What I Almost Saw at the Theatre

Hamer horror

The concert I didn’t see at Melbourne’s Hamer Hall promised to be a good night out: Broadway singer and actor Mandy Patinkin and baritone Nathan Gunn. I’m kicking myself I didn’t go instead to see Wolf Creek: The Musical (pending legal approval)—I hear that at the Numurkah Cultural Centre they sold seats where you could actually see the stage.

The sighted audience are eager. Moving helplessly from side to side in my Hamer chair I struggle to look around the people in front of me to occasionally see parts of the stage. Applause starts early as the houselights dim and rises in volume over the arrival of the two pianists, then leaps upwards again and includes some cheering when Mandy Patinkin comes on then falls a bit for Nathan Gunn. When the performance gets moving the onstage sound seems to be coming from a long way away. A home sound system does better. This is Hamer Hall, Melbourne’s leading concert hall. My seat from where I can’t get a clear view of the stage is in “T” row: that’s Hamer Hall’s “gold class” and cost $129 (plus booking fee).

For Patinkin and Gunn it’s a bank-account-filling one-night-only show in Melbourne, then Auckland, Sydney and Brisbane. Far away from me, seats in the first four rows cost $395 (plus booking fee). That’s meet-and-greet territory. After the show, lucky seat sitters get to meet the sweaty performers, have a “professional photograph” taken with them and receive “a souvenir lanyard”. If you went to Auckland to see them perform, the VIP seats, with the same privileges, were $200 cheaper.

It looks like a full house. Patinkin makes an immediate connection with his audience—not me, I mean the ones who can see him. Though truthfully, when he sings “Agony” I’m really with him. He’s presently playing the non-singing part of CIA officer Saul Berenson in the Homeland television series. Behind him stretches a career in film, television, recording and Broadway. In musical theatre he was Che in the first US Evita, and the original Georges Seurat in Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George. Having appeared recently in Carousel at the Lincoln Center, Nathan Gunn returned to the Metropolitan for a family-friendly Magic Flute for Christmas. Patinkin comes to the stage in casual black and sneakers, Gunn in dinner suit and black tie. Patinkin does the comedy, Gunn is the straight man—with a voice you end the evening wanting to hear more of.

Patinkin happily calls their show a mess, and it is. We get tastes of good things and then some odd choices—more Chicago bar mitzvah than Broadway heights. Patinkin’s “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody” had me waiting for a Red Faces gong—which never came. Instead there was heartfelt applause and a few, in the expensive seats, rising to their feet. Patinkin’s personal anecdotes, which punctuate the evening, don’t lock into a connecting narrative and have little relevance to the song choices.

Patinkin is familiar through his recordings, some of them years old. Compared to the preserved studio voice, the one coming from the stage has lost power and the clarity he had when storytelling through song. On record his “Cat’s in the Cradle” is a slowly paced ballad with hammer-blow accuracy in articulation that tells of a father and son never coming together. It’s a thoughtful mid-record reflection. In the concert it appears early and quickly and vanishes fast. Mid-concert was Gunn’s “Shenandoah”, interspersed with Patinkin reading the Gettysburg Address, then moving straight into “The Ballad of Booth” from Sondheim’s Assassins. With red, white and blue local audiences this may be a show-stopper, but in Melbourne it seemed contrived and wasteful. The time could have been much more interestingly spent exploring song selections from the musicals and operas where they have each excelled.

Patinkin’s humour doesn’t travel well. Interrupting Nathan Gunn with a flat gag in the first of several songs from Camelot seemed churlish, but the audience laughed. In fact they seemed to laugh at everything Patinkin said or did. Being an Australian you get the feeling that the friendly compatriots sitting around you are sometimes obsequious towards overseas performers they have overpaid to see or in situations where they think they are expected to laugh. Ditto behaviour tonight, when it sounds at times as though auditions are being held for a canned-laughter recording session.

At event’s end there is a happy standing ovation, by almost everyone. The show was too personal for this big space. In a smaller auditorium with a better sound system the banter might have sounded friendly instead of cheesy, and the singing more remarkable.

Theatre Travel Advisory for Hamer Hall: Reconsider your need to visit—and don’t try the damp wraps sadly crying in their plastic boxes at the bar.

Ghost busted

It’s 1975, again. Day for day in 2014 we are doing it all over again. Searching online I found an old, almost empty diary of that year which I bought to use this year. In that remarkable twelve months the previous owner only made a single note—for December 23. Around the same time he/she/it was heading off on “Hols” I encountered a childhood ghost in a London theatre.

I was haunted by a persistent memory from my early years which I could cloudily see but couldn’t explain. It was something that happened, I thought, on stage at our local town hall. I could still see the colour of the soft seats and I think I was with my older sister. What haunted me, perhaps had frightened me at the time, was the image of a man, made of paper, collapsing. I was always sure that what I remembered had happened on a stage and hadn’t been a scene from a film.

Unexpectedly, far away in a London theatre and years later, I saw my ghost again. What I saw immediately connected with my childhood memory. It happened and it was like getting to the end of a short story, something that could then be closed and put away.

In late 1975 I was working at Sadler’s Wells and, from the back of the stalls, was watching the D’Oyly Carte production of The Yeomen of the Guard. John Reed was playing the jester, Jack Point. At the end of the cruel comic opera, broken-hearted Point collapses—suddenly, there he was, it was my “paper man” falling down.

Perhaps I had been taken to an amateur G & S production, or a performance by a travelling theatre group, or it might have been a scene from a school or church concert. Perhaps my memory, or child eyes, had turned the jester’s unusual costume into what I thought of as a paper man. Did I even understand the sadness of what I had seen in the performance?

Once the connection was made the recollection dimmed and disappeared, until flicking through my new 1975 diary brought it back.

Upsetting Laramie

In 1998 Matthew Shepard, a gay twenty-one-year-old university student, was brutally killed in Laramie, Wyoming: tied to wooden fence, beaten and left to die. The attack on him was immediately locked into a progressive media template as a hate crime. In 2000, only fourteen months after his death, a play, The Laramie Project, was produced. It was successful and continues to be widely produced by amateur and professional theatre companies worldwide. Its first Australian production was at Belvoir in early 2001. Later the story was told to an even larger audience through an HBO television film. “Hate crimes” had become part of Left knowledge.

This highly publicised “hate crime” created a need for legislation to combat “hate crime”. The Matthew Shepard Act was introduced into the American Congress to combat “hate crime” and was signed into law by President Obama in October 2009.

Now a new book questions everything. The Book of Matt: Hidden Truths About the Murder of Matthew Shepard by Stephen Jimenez argues that the murder involved crystal meth and that far from being a gay hate crime one of the murderers had been sexually involved with the victim. The murder of Matthew Shepard was not the “hate crime” it has come to represent but a case of drugs, violence and robbery.

Though the author does reveal previously undiscussed material, he has also adopted a loose non-fiction writing style which weakens the revisionist case he is making. The progressive liberal establishment applauds the questioning of all orthodoxies, except their own. Liberal America was enchanted with the gay-hate-murder story and to question the facts of what happened, with the emergence of a victim possibly involved in drug selling, is intolerable to the picture they have created of an innocent sexual martyr. It also threatens the support and activist groupings for whom Shepard’s death is their raison d’être.

As a much-lauded play teaching about prejudice and intolerance The Laramie Project doesn’t seem to have been very successful. Angry rights activists organised a prejudiced and intolerant online petition to have American booksellers cancel author signing sessions for The Book of Matt.