Close to home

We discovered the ACT HUB with another play just weeks before, Five lesbians eating a quiche.  The ACT HUB is located in that century-old community hall in the Causeway, next to the Kingston Railway station and home of at least one very big kangaroo we saw hopping by as we left, and it hosts a string of local theatrical presentations, seeming to be amusing and worthy and cluey.  This one was I love you, you're perfect, now change.  Again a funny title and a significant off-Broadway history of success.  It's musical theatre, so songs and a small musical accompaniment, here keys and violin, in 2 acts and with some localisation and modernisation.  The first act on forming relationships features online dating, and the second act is all the result, the relationships and weddings and children and losses but also some touching scenes of mature relationships, but it remains predominantly heterosexual.  Modernisation didn't quite reach to LGBTQI+ although there are some mentions of lesbianism as an alternative and one scene has a gay male couple hamstrung and frustrated at home with a child when an old female friend visits for some entertainment.  The cast is 6, comprising 3 men and 3 women, all playing various roles in various romantic pairings and occasional stints as other family members.  Plenty of humour, quite a lot of song, lots of good will from audience and characters alike.  In the end, it portrays something we recognise and value and fear and it does it with some sympathy, so good, in a series of vignettes rather than a single story, and that fits.  The promo says "it celebrates love in all its messy, funny and totally human glory" and "honest...awkward...familiar".  Near enough for jazz, I reckon, even if the music was very much out of music theatre.

I love you, you're perfect, now change was written by Jimmy Roberts (music) and Joe DiPietro (book, lyrics).  This series was directed by Janie Lawson and featured Amelia Andersson-Nickson, Sarah Copley, Connor McNaught, Deborah O'Toole, David Pearson and Sam Thompson (cast) at the ACT HUB with musicians Leo Amadeus (keys, MD) and Laura Lay (violin).

What is this thing called, love

It's a piece of nostalgia and theatre and comedy as much as music. NCO and CCS and a string of soloists performed Not the Messiah : he's a very naughty boy at Llewellyn last night to a crowded house and everyone had a ball. There's a generation out there that's brought up on Monty Python (I'm of it), so I'm not surprised at the turnout, but to some degree I was surprised at my own enjoyment of the event. I'd gone around thinking this is not Beethoven 9 or Mozart Requiem, especially because of the fairly simple readability of the music. But it's not complexity alone that makes for success in music and I wonder if I'd been snobby about the whole thing. I don't think so but I'd ignored the pleasure of a massed musical outing, of the joy of comedy and the essentially intelligent and well meaning humour of the Python crew and just the effectiveness of our locals to carry all this off.

120-or-so performers filled the stage physically and the hall aurally with a inundation of sound with the help Llewellyn's new phrased array; the orchestra did its musical job, enhanced even with a rhythm section with electric instruments (gasp); the choir sang a treat but also played up the night with discrete props; the soloists were a roguish joy as well as being wonderfully capable as singers; the brass wore sombreros and the pipers brought the house down. There were smiles and joy everywhere and congrats for jobs well done. Well done to Lenny, of course, who conducted this all and to SarahLouise who had done her parallel part with the choir. A huge turnout and a huge success.

National Capital Orchestra and Canberra Choral Society presented Not the Messiah : he's a very naughty boy by Eric Idle and John du Prez at Llewellyn Hall. Soloists were Louise Page and Demi Smith (sopranos), Nick Begbie (tenor), Tobias Cole (baritone), David Pearson (bass) under Leonard Weiss (conductor) with Ylaria Rogers (director) and SarahLouise Owens (chorus master). The bottom-enders were Roger Grime, Lizzy Collier and Eric Pozza (basses).