Returning as concurrent exhibitors for the third time, we're delighted that Cathy and Bill are back! Here are a few snaps from their shared opening Tuesday 9 October, 2012. Arrested Decay by Bill Hay and Stilled Life, New Paintings by…
Tuesday 11 September 2012 5pm- 7pm A wonderful shared opening of two urban themed exhibitions. Photos by Grace Petrou of Agent 86.
MSFW: Parallel Tensions at fortyfivedownstairs Monday 3 September, 2012 Cancel all hot dates! Set the DVD player to record all those favourite shows! Change your after-work gym sessions to morning workouts! It's Melbourne Spring Fashion Week, and you know what…
mX Goss and Glam - lookbook Tuesday 28 August, 2012 Picture: Nicole Cleary Born and raised in South Africa, growing up across Asia and ending up in Australia, Jason Hewitt's designs are inspired by his travels. A selection of his…
The cast of the Marvelous Wonderettes have a chat, in character, about their upcoming prom and what a fantastic night it's going to be. Also, with a little coaxing, they gave the program a little of what you can expect…
Tuhaka takes Manaia to Melbourne festival (Thursday, August 16, 2012) GISBORNE actor Te Kohe Tuhaka is off to Australia . . . for a short while, at least. Theatre company Taki Rua has confirmed that its acclaimed production of John…
Ten of the world’s leading image-makers have been commissioned to create unique Herman Miller posters, exhibited alongside a special collection of vintage posters from the past. Here's a selection of images from the official launch. The exhibition has been curated…
Nicholas Rothwell explores the Spinifex Arts Project The Australian - 6 August, 2012 Image: Artists from the Women's Collaborative at Tjintirkara. Picture courtesy of Louise Allerton There are many who wonder if there is anything true or genuine we can…
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I was not sure what to expect from the world premier season of Mademoiselle, advertised as “a gothic camp music theatre revue” with two satirical manservants singing tunes about what could have been, but I knew I would be in for a treat.
Our two manservants, played by creators Michael Dalley and Paul McCarthy, sneak into their employer’s boudoir and let loose some glitzy musical numbers revolving around fantasy, regret, power and servitude. The very opening song relaxed the audience and assured us that we were in for a night of cheeky laughs.
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Michael Dalley is the real deal when it comes to the Melbourne cabaret scene; he is a sophisticated pisstaker extraordinaire who delights once more with his new work, Mademoiselle, an exercise in supreme nastiness. Very funny and rude. We last saw his talent comically tarring and feathering the world of real estate in Urban Display Suite.
Here Dalley and co-deviser/performer Paul McCarthy present in song the most professional pair of bitchy queens you will ever meet, sad little men with evil minds and a penchant for going through other people’s rubbish. The best thing about this show is how it has a go at two of Australia’s wealthiest, most famous and least civic minded ladies. Recognition brings glee. Music is provided by John Thorn; the songs are co-written by him and Dalley.
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Michael Dalley’s newest work, Mademoiselle, was the most vulgar, crude and amazing display of comedic theatre I’ve ever seen. Dalley and Paul McCarthy embodied two sparkly, overdressed, flamboyant man-servants that had the crowd in stitches from beginning to end.
Heading down into fortyfivedownstairs, I had no idea what to expect, the promo description of ‘gothic camp’ meant I was in for something unique to say the least. I got my tickets, grabbed a wine and headed in, ushered by a lovely older man to our seats. The audience, which was very ranged in age, gender and level of flamboyance, filled every seat. All we could see from the performing end was a small podium with a toilet in the centre. Lights dim and I’m anticipating a small time, pleasant little show… how wrong could I be? I suppose the toilet should have been a give-away.
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Mademoiselle is a whirlwind of political incorrectness. Michael Dalley’s witty hour-long script had the packed audience in Flinders Lane laughing and gasping in its assault on the “lower middle-class”.
Michael Dalley and Paul McCarthy feature as two effeminate man-servants of a certain Mademoiselle, who get creative in her absence in “an orgy of ridicule” and “a litany of abuse”. The irony of their relentless and superior sneering is that it’s dished out at the expense of their own social class, even as they attempt to position themselves apart from it.
Liza Power
The Age
28/07/2012
AS A satirist, Michael Dalley has made a career of taking the mickey. Middle-class values, real estate agents, the nouveau riche, his closest friends and acquaintances – nothing is out of bounds. ”I could make a cabaret about the Labor Party or Family First,” he jokes over coffee, ”but it would be too easy and pointless. It’s more interesting to pick apart what you’re supposed to hold sacred.” Better still to do it in a slick, mordant, wildly witty way, which is of course precisely what Dalley is renowned for.
Tessa Hayward
02/08/2012
City Weekly
Michael Dalley is a self-confessed control freak. He has written, stars in, produces and directs the upcoming gothic music theatre revue, Mademoiselle.
Dalley (pictured above right) and Paul McCarthy (above left) play two valets, or butlers, who are left alone for the evening when their boss unexpectedly goes out. “They decide to use it as a chance to let out all the oppression that has been holding them in,’’ Dalley says. ‘‘They don’t like each other very much. They feed off each other and end up ridiculing each other and putting each other down quite a lot.’’
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Hailed in the 1970’s as Australia’s answer to Jean Genet, prisoner turned playwright Jim McNeil was destroyed by the very fame that saw him released early from a 17 year jail sentence. Without the strict routine of prison life, McNeil’s violent alcoholism soon got the better of him, and he never wrote again. He died in 1982, aged 47.
The McNeil Project at Melbourne’s fortyfivedownstairs, features two of Jim McNeil’s one-act plays: The Chocolate Frog – a relatively simple work – and the altogether darker, more complex The Old Familiar Juice.
See the review in its original context here.
**** 4 STARS
Jim McNeil, not your everyday, bleeding-heart playwright, was gaoled for armed robbery and shooting a policeman in 1967 and, while incarcerated in Parramatta Correctional Centre, he wrote several compelling and shocking plays.
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**** 4 STARS
IMPRISONMENT and modern drama have an intriguing relationship. Arguably the first audiences to ”get” Beckett’s Waiting for Godot were the inmates of San Quentin, in the famous 1957 jailhouse production. These men were living at the sharp end of the fiction that we’re all at liberty to act rationally in our own self-interest: they knew the ways in which we’re radically unfree.
See the review in its original context here.
**** 4 STARS.
According to the quotable G.K. Chesterton, all slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry. By this memorable formula, along with sailors and Cockneys, few subcultures can claim to be as poetically fecund as prison culture. Both The Chocolate Frog and The Old Familiar Juice, one-act plays currently being presented as a double bill at fortyfivedownstairs, are fine examples of this.
See the review in its original context here.
MALCOLM Robertson’s connection to Jim McNeil and his celebrated prison plays dates back to 1971, when Robertson conducted drama workshops at Parramatta jail, then directed the first professional production of The Chocolate Frog for Q Theatre.
Two years later, he directed a double bill of it and The Old Familiar Juice for the Melbourne Theatre Company.
These one-act plays combine well. The polemic of the first, which, on its own, might seem naive and too bluff, is counterbalanced by the finesse and tight focus of the latter.
Four decades on, Robertson plays The Chocolate Frog absolutely straight. Thanks to its archaic slang, its references to “the permissive society” and the Latin mass, the play is a period piece. But, if anything, it stands up better now than it did when previously presented in Melbourne in the late 1980s.
In this series of floor talks, hear architects discuss their award-winning projects as recognised by the 2012 Victorian Architecture Awards. Thursday 12 July, 12.30pm Victorian Architecture Medal & William Wardell Public Architecture Award winning project The Royal Children's Hospital by…
Raymond Gill
Life & Style, The Saturday Age
30/06/2012
DOUG Fields, 55, works night shifts managing an outer-Melbourne supermarket, so he would seem to have scant connection with a fascinating chapter in Australia’s theatre history.
Fields is the eldest of six children of the late Jim McNeil, who is known in the theatre industry as a playwright whose talent burnt bright and fast in his small output of plays from the early 1970s, including The Chocolate Frog and The Old Familiar Juice, both of which are having a rare production at fortyfivedownstairs from next week.
Domain Feature
The Age
23 June, 2012
A new exhibition shows the sky is the limit for Melbourne architects.
Picture this: row upon row of boards, each bearing images of a building, hanging on white gallery walls. Sounds boring, doesn’t it?
The Victorian chapter of the Australian Institute of Architects thought so too. That’s why, this year, the 236 entries for its annual architecture awards will be displayed in an innovative exhibition designed by Monash University students and aimed at luring a broad audience, beyond the architects-only viewers of A2 boards on a wall.
Rosemary Neill
The Australian
23/06/2012
THE Melbourne media christened Jim McNeil the laughing bandit because he was often amused at how easy it was to hold up a TAB or pub at gunpoint.
The serial offender would chuckle to himself, even as he was carrying out his weapon and a bag of loot.
McNeil was many things: armed robber and cop shooter; husband, wife basher and father; raconteur, recidivist and violent alcoholic; underage lover of a brothel madam, prison homosexual and charismatic womaniser. He was an unlikely arts sensation, but that’s precisely what he became after he started writing plays behind the high sandstone walls of Sydney’s Parramatta jail in the early 1970s.
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…I spent my Sunday evening with the good women of the Burlesque Hour: Glory Box at fortyfivedownstairs. Moira Finucane and Jackie Smith have built a loyal audience over the years of presenting the Burlesque Hour, and so the long queue outside the venue should not have been a surprise: I can’t think of a better way to spend a gloomy winter evening in Melbourne. Hilarious, witty, erotic, liberating and beautiful, they put the “adult” into adult entertainment. I have sometimes thought that anyone who claims – as is said with monotonous regularity in comment threads on the web – that feminists are humourless, sexless misandrists should be forced to watch a Finucane and Smith show. But they don’t deserve to have so much fun.
See the review in its original context here.
Finucane & Smith’s GLORY BOX is the latest incarnation of The Burlesque Hour, the Australian cabaret that has gone on to redefine – defy even – the genre around the world.
Sexy, twisted, and at times very moving, I find myself requiring multiple adjectives to capture the essence of this show. I could add funny, confronting and slightly un-hinged, and I’d still only describe a portion of what happens when this GLORY BOX is opened.
In an underground salon of red lanterns and intimate tables, co-creator Moira Finucane’s opening act sets the tone as she devours an apple so ferociously that I might still be removing pieces from my hair. For the uninitiated this might be the moment where any expectation of a traditional burlesque experience is also demolished. And from here the delights unfold!
The Age
Mark Ellis
11/6/2012
Christos Tsiolkas enjoys the serious and playful sides of burlesque.
THE Queen of Burlesque, Moira Finucane, is also the Queen of Adjectives. As she enthuses about her new show, a tumbling cascade of P.T. Barnum superlatives collect at our feet.
Bridget McCormack The Australian 31/05/2012 CHRISTOS Tsiolkas has lent his pen to cabaret doyenne Moira Finucane for her latest show, The Glory Box. The author of The Slap wrote a five-minute piece about the Garden of Eden on the condition…
Vulture Magazine interviews Laurence Strangio, Director of Uncle Vanya.
See the interview in its original context here.
Laurence Strangio has adapted and directed the play Uncle Vanya, originally by Anton Chekhov, and it’s being performed from today until the 3rd of June at fortyfivedownstairs in Melbourne. We caught up with Strangio ahead of the premiere to talk Chekhov, 19th century Russia and wall-chewing ennui.
Anastasia Russell-Head reviews Uncle Vanya for Theatre Press.
See the review in its original context here.
Chekhov’s works, like Shakespeare’s, serve to unite humanity and human foibles across time and continents.
More than a century after Uncle Vanya was first penned, and on the opposite side of the globe, we’re still dealing with the same stuff – complaining about our lives, falling in love with the wrong people, allowing ourselves to be irritated and manipulated by our relatives, and falling victim to paralyzing inaction.
Liza Dezfouli reviews Uncle Vanya for Australian Stage
See the review in its original context here.
This adaption of Chekov’s Uncle Vanya by Laurence Strangio delivers a classic play with an effective timelessness of approach. The tone of the production is simultaneously both naturalistic and formal. The story of a blended family ensconced for over half a year at their country estate contains some startlingly modern themes: more than a century later people still don’t know what to do with themselves, whether their idleness is created by too much or too little.
Sian Prior reviews Far Away for Culture Club, 774 Drive, ABC Radio
See the review in its original context here.
If…you want to be surprised, even a bit disturbed by a visit to the theatre – try ‘Far Away’, a play that’s on at 45 Downstairs in Flinders Lane, written by the award-winning English playwright Caryl Churchill. I’ve been thinking about this play ever since I saw it last weekend. Churchhill is known for her non-naturalistic approach to theatre – she’s a political playwright…politics in the broader sense of power and the uses and abuses of it. The play is divided into three different scenes and as the first one opens, we see a child who has woken up in the middle of the night approaching a woman in a kitchen. We learn the woman is her aunt and the child gradually reveals that she’s just witnessed a deeply disturbing scene outside in the garden. There’s been violence and blood and the child is trying to make sense of it all. And the aunt is trying to first of all explain what the child has seen, but then – we realize – she’s trying to cover up what’s been happening. We see the world from the child’s perspective as she tries to understand adult behaviour that, on the face of it, is simply terrifying. We’re in moral quicksand as the aunt keeps changing her story. What IS going on out there in the garden shed? – we never really find out.
Fortunately the weather let up a bit on Saturday, enabling gallery goers to venture out in Flinders Lane. We're glad the rain showers didn't deter our dedicated ensemble of drawers in the small gallery from putting pencil (as well as…
Coming along to The Burlesque Hour: The Glory Box? Why not make it dinner and a show...? fortyfivedownstairs and Finucane & Smith are thrilled to announce an exciting chance to win a delicious meal for four at the Sofitel's award…