The opening night of the Sydney Theatre Company’s second venue at the Kinsela in Taylor Square tomorrow could have been a sober affair. Not because the theatre-cafe brasserie was formerly a funeral parlour,but because it has yet to get a liquor licence.
“The Stripper” Terence Donovan as Lt. Al Wheeler and Robyn Moase as Deadpan Dolores in “The Stripper”The Sydney Theatre Company
However,the management of the venue has decided that tomorrow night’s invited audience to the premier of The Stripper,the Richard O’Brien and Richard Hartley adaptation of a Carter Brown thriller,will be given refreshments on the house.
Whether or not the paying public will be able to attend from Thursday night depends on a part-heard application now before the licensing Court.
When the application came before the Licensing Court last Friday objections were received both from residents of nearby flats because of noise,and from the Metropolitan Licensing Inspector,broadly on grounds that a licence would be inappropriate under the laws.
Barry Humphries and wife Dianne in the audience on opening night.Staff photographer
H. G. KIPPAX,Herald Theatre critic’s review
SYDNEY’S newest theatre restaurant opened on Wednesday in the old Kinsela funeral parlour building in Taylor Square,with a new Sydney Theatre Company musical,strongly cast and directed with verve and with a starry audience.
All that was lacking was the restaurant and such amenities as air-conditioning. It was a happy occasion,for all that.
I’ll leave comment on the restaurant (when we get it) to the Eating-out columnists.
The high-ceilinged,terraced auditorium was unduly congested,with its utilitarian tables-for-six,on Wednesday. I hope it won’t always be like that.
I fear that its acoustics,which are cavernous,will be.
The staging presumably is adaptable. For The Stripper it was wide and shallow,the bond enthroned aloft on the left,a half-moon of forestage at the centre,and behind and above it a poky little proscenium stage (more a curtained window than a stage);on the right,other bits and pieces of acting space —notably a ledge.
From the ledge,soon after the lights go down,a young woman plunges to her death;and the show is away.
Richard O’Brien (who wrote the lyrics for “The Stripper”),Jan Moss,and Barry Humphries.Staff photographer
It is a spoof,with music,of one of the prolific Carter Brown’s (Alan Yeates’s) pulp fiction thrillers,part pastiche,part parody of the Hammett-Chandler school (which,if you think I am sneering,began in pulp magazines and what would we do without it?);and of the Bogart-and-bitters cinema of the thirties and forties that sprang from it . . .
We have the tough detective (here Lt Al Wheeler of Pine City’s finest),with black hat,dark suit,crumpled macintosh:chain-smoking,spitting speech like half-chewed bullets . . .
And the sleazy back-streets of the big,corruptive (Pine City in 1958),the half-world of the quick dollar,the quick getaway,- the Mickey Finn ...
And the dames—lacquered dolls tottering on six-inch heels,snaking in and out of clothes all split and mollish,and in and out of bed;nubile,dangerous. . .
Into this half-world goes Al Wheller,a tired knight-errant cynically out to get a half-nelson on justice,with only a dame (but which one?),and the band,and a rousing score to keep him upright.
As advertised in the Herald,August 1982.Sydney Morning Herald
It is good fun as deadpan as the stripper,Deadpan Dolores,herself with just enough exaggeration,as the cliches,clues and corpses accumulate,to keep the chuckles coming.
For belly laughs there are splashes of lyrical clowning;a dumb cop stripping down to a gold lame under-uniform;a corpse sitting up for a last song;a shoot-out that disposes of just about everyone and leaves virtue triumphant,though a thought shop-soiled.
It goes on a bit too long. Parody has its limits,and the predictable plot tangles are unravelled too painstakingly as though we really cared who dunnit.
On the other hand the music and lyrics of Hartley and O’Brien,of Rocky Horror fame,are frequent enough to keep all airborne. They run the gamut from rock to Carmen Miranda and ballad to bebop. They are pungently funny in their own right.
Best of all are the performers —the sultry disciplined attack of Miss Moase as Dolores,absolutely authentic in the icy contempt of her gorgeous strip scene;Mr Donovan,mellow and insinuating in song,impregnably tough when the action hits:John Paramor us the cop in gold lame;Bob Hornery and Jack Webster,each doubling a brace of grotesque,and Robina Board as another:pulchritude from Anne Crigg and Barbara Jane Cole. . .
I don’t know whether the STC ought to-be in this scene,nor much care. It will be a poor heart who does not relax and rejoice at so diverting a result.