A very long festival season

So, I've survived another Fringesanity. And, given that the Fringe proper is now a week longer – taking the total time to just over four weeks (since it begins on a Friday and ends on a Sunday) – as well as the fact that that the weekend before the now-extended Fringe began I went to Melbourne, it's been quite a challenge.

Melbourne

Melbourne was great; we – Miriam and I – went primarily to see the stage production of War Horse (which, while not as great as I'd hoped, was stil worth seeing because of the awesome horse puppetry) and also saw Melbourne Theatre Company's production of Constellations, which was excellent. Then there was the cabaret: the Butterfly Club¹ gala at the Town Hall (which Miriam got tickets to by helping crowdsource their move to a new location) and after party at the club itself one night and a Tom Dickins (one half of The Jane Austen Argument) solo show another.

We did a few touristy things as well, like the Aquarium (good, but lacking in cephalopods); the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), where I saw my first ever actual Oscar statuette²); The Melbourne Zoo (great, but required more walking than I was especially happy about); The National Gallery of Victoria (lots of art, but I had very sore feet from the zoo earlier that day, which undermined the experience somewhat); and the Victorian museum (lots of interesting stuff, including live tarantulas and dead Phar Lap³). I also caught up with a few friends, though not as many as I'd have liked.

So we got back on a plane and came back to Adelaide. And a few days later the 2013 Fringe began.

¹An indie cabaret club that includes regulars such as Sammy J, Gillian Cosgriff, Simon Taylor and The Jane Austen Argument
²They have several won by Australians there.
³For the non-Australians: that's a famous racehorse; he's been taxidermied and put in glass.

Fringesanity

As usual, my schedule was a) jam-packed and b) a mix of shows I'd chosen to see, those I'd been allocated to, and the ones I'd be going to as Miriam's⁴ plus one. But I wouldn't be seeing as much as I'd seen last year, because I had How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying rehearsals one afternoon and two nights a week. And one Saturday night I'd be otherwise occupied by the ceremony and reception for the wedding of my friends Glen and Anna.

Highlights of the Fringe this year included Angry Young Man and Glory Dazed at Holden Street; Sammy J, Tommy Bradson: Sweet Sixteen or the Birthday Party Massacre (review here) and Tim Fitzhigham's two shows Flanders and Swann and The Gambler in the Garden of Unearthly Delights; Le Foulard, Bane, Deanne Smith and Of Dysentery and Madness: A Trapper's Tale at Tuxedo Cat; My One and Only and Raton Laveur at the Bakehouse and Desperately Seeking the Exit at The Austral.

I ony got to four Festival shows, but they were all great. One Man, Two Guvnors was the highlight; I'd seen the NT Live broadcast version last year (which I wrote about here), but I was keen to see it again – so much so I'd bought tickets the day they went on sale and got front row, which I was pretty sure would mean I'd end up stage as part of the audience participation. And I was right.

Laurie Anderson and the Kronos Quartet was the same day as One Man, Two Guvnors; that two was pretty amazing, though more in a "this is moving me in ways I don't understand" sense. I also saw Kamp, which was an astonishing work about a WWII concentration camp; you can read my review of it here. The last Festival show I saw was The Kreutzer Sonata, one of the most talked-about shows this year – its original performer Barry Otto withdrew after the first preview due from exhaustion and local actor Renato Musolino was recruited to take his place, performing with script in hand. By the time I saw it he'd been doing it for a couple of weeks, and the result was amazing; a brilliant rendition of an excellent Tolstoy story.

The downside was it made me want to read all the Russian classics, and I've got precious little reading time these days, and not many of those babies are what you'd call slim volumes.

Glen and Anna's wedding was at St Paul's Cathedral – the big, famous one in North Adelaide near the Adelaide Oval – which was pretty cool. Figuratively, that is; literally it was quite the opposite because we'd had something like a week of mid-thirties during the day and high-twenties over night. Given that both the bride and groom were choral enthusiasts (that's how they met) there was a lot of music, almost all of it with the backing of the pipe organ. The reception was at a bowls club with an Indian buffet – an awesome choice. And I got to catch up with a group of people⁵ I don't get to see all that often.

The final week was actually a bit anticlimactic, mostly because I got sick and didn't end up seeing a couple of shows that I wanted to see; I also missed out on the couple of nights of drinking I'd planned to do at the end of the season because I hadn't had the opportunity to do before. But I made the most of that final night, seeing four shows in a row – 2880 Minutes Late, Desperately Seeking the Exit, The Gambler and Bane – the last of which I had to sprint to 'cause the one before had started late.

It was a lot of fun, as it always is; I didn't seen anything as mindblowing as I've seen some years, but there were some great shows nonetheless, and it's great to be making so much of the time when Adelaide really come alive. And, scary thing is, it won't be that long before they're announcing the first shows that will be going on sale at the 2014 Festival...

⁴She reviews for Kryztoff
⁵The group I call 'the ex-flatmates' because most of them are.