Opera Australia Appoints Lyndon Terracini as Artistic Director

Not since Eberhard Waechter controlled the Vienna Staastoper have baritones held so much power in an opera company. Two baritones now hold the highest creative and administrative posts in opera in Australia with Opera Australia’s appointment of baritone and artistic administrator Lyndon Terracini to the newly created post of Artistic Director. The company’s CEO Adrian Collette is also a baritone singer by training. As an administrator Terracini has been artistic director of the Queensland Music Festival and more recently the 2006, 2008 and 2009 Brisbane Festivals.

As a singer Terracini (pictured left sometime in the 1970s as a member of the Sydney Conservatorium of Music Renaissance Players and displaying an impressive pair of nakers) made his operatic debut with Opera Australia (then called The Australian Opera) as Sid in Benjamin Britten’s Albert Herring and sang a variety of roles with them as a career baritone ranging from Strephon in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe to Tarquinius in Britten's The Rape of Lucretia. One of his last roles with the company was Lord Byron (doubling with the role of the Monster) in one of their most impressive contemporary commissions Mer de Glace by Richard Meale. An early example of barihunk Terracini had respectable career singing the standard repertory with the national and state companies but it is his contemporary music performances that established him here and overseas. At the 1976 Adelaide Festival and subsequent Melbourne, Perth, Barossa and Darwin Guitar Festivals he gave outstanding performances in Hans Werner Henze’s solo theatre work El Cimarron. He was invited by the Henze to create the role of Sancho Panza in the world premiere of his adaptation of Paisiello’s opera Don Quichotte at the first Montepulciano Festival in 1979. Terracini stayed in Italy for over a decade but returning to Australia to perform and create new work including the lead role in Brian Howard’s adaptation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis in 1983. Other important premieres included The Ghost Sonata by Aribert Reimann after Strindberg's play for the Opera Factory Zurich in 1983. Terracini (third from right) still in knee high boots but tighter tights in Opera Australia's production of Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia)

Terracini returned to Australia taking the title role in the Australian premiere of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd for the State Opera of South Australia, one of the earliest stagings of the 'opera house' version of the musical. He continued to sing overseas, still working with leading composers and theatre makers. The most notable was the title role in the world premiere of ROSA - A Horse Drama by Louis Andriessen and Peter Greenaway in 1994 for the Netherlands Opera in Amsterdam where, performing nude, he displayed his nackers in earnest.
In 1993 he founded Northern Rivers Performing Arts (NORPA) and in 2002 was awarded the Myer Foundation Group Award. As a member of the Australia Council’s music committee of the Performing Arts Board and his commitment to securing performances of contemporary music would enable Terracini to have a keen understanding of the issues surrounding the commissioning, creation and performance of new 'performance' works. Interviewed on ABC Radio National the following day Terracini spoke of new works being part of the company repertoire at a modest rate, suggesting one new opera per season. He also enthused about digital technology being applied to opera production. Terracini's appointment commences in October.

Happy Birthday Hugues Cuénod

Hughes-Adhémar Cuénod (born Vevey Switzerland, 26 June 1902) is 107 today.

His ancestry is Swiss, with links to the English - the Marlboroughs no less - nobility. Cuénod lived his entire life at his family residence, Château de Lully. In later years he shared the home with his sister, who tended the estate orchards which provided fruit for a well known local liqueur.

Cuénod still resides there, supported by his life partner, Alfred Augustin (41 years his junior, you cradle snatcher Hughes!). In 2007, at the age of 104, Cuénod and Augustin signed a civil union after the changes in Swiss law giving same-sex couples legal recognition.

Cuénod made very famous Metropolitan Opera debut at the age of 80 (as the Emperor in Turandot) and continued to perform, more often as narrator of works like Poulenc's Histoire de Babar.

Cuénod can also be glimpsed here as the Emperor in his Metropolitan Opera debut in the 'riddle' scene between Eva Marton (Turandot) and Placido Domingo (Calaf).

Monteverdi's chaconne for two voices Zefiro Torna is sung by Paul Derenne and Cuénod, when he was a mere 35 years old. Cuénod's young voice is so free and responsive to this music, and already shows the interest in early music he carried his entire life. The famous composition teacher Nadia Boulanger is the pianist (!) in this endearingly inauthentic performance (notice that Derenne comes in too early at one point). Recorded in 1937 it comes from a set of 78 rpm recordings of Monteverdi madrigals and vocal ensembles that regenerated interest in his music. Cuénod continued to perform and record early music. One of most famous recordings was of the Couperin Leçons de Ténèbres (Stravinsky owned a copy of the recording and wrote his Cantata specifically for Cuénod's voice).

Review - Lobby Hero - Red Stitch Actors Theatre

Foyer Pleasure

As with Kenneth Lonergan’s earlier success This Is Our Youth, his Lobby Hero is another affectionate comedy about a nerd who, despite the odds, overcomes his nerdiness, scores a moral triumph and even impresses a girl. Set in the lobby of a Manhattan apartment building, wherein resides Mrs. Heinvald, a woman of generous affection beloved of the local cop Bill (Daniel Frederiksen), who visits her each night while doing his beat. The apartment security guard Jeff (Tim Potter) is the most insecure security guard ever! A would-be conversationalist Jeff only stops talking long enough to put his foot in his mouth. Try as he may, he only says the wrong thing, putting Bill’s rookie assistant Dawn (Eryn-Jean Norvill), who Jeff fancies, offside during one of Bill’s nocturnal calls to the Heinvald apartment. Jeff also blabbers his way into the confidence of his boss William (Christopher Kirby) and uncovers some potentially embarrassing secrets.

Jeff's innocent attempts at winning people's admiration and confidence lead to moral dilemma for everyone in the play. William, despite his officiousness and constant proclaiming of his fair-mindedness commits an act of dishonesty as does his buddy Bill. Their juniors, Jeff and Dawn, see things more plainly. Jeff wrestles with the potentially disastrous information while Dawn wrestles it out of him.

Not strictly laugh-out-loud comedy, the play derives its humour from exposing the hidden motives in the situation rather than the situation itself. The scenes are not particularly funny in themselves. Potter flinches like a scalded puppy each time his attempts at camaraderie backfire and suffers agonies of self-consciousness. Denis Moore’s production mixes the table-turning farce with more serious comedy. The scenes between Jeff and William as Jeff's jokes backfire build up the pathos of the poor schlemiel and are intensified when Jeff is intimidated by Bill. The faint glimmer of romance between Jeff and Dawn brings a feeling of relief as well as an actually funny scene.

Dropping his voice half an octave and appearing ten years older Frederiksen is amazing as the gruff, old cop hiding his duplicity behind his badge. Norvill gives the impression, by often avoiding eye-contact with Bill, of insecurity different from Jeff''s and creates with Potter some convincingly 'low-voltage' sexual tension between the anxious pair. Lobby Hero poses a few problems in genre definition, how much of a comedy is it intending to be? The production, however, was highly polished and cleanly focused - of the the case with Red Stitch due to the intimacy of the acting space.

picture: Jodie Hutchinson

Lobby Hero (2004) by Kenneth Lonergan
Jeff - Tim Potter
William - Christopher Kirby
Bill - Daniel Frederiksen
Dawn - Eryn-Jean Norvill
Director - Denis Moore
Desinger - Shaun Gurton

Red Stitch Actors Theatre, St Kilda
10 June - 11 July 2009
130 minutes (including 1 interval)

Review - August: Osage County - Melbourne Theatre Company

A Family That Flays Together Stays Together
Even before the play begins Dale Ferguson’s impressive set imposes itself on you, like the doom-laden palace of a Greek tragedy. A shambling, three storied old house, which has undergone theatrical open-heart surgery, opening it up to reveal the chambers where so much blood has flown. Written for one of the world’s great acting ensembles; the Steppenwolf Theatre Company this is a play in the great American pedigree of family tragedies of Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Eugene O'Neill on the stage and the family melodramas played out in television soap opera. This has the feel of a piece of writer's theatre, actor's theatre and designer's theatre. It unfurls like a chronology of classic, 20th century American theatre. In the opening scene there is a homage to O'Neill's James and Mary Tyrone in the Beverly and Violet while Mattie Fae (Deidre Rubenstein) browbeats her husband and son with the ferocity of any one of Tennessee Williams' mothers and even the sleazy Steve (Sean Taylor) is reminiscent of a David Mamet sleaze.

The play has a sense of fatalism; even the gentle seeming opening scene where the family patriarch and one-time famous poet Beverly Weston (George Whaley) muses about his idol T. S. Eliot having committed his wife to an insane asylum has deeper meaning. As soon as Beverly’s drug-addled wife Violet (Robyn Nevin) enters we realise those musings were tinged with regret that he didn’t do the same to Violet. Violet is revealed as one of the cruelest wives and mothers, a woman outrunning anything Tennessee Williams or Edward Albee could have imagined. Love in this family is more like Stockholm Syndrome. Each of the cankers that gnawed at Beverly and Violet throughout their marriage is inherited by their three daughters, one canker each. To reveal what they are would would spoil the deliciously mounting horror of the second and third acts.

August: Osage County lives up to the plaudits as one of the most compelling plays of recent history. It is made more compelling by Fergusson’s visually (and metaphorically) multi-layered set and Simon Phillip’s detailed direction of the many full-blown arguments and introspective scenes, often on the middle level of the set, where a few characters gather to debrief after a catastrophe. But no matter where they go onstage either en-masse or in pairs, Phillips directs the focus on any part of the set they dwell. Similarly Matt Scott's lighting seems to illuminate without spotlighting the action anywhere and suggests the heat and gloom of the house where Violet has banished air-conditioning and boarded up the windows. Even when the play begins and the set has been on view as the audience arrives and take their seats, the opening scene instantly rivets your attention to Beverly, picked out in his gloomy study explaining the household set-up to the new housekeeper Johnna (Tess Masters). Another moment is a family dinner, where the extended family are assembled around the table so that the focus is on Violet’s face as she connives yet another family squabble. As Barbara, the eldest of Violet’s three daughters Jane Menelaus captures the image of a woman carrying shards of both her mother and father and which begin to assume her own personality. "All women become like their mothers," said Oscar Wilde, "that is their tragedy" and that tragedy is writ large in Barbara.

An actor himself, the author, Tracey Letts, has bestowed on every member of the large cast a memorable personality, no matter how briefly they occupy the actual stage. Beverly looms like Agamemnon's spectre over the House of Atreus and even an incidental character like the local Sheriff (Tony Nikolakopoulos) is made familiar long before he appears. In one of her most protean characterisations Nevin is through-and-through the cantankerous, pill-popping matriarch. Whether shambling around in a barbiturate fog or assuming vicious command of her family as they cower before her at the dinner table, it is a compelling performance. Letts’s equally compelling script and well-drawn characters brings out the best in the other actors. August: Osage County deserves the accolades it has received its inherent brilliance all of which are made abundantly clear in this production.

August: Osage County by Tracey Letts (2007)
Karen Weston - Heidi Arena
Jean Forham - Kellie Jones
Johnna Monevata - Tess Masters
Barbara Forham - Jane Menelaus
Bill Fordham - Robert Menzies
Violet Weston - Robyn Nevin
Sheriff Deon Gilbeau - Tony Nikolakopoulos
Charlie Aiken - Roger Oakley
Little Charles Aiken - Michael Robinson
Mattie Fae Aiken - Deidre Rubenstein
Ivy Weston -Rebekah Stone
Steve Heidebrecht - Sean Taylor
Beverly Weston - George Whaley
Director - Simon Phillips
Designer - Dale Ferguson
Lighting Designer - Matt Scott
Sound Designer - David Franzke
Playhouse Theatre, The Arts Centre 23 May - 4 July 2009 (season extended to, ironically, American Independence Day!)

pictured: Robyn Nevin (picture Jeff Busby)

Review - Optimism - Malthouse

2009 marks the 250th anniversary of Voltaire's hilarious satire, published in 1759 and Malthouse have coincidentally mounted an adaptation by Tom Wright. Wright sets the story in the present and makes very few changes to Voltaire's plot and characters. For some reason the famous but unnamed and mono-buttocked Old Woman (Alison Whyte) is christened by Woods as Emily and the kindly Anabaptist becomes a Salvation Army lady who meets her death, not in the Lisbon earthquake but being thrown from a plane attacked by terrorists. In this modern analogy Candide's lonely wanderings involve a lot of air travel. A real lot! Every second scene seems to take place on an plane - Candide's preferred airline is no doubt Volt-Air - (Boom-Boom!).

Pangloss (Barry Otto) is dressed as a Pierrot clown and manically espouses his sham philosophy in contrast to the memorably melancholic French clown depicted by Watteau in Voltaire's own time. Candide (Frank Woodley) is dressed as a Grimaldi clown, the the chattering, ad-libber beloved of Dickens and the precursor of his own stage persona. In Voltaire's story Candide is made to suffer horribly while the rest of the characters live and die (often more than once) with comic book unreality. Pangloss is cured of syphilis and resurrected from the dead, as is Candide's beloved Cunégonde (Caroline Craig) and her brother (interesting that with all these curings and bringings-back from the dead mean old Voltaire couldn't grow the Old Woman's lost buttock back!). Instead of Candide's bitter reflections as he tries to apply Pangloss's absurd 'chin-up' reasoning to the log-jam of misfortunes that befall him Woodley indulges his well-known clown character in stand up routines.

Nearly all of the interpolated songs don't work in the same way contemporary pop songs had been used in previous Malthouse music theatre. Often they are delivered in a very low-key manner, often emphasising the irony. They like Candide's stand-up routines and a lot of the jiggery-pokerery of the production seem to gloss over a hollowness which has been pointed elsewhere as possibly an intentional comment on the hollowness of the ludicrous philosophy Voltaire set out to satirise. What shows up the hollowness of the optimistic philosophy most is the speech by the Old Woman as she relates her story (including how she lost one buttock). As acted by Whyte it is a supremely well realised mono drama. The Old Woman has suffered long and hard and, unlike Candide, stared at her misery and contemplated suicide. Only the instinctive will to live, that still sparked somewhere inside her, made her go on. That sharp smack of pragmatic reality works as well as any of the other and better remembered silliness in Voltaire's story and worked as well in this production.

Optimism (2009) by Tom Wright after Candide, ou l'Optimisme (1759) by Voltaire
A Malthouse, Edinburgh International Festival, Sydney Theatre Company and the Sydney Festival production
Director - Michael Kantor
Candide - Frank Woodley
Cunégonde - Caroline Craig
Cacambo - Francis Greenslade
Paquette - Amber McMahon
Cunégonde's Brother / A Slave - Hamish Michael
Doctor Pangloss - Barry Otto
The Old Woman - Alison Whyte
Martin - David Woods
other roles played by the cast
Original Music - Iain Grandage
Merlyn Theatre, CUB Malthouse
22 May - 13 June 2009 followed by productions at the 2009 Edinburgh International Festival and the Sydney Theatre Company during 2010
135 minutes (including 1 interval)

Review - Melburnalia No 2 - White Whale Theatre

In 2007 White Whale Theatre commissioned Melburnalia, five short plays about various Melbourne suburbs. The idea was good and the plays, although disparate in style, sat well against each other. Five more plays Melburnalia 2 have been commissioned with a unifying theme of trams and again the styles vary from almost sketch comedy to a purely vocal evocation of place based on Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood.

Indigenous and migrant experiences feature as well beginning with Birrarung, by Andrea James, where the spirit of a Wurundjeri man evokes a memory of public transport with conductors instead of fare evasion officers and the legendary Flinders Street Station Ballroom as a kind of White Man’s Dreaming. Hoa Pham’s Maribyrnong powerfully contrasts the post war migrant settlement camps with the severity of the modern detention centres. A visiting Vietnamese student has been detained due to her working more hours than her student visa allocated. In this suburban detention centre she meets a Greek national who has been resident in Australia since he was two years old but who had not formalised his citizenship. Between them a ghostlike, elderly migrant begs to be let into this awful place because, according to her parents, these 'holding centres' were nurturing places. That this takes place in the suburbs - the Maribyrnong tram rattles past! - instead of somewhere hidden in the outback gives this playlet a nasty edge.

Aiden Fennessy’s Mentone is a ‘choral symphony’ which cleverly incorporates Under Milk Wood into its text by way of the local drama society rehearsing the famous play. Even more so than in Melburnalia, the older history of each suburb informs the plays. Preston's 19th century origins as a pig farming and bacon curing centre underpins Kit Lazeroo's play which has a veiled attack on the modern Real Estate industry.

Danny Katz's Caulfield is a sketchy sketch where thinly drawn caricatures of squabbling thirty-somethings showing off in a desirable yuppie suburb tries to either emulate or encapsulate a David Williamson snob comedy ending with the infantilism of their pretensions given a surreal twist.

The juxtaposing the past and present and, particularly in the plays about Maribyrnong and Preston, works particularly well, pointing the way to a Melburnalia franchise with more ways of exploring our suburbia.

Melburnalia No 2 (2009)
Birrarung by Andrea James
Maribyrnong by Hoa Pham
Caulfield by Danny Katz
Preston by Kit Lazeroo
Mentone by Aidan Fennessy
Director - David Mence
Fortyfivedownstairs, 45 Flinders lane, Melbourne
20 May - 7 June 2009
120 minutes (including 1 interval)
White Whale Theatre

Melburnalia 1 on DVD and (parts thereof) in Revival at the MTC
In the past few years Melbourne's independent theatre has had an enormous boost thanks to the scripts of many of the plays written and performed being put into print. While the scripts of Melburnalia have yet to be published, the production has been made available on DVD. Filmed in performance with multiple camera angles, some fudged through trying to be discreet, but with acceptable sound and eminently watchable accounts of the plays in performance. I was very happy to revisit Melburnalia this way and re-watch the writers forum where the authors spoke about their work which is included on the DVD.
Melburnalia (1) included Lally Katz's wonderful little two-hander The Fag from Zagreb which featured one of the earliest sightings of her enigmatic Apocalypse Bear (who certainly has a thing for gay boys). That terrible teddy has now been developed into an Apocalypse Bear trilogy, including a revival of The Fag from Zagreb, at the Melbourne Theatre Company's new Lawler Studio between 8-24 October this year. Meanwhile the DVD of Melburnalia is $10.00 and is a hopefully the first example of recording the very exciting work happening in independent theatre at this time. The plays in Melburnalia were good but, like the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Review - A Little Night Music - Opera Australia

My Year Without Sex

As music theatre becomes less willing to risk alienating an audience by being too eloquent or too intelligent Sondheim’s classic shows stand out like beacons. A Little Night Music is mid-period Sondheim and, like mid-period Verdi, has musical and theatrical assurance right from the start. Using operatically inspired motives and multi-layered ensembles and with an ability to write lyrics that have the dead-pan wit of W.S. Gilbert on a good day, his scores are works of genius. The songs in A Little Night Music bristle with rhyming patterns that are still unmatched after thirty years. Middle-aged lawyer Frederik Egerman (Robert Grubb), for example, is contemplating how to make his 18-year-old wife Anne (Lucy Maunder) overcome her fear of consummating their 11 month marriage, “A) I could put on my nightshirt or sit disarmingly B) in the nude,” he ponders,

"That might be effective, my body’s all right,
but not in perspective and not in the light."

Or perhaps he will read a suggestive book in her presence and give her a hint

“In view of her fancy for something Romantic,
De Sade is too chancy and Dickens too frantic.
Stendhal would ruin the plan of attack,
as there isn’t much blue in the Red and the Black."

This wittiness runs through the lyrics of every song and Sondheim’s’ score - nearly all of it waltz-time - is so detailed and polished in contrast to Hugh Wheeler’s rather stodgy book which at times is very saggy and appears beyond the help of director or cast. Sondheim's best work is founded in musical pastiche. The quasi-operatic Sweeny Todd is based on Victorian melodrama and its musical form is derived from 19th century music theatre like Michael Balfe'sand vincent Wallace's sentimental ballad style operas, certainly Gilbert and Sullivan's complicated patter solos and ensembles, Music Hall and even at times thunderous Verdi-esque arias. Pacific Overtures dips into Japanese music and, with the approach of the Western Powers, nationalistic music parodies. Assassins too frames each of its episodes in the popular musical style of the era. A Little Night Music is the first of his shows to recreate music of another era rather than to recreate the formulaic style associated with a Broadway musical. Madame Armefeldt’s song reminiscing about her many liaisons is a stumbling waltz, as though it were an old lady too, dominated by a plaintive oboe but the song shimmers like a golden memory due to a celesta underlining the melody. Only a few minutes long but it has such detail and individuality that compares with Ravel again or Sibelius’s Valse Triste. Another ingenious device is the Liebeslieder quintet that appear and sing memories and unspoken thoughts of the other characters.

The programme reproduces Scandinavian landscape paintings from the time the story is set and these appear to have influenced Roger Kirk’s sets, gauzy curtains painted to look like pallid watercolours that accentuate the sumptuous and detailed costumes. The melancholy of Scandinavian Symbolist art is an apt influence on the melancholy in so much of the story. At the end of the 19th century too, the sexual/social order, as Madame Armfeldt laments, was breaking down; sexual anxiety in Scandinavia was the order of the day too as the proceedings in A Little Night Music are unashamedly erotic. Actress Desiree Armfeldt (Sigrid Thornton) and her coterie fuss and flounder about trying to organise their sex lives and pipped to the post by the Egerman’s no nonsense maid Petra who gets it on with Madame Armfeldt’s footman Frid (Byron Watson) within a few hours. Carl Magnus and his wife even have a mildly Strindburgian love-hate relationship, the musical comedy equivalent of Edgar and Alice in The Dance of Death.

The cast is best in the central and outermost roles. The vocal quintet (Julia Malczewski, Jacqueline Dark, Jane Parkin, Benjamin Rasheed and Andrew Moran) are drawn from the company ranks and give a magnificent account of their Brahms Libeslieder Waltz-inspired music. The rest of the cast is variable as it ascends toward the principal role.

As Madame Armfeldt Nancye Hayes adopts a Euro-pudding accent that when not French or German tinged is fruity in the same way Hermione Gingold’s (the roles creator) was. Her character and even appearance also bears an uncanny resemblance to late career Maggie Smith. Katrina Retallick’s interpretation of Countess Charlotte was effective enough but the bitterness and self-reproach in her lines were glossed over and, as with most of the spoken dialogue lagged and lumbered along. Grubb, in a Trotsky beard and, at times a Trotsky voice sings/speaks a lot of his songs, often off the beat and only sounding and holding notes at the ends of phrases where he displays briefly an attractive voice.

One of the best, if perhaps not the best, performances is Matthew Robinson as Henrik. In his bitter introductory song he shaped the words and the music with astonishing clarity. Kate Maree Hoolihan as Petra was in the same league, her song done with a earthy tang and brassy vulgarity, right against, as Sondheim might have intended, the charming but ineffective waltzes that accompany everyone else’s sexual frustrations. Both WAAPA graduates too, they must put something in the food at the canteen there; everyone comes out of the place with such so polished and assured voices.

As Desiree Sigrid Thornton does carry the show with her winning interpretation. Famous as a role for an actress who can sing it is still a difficult part to bring off and Thornton makes Desiree a minor Arkadina with ‘actressy’ mannerisms; pouting and purring (with the same voice she used for the actress in The Blue Room) to Egerman and acidic to her domineering mother. But as the complications set in her Desiree is a deeply anxious and vulnerable woman. Her famous “Send in the Clowns” is an admission of failure and needs to be her final breakdown. The famous song is the antithesis of the big number, an introvert moment coming from an extrovert and yet it has all the impact of a traditional show-stopper. Thornton handles it exceptionally well, self-effacing then distraught and finally tearful and all without overplaying or milking the sentiment. "Send in the Clowns" also tries to become a waltz number but because Desiree is just too unhappy to launch the waltz rhythm, instead she repeats a halting - almost sobbing - and repeated phrase that sounds like the beginning of a waltz. "Isn't it rich!" ... "Aren't we a pair?" ... that introduction to the songs is similar to the introduction to The Blue Danube theme but Sondheim lets it fall away each time as Desiree tries to sing what should be the big 'sob' number and achieves so much more with, instead, a brilliant understatement. Thornton is right on the money in the way she sings this ingenious number.

There is a good body of strings in the orchestra of about twenty players and the richly employed and varied instruments are heard to their best advantage. Conductor Andrew Greene leads the majority of songs in the manner of Victor Silvester, a 'strict-tempo', one-two-THREE waltz beat which gives a forward, even fast sounding momentum to the songs. This is a lavish production, with perhaps and uneven cast but in any case the real star is Sondheim's incredible score.

A Little Night Music (1973)
Desiree Armfeldt - Sigrid Thornton
Madame Armfeldt - Nancye Hayes
Anne Egerman - Lucy Maunder
Fredrika Armfeldt - Erica Lovell
Petra - Kate Maree Hoolihan
Fredrik Egerman - Robert Grubb
Henrik Egerman - Matthew Robinson
Count Carl Magnus - Ben Lewis
Charlotte Malcolm - Katrina Retallick
Frid - Byron Watson
Mrs Anderssen - Jacqueline Dark
Mrs Nordstrom - Julia Malczewski
Mrs Segstrom - Jane Parkin
Mr Lindquist - Andrew Moran
Mr Erlanson - Benjamin Rasheed
Orchestra Victoria
Conductor - Andrew Greene
Director - Stuart Maunder
Designer - Roger Kirk Lighting
Director - Trudy Dalgleish
Choreographer - Elizabeth Hill
19 - 30 May 2009
State Theatre, The Arts Centre
165 minutes (including 1 interval)
sildeshow via Australian Stage Online

Pictured: Erica Lovell, Sigrid Thornton & Nancye Hayes. Picture by Jeff Busby