DRACULA’S SIN AND TONIC, Oct 26, 2012 ***

DRACULA’S SIN AND TONIC

Venue and Dates: DRACULA’S, Opens October 26, 2012 for a 12 month run.
Reviewed by Joe Calleri on Oct 26, 2012
Stars: ***

Audiences just can’t get enough of vampires. So, it’s no surprise that, Melbourne iconic theatre restaurant, Dracula’s, is currently celebrating its 30^th anniversary of screams.

You’ve probably driven past it thousands of times without stopping, but the interior of this theatre restaurant is a thing of grim beauty with lots of skulls, and severed hands and body parts and other horror-related paraphernalia. Sure, it’s a bit

You are transported to the restaurant in a full-scale working Ghost Train. I’m not joking. That ride, which brings back many fond memories from Luna Park, is worth the price of admission alone.

Once inside the restaurant, you meet the attentive waiting staff, who in their make up look like escapees from Michael Jackson’s Thriller film clip.

Sin and Tonic– which is into its second week of a fifty two week run - of is a throbbing cocktail of hard rock songs, stand up comedy, and burlesque routines performed by a group of very sexy, charming, skilful and hard-working performers.

The show is divided into two halves, with the second half stronger and more cohesive.

If your taste in theatre runs into bright, flashy, loud and kitsch, then stick your fangs into Sin and Tonic. You won’t be disappointed.

By Joe Calleri

Whiteley’s Incredible Blue … an hallucination by Barry Dickins Oct 13, 2012 ***

 Fortyfivedownstairs – 13 to 23 October 2011
Reviewed by  Joe Calleri
Stars: ****

The word tortured often precedes the word artist. Brett Whiteley, one of Australia’s greatest painters, was a tortured individual - a self-indulgent free spirit, and heroin addict. In Barry Dickins’s Whiteley’s Incredible Blue … an hallucination, we join a shambolic Whiteley in purgatory.

Neil Piggott who poignantly channels the body and spirit of Whiteley in this short piece, often bears a strikingly uncanny physical resemblance to Whiteley, right down to Whiteley’s trademark mop of unruly blonde hair.

Piggott is joined on a cleverly lit and designed stage (Meredith Rogers and Kerry Saxby) by musicians Pietro Fine, Robert George and Robert Calvert who provide a sophisticated, jazzy, percussive soundscape to Whiteley’s sometimes rambling, and barely intelligible rantings on some of his most important art works, drugs, women, art, and artists including Van Gogh, Bacon and Pollock.  

Dickins has written a complex, often moving script, that in equal parts depicts Whiteley as a crazed, drug taking, creative genius, and then as a sensitive, lost, scared, pitiful, misunderstood soul starved for love and genuine connection with those closest to him, including his wife and daughter. These tender moments are among the highlights of a play that is rendered truly memorable by Piggot’s remarkable, chameleon-like depiction of Whiteley. 

by Joe Calleri