the women after several decades on the floor with “sagging titties” and “bunions”.

Kristen Smyth has ventured into the difficult territory of presenting painful and challenging experiences to an audience. She has wrapped the torturous Thatcherite skinhead, drug and club culture and the experience of identity discovery and transitioning in the cloak of our common understanding of the making of a monster as depicted in Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”. The fundamental question of who the monsters are is deeply explored in this searching and poetic text. The Director, Cohan has offered a purity of vision which supports the text’s life.

For some years WAAPA’s Bachelor of Performing Arts, Performance Making students have been collaborating with Spare Parts Puppet Theatre, for their ultimate performance project. Always an excellent partnership, this year’s The Murmuration of Lost Birds, with its themes of young birds leaving the nest and flying off into an uncertain future, was particularly poignant, and I felt privileged to witness this charming cohort’s last ever performance together.