See the article in its original context here.

WHEN friends of Melbourne photographer Morganna Magee started having babies, it opened her eyes to parts of life she had previously not seen.

Not the anticipated world of feeding, nappies and sleep deprivation – the unexpected ways in which motherhood has become a “commercial entity”.

“Advertising really plays on being a mother now,” she said. “My friends were feeling a lot of pressure and guilt about whether they were doing the right things.”

So Magee decided to do something about it, picked up her camera and created an exhibition celebrating everyday mums doing a “pretty amazing job”.

Her third solo exhibition, Motherhood, opening at fortyfivedownstairs on Tuesday, aims to give mums back a little of their power.

Magee has beautifully captured women from a range of cultural and social backgrounds in different stages of motherhood.

Among them is a woman pregnant with her first child, a single mother of four girls, and an older woman with an adult son who has Down syndrome.

“Once you look at them and read about them, any pre-conceived notions and judgments fade away,” Magee said.
————
MOTHERHOOD, fortyfivedownstairs, Flinders Lane, city, February 7-18.

The Age interviews Dan Giovannoni – see the article in its original context here.

PLAYWRIGHT Dan Giovannoni is suspicious of the tolerance afforded minorities in contemporary Australia, even though he is a member of generation Y that he acknowledges has little direct experience of prejudice.

”I could live my whole life quite happily in a lefty bubble having a great time with friends and family,” he says.

Giovannoni shared in last year’s fringe festival award for best emerging writer for the comedy Cut Snake and won the the Malcolm Robertson Prize for his new play, Two by Two, which is at fortyfivedownstairs next month.

It is a critique of the norms of middle Australia in an allegory based on Noah’s Ark, set in a cataclysmic near future after a devastating plague and mass flooding brought on by torrential rain.

Survivors are being recruited to board a ship to safety but the play’s three characters have been left behind. They are a married gay couple played by Gary Abrahams and Paul Blenheim, and an ill single woman played by Zahra Newman.

”They are not wanted on the boat and have been told to wait behind to die,” Giovannoni says. ”Instead, they decide to fight society’s rejection.”

A possible key to their salvation is a baby found in the floodwaters because families are accepted on the ship. The three wrestle over who will care for it.

”People are always talking about the worth of different people and the role they play in society,” Giovannoni says. ”But this makes their worth explicit, even if it is in an allegory.”

The couple have been happy and not faced any great discrimination.

”But the limits imposed for the rescue mean it makes no sense to take a gay couple on board,” he says. ”But is the ability to have babies all that society needs? What happens to the gays, the sick and black people and anyone else who doesn’t fit into this utilitarian vision for the future?”

He says the play is about a relationship and how the love that binds it is tested by the external situation. ”It’s about the struggle to believe in your own love when the rest of the world doesn’t.”

Giovannoni graduated from Melbourne University’s creative arts course with the play’s director, Stephen Nicolazzo, and attended the one-year graduates course in playwrighting at Sydney’s National Institute of Dramatic Art in 2010.

”That’s when I became serious about my writing,” he says. He is writer in residence at Red Stitch Actors Theatre and is taking Cut Snake and a new show to Sydney this year. He also hopes to have another work in the Next Wave Festival.

His doubts about the role of minorities in society were fuelled during rehearsals for Two by Two by the outcry caused by opposition frontbencher Teresa Gambaro’s call for migrants to be taught how to use deodorant.

”What are we supposed to do – make up a welcome-to-Australia pack with a stick of under-arm? I don’t understand what benefit such statements bring to anybody except to contribute to passive racism.”

Newman migrated to Queensland from Jamaica as a teenager and attended the Victorian College of the Arts drama course in 2006. She agrees minorities are widely accepted now but says there are still concerns that prejudice persists ”deep down”.

”But the play is also about a relationship and what happens to two people during a global crisis,” she says. ”It’s not about a specifically gay relationship – the arguments and conflicts could be between any couple.”

Newman has been extraordinarily busy since graduating from VCA four years ago and earning her first main-stage role in the Melbourne Theatre Company’s production of Joanna Murray-Smith’s Rockabye in 2009, directed by Simon Phillips.

She was cast in two MTC shows last year, the one-woman show Random and the American ensemble hit Clybourne Park – impressive for a recent graduate.

”It was a challenging year,” she says. ”Performing alone on stage was a milestone and Clybourne Park was one of the best experiences I’ve had – it was freakishly good.”

The ”massive difference” between main-stage and independent work is the level of financial support. ”The strength of commitment is comparable because the desire to make the art is just as strong,” Newman says.

She will work with Phillips again when rehearsals start in Sydney for the new musical, An Officer & a Gentleman, that opens in May and transfers to Melbourne in September. She plays one of the cadets.

”I have never done a show that runs for months and months,” she says. ”I expect to learn a lot because it will involve different techniques from drama, which I have most experience in.”

For more information about Two by Two, see here.

Each exhibitor creates their work using a common yet versatile medium – paper. Continuously intriguing, the medium is flexible yet strong and utilised in myriad ways by artists all over the world. Animated, crushed, folded, torn, twisted, cut, punctured, burnt and stitched.

Image: Function by GRAHAM HAY Craft Journals and other documents 11 x 25 x 25cm Photo courtesy of Victor France

Twenty artists are in the running for prizes totaling more than $50,000 as part of the Victorian Government’s 2012 Victorian Indigenous Art Awards.

The awards, now in their seventh year, profile the diversity of Indigenous arts practice in Victoria and showcase the uniqueness of south-east Australian Aboriginal art.

Premier and Minister for the Arts Ted Baillieu said the Victorian Indigenous Art Awards played an important role in celebrating and promoting the work of the State’s Indigenous artists and our unique Koorie culture.

“There are many voices and many generations of Indigenous artists in Victoria working to uphold traditions and to express their culture in new and distinct ways,” Mr Baillieu said.

“The shortlisted artists work across a variety of mediums, from traditional painting and weaving techniques to photography, sculpture, video and street art.”
Mr Baillieu said the 27 shortlisted works were selected from 132 entries for this year’s awards.

The awards, which give prizes across five categories, are open to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists living in Victoria.  This year’s finalists include both regional and metropolitan artists, past winners and several who have not been shortlisted before. Seven of the shortlisted artists have two artworks on the shortlist.

The finalists were selected by an expert judging panel comprising Dr Treahna Hamm, an Aboriginal artist; Clinton Nain, a Torres Strait Islander artist; and Jason Smith, Director of Heide Museum of Art.

The winners of the 2012 Victorian Indigenous Art Awards will be announced on 9 March 2012 and fortyfivedownstairs is proud to host the finalist exhibition, open to the public from 10 to 31 March 2012.

We are delighted to announce the finalists in the Victorian Indigenous Art Awards 2012:

Paola Balla – Footscray (two works)
Katen Boy
Sacred Ibis

Trevor Turbo Brown – Brunswick (two works)
Owl Dreaming
Every Dog Have Their Day

Megan Cadd – Doncaster East
The Couch

Teddy Chessels – Preston
The Lone Canoe

Jody Croft – Swan Hill
Rainbow Energy

Katrina Doolan – Mildura
Babies Are Our Future

Gwendoline Garoni – Reservoir
Regrowth in my Tribal Country

Daniel King – Fitzroy (two works)
Sports Star
Full-Blooded

Jason B King – Sale
Agrotis Infusia

Brian Martin – Seddon (two works)
Methexical Countryscape: Wurundjeri #2
Methexical Countryside: Wiradjuri #2

Glenda Nicholls – Northcote
Ochre Net

Steaphan Paton – Fitzroy North
My Bullock (pictured)

Simon Penrose -  California Gully
Eyes Are The Windows To The Soul

Eva Ponting – Shepparton
Turtle Spirit Dreaming

Wayne Qilliam – Point Cook
Guided by Spirits

Reko Rennie – South Melbourne
Message Stick (Gold)

Dallas Scott – Pakenham (two works)
Storyteller Fisherman
Smoke Signal

Lyn Warren – California Gully
Sunset

Gloria Whalan – Yallourn (two works)
Guulaangga The Frog
A Night of Remembrance

Naretha Williams – Coburg (two works)
Self Portrait 1 – SLIP Series
Self Portrait 3 – SLIP Series

Weaving together elements of text, image and sound A Little Room is a startling visual and aural performance piece. Writer-animateur Michelle St. Anne has created a work of heightened detail that will transport you between the ephemeral world of memory, and the not so present.

A Little Room takes you into the lives of three women at different stages; sharing the joys and agony of new found love… and of love lost. Caught in a web of their own making, they wait for the spell to break. These are their stories.  Stories about the struggle to cope, about temporary instability, and how memory is instrumental in finding comfort.

From the company that brought you Man 40 seeks Woman with Good Legs and Billie, a girl a swing and underpants returns to Melbourne with A  Little Room which enjoyed  a highly successful debut in 2011 at CarriageWorks Sydney; running this March at fortyfivedownstairs for two weeks only.

Performed by Susan Miller, Kate Gorman, Michelle St Anne, Gabrielle Quin.

Created by Michelle St Anne, Designed by Joel West, Lighting by Michelle St. Anne and Jared Lewis, Film and Sound by Jared Lewis, Music by Alister Spence Trio (with permission).

Time Out Melbourne interviews Zoey Dawson – see the article in its original context here.

Actor and director Zoey Dawson presents an all-female production of Romeo and Juliet at fortyfivedownstairs, sharing the space with an all male production of Henry IV.

How did you come to this play?
I’d never seen a production that was really concerned with Juliet herself. Romeo and Juliet usually come as a couple. I wanted to yank them apart and just look at what happens to her. The fact that she meets a boy at a party and four days later she kills herself. What is that?

This production emerged out of an honours year project, is that right?
That was in 2010. I’m calling it an extensive development period. Before then I wasn’t so keen on it, really. But after I was assigned to it at university, and read it through, I was like, shit, this is a 13-year-old girl, and yet it’s part of this great romantic mythology.

I thought, OK, so my cousin is 13, and she’s obsessed with Twilight. I look at her, and other 13-year-olds, and I think: she is a child. How did this romantic mythology build up around a child? That was where it started, when I realised Juliet was 13.

You have a cast of only six – has the script been cut much?
I’ve adapted it so that it’s a bit shorter. But we’re very much using Shakespeare’s text. It’s presented as six actors interacting with the story and with the whole mythology that surrounds the script, and seeing what comes out of that.

And the prism is the female experience?
Yeah – to have women create their interpretation of the men – as in, I’m a woman, but this is my understanding of masculinity, of what men do, and how men interact with women. It’s really interesting to create the balance of energy where a woman is empowered to perform masculinity, because it’s so often the other way around. There are so many male drag queens who perform femininity. I find it really empowering. To watch a man perform the role of a woman, or a woman perform the role of a man, is to understand that actor’s understanding of the other sex.

It’s interesting because Juliet, the main female character, is perhaps the most life-like character in the play.
That’s exactly where this adaptation came from. Juliet is the only real person. So we put her right in the middle of the stage. The set consists of a box in the middle of this very theatrical space, but inside that box, where Juliet is, is the real world.

There are six actresses, and one of them plays Juliet, and the other five play Romeo, as well as all the other characters. So Juliet is the only person who doesn’t change, who isn’t an actor performing these roles. All the other actors are changing roles, they’re fighting over who is playing who. It’s all very performative, but it’s all happening around Juliet.

I can’t believe you didn’t you call it 5xRomeo? Hilarious. Although I guess that misses the point.
And I thought about it too! But, well, I didn’t want to rip off the Hayloft Project too much. I considered calling it Juliet and Juliet, because the play is so much about Juliet. But I didn’t want to get too gimicky. And I really like Shakespeare’s original title: The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. I like what it adds to our understanding of the story – what is an excellent and lamentable tragedy? It heightens our awareness of the mythology.

And so you see Romeo more as a composite? He doesn’t develop as a character in the same way as Juliet?
Juliet is the same person through the whole play; she has the same values; and though her character changes and grows, she’s incredibly steadfast. Romeo on the other hand changes all the time. In fact, I found in the script that there are these five completely different Romeos. I think it’s interesting with these Romeos to think about the transformative power of love, about how you meet someone and they can completely change you. But anyway, I just took that it’s natural conclusion, having five different actresses play Romeo.

As though Shakespeare were writing in different poetic registers to achieve different effects at different times?
He starts out, for example, Romeo number one, as the Romeo who is still in love with Rosalind – we call him Emo Romeo. He’s sort of mopey – “Oh, I’m so depressed.” Then as soon as he sees Juliet at the party he becomes a different person. He’s actually a different person. There’s no trace of the Romeo that you saw before. He’s impulsive and spontaneous.

Has Juliet been obscured because her language is not as high-sounding or poetically embellished as some of the male characters?
The other characters have very high, very flowery poetic language, because you can afford to be flowery and poetic in your language when you’re not actually trying to do something, when it’s just rhetoric.

Like Romeo on the balcony – he’s just waxing lyrical. Juliet on the other hand is always trying to do something. She’s the one who constantly has to make choices and understand these things that are put upon her. “What am I going to do? What will happen if this happens?” She’s always trying to solve the puzzle that she’s in. A lot of the other characters are just romanticising or feeling sorry for themselves. Juliet is the character who says, “Yes, but what are we going to do?”

And that’s the whole play. A lot of people faffing around and her in the middle trying to figure it out. The tragedy is that a whole lot of people take part in what happens to this young, young girl without much thought as to what might happen to her.

How is it going to work portraying a 13-year-old girl?
A really good actress. Brigid Gallacher played a 16-year-old last year at the MTC’s Circle Mirror Transformation. It was when I saw that that I thought, yep, she can do this. She has an energy about her as an actress, a vulnerable tom-boy thing. She reminds me of Michelle Williams. As an actor to watch she has this power over an audience where you just want her to be happy. When I look at her perform I just think, I would do anything for you to get what you want.

Ooow. I feel sad already.
Yeah, it’s going to be really sad and really beautiful.

And this is where you’re exploring questions about the sexualisation of children?
It’s definitely a feminist reading of Romeo and Juliet. All the work I make ends up being about gender and about the experience of being a woman. That’s what I do with I’m Trying to Kiss You, one of the theatre collectives I work with.

But if you think of how her father tries to marry her off to this guy who is obviously a lot older than her – “if you be mine I give you to my friend” – well, that doesn’t really happen now, but what does happen to 13-year-old girls is that society says, “This is how you act like a woman. This is how you get men to like you.”

It’s such a precarious age. I really wanted to question everything around the experience of a 13-year-old girl, and how those things influence her relation to the opposite sex. How do you even learn what to do when you meet a boy at a party? How do you learn how to relate to him? How do you learn to perform femininity? How do you learn to deal with that moment when men start looking at you differently as a child? Every woman has had that experience where you’re not a child anymore, but you don’t quite know what that means.

It’s like that movie, Thirteen (2003). I think the tragedy kicks off because a 13-year-old wants sexy clothes.
It’s very bizarre. I started smoking when I was about 14 and it was for a guy, for the guy I liked. It’s all these little tragedies in my life. Why did that happen?

These are readings of gender identity that really stand up to examination in theatre, especially now, especially involving 13-year-olds. What I love about contemporising Shakespeare, and why I think it works so well, is that even though these plays were written so long ago we can look at Juliet and think, she’s the same. For an actress to say, “This is still what I’d do if I were in this situation”, well how is it that these sort of gender stereotypes still ring true all these years later. What does that mean about how far we’ve progressed as a society if it still feels realistic that young girls in general are concerned with the love of a man, and that’s still understood as how you win as a woman.

Is there a moment in the play which really encapsulates that experience?
The image that really got me at the beginning of the project was that of Juliet, left alone on stage at the end, after Romeo has killed himself and the Friar has left.

The image of Juliet at the end going, “What the fuck? How did this happen?” It really spoke to me as a woman, as a rite of passage for a young girl. Every young girl goes through this in a way. It is every young woman’s experience of first love and every young woman’s experience of that time when you metaphorically die. The first time you end up alone in your bedroom saying I wish I were dead.

We talked about it after the first read through, with the 12 women who are involved in the show, and without even needing to say it, you knew that every person in the room had had that experience.

Actually, when I was first assigned this play at uni it was December, and I was really happy and I was in a relationship. But then in January when we came to rehearse I’d just been dumped, and so the play took this very cruel left hand turn. Suddenly the play was about Juliet and how she gets fucked over by all these men and how she gets left alone on stage, crying. And I was like, she’s going to take five minutes to die and the audience is just going to have to watch her.

It’s actually nice to be able to remount it because I can look back and say, OK, I can understand why you did it that, but this time I’m trying to add a bit more wisdom, maybe.

As you say, the cast is quite young. I know that you spent a year training in the Conservatory of Classical Performance at the Shakespeare Company in America, but how are the rest of the cast coping with the technical demands?
I find Shakespeare an incredible mix between technical skill and emotional intuition. It’s really interesting because some of the actresses I’m working with have done Shakespeare before and some of them haven’t. Brigid has never done Shakespeare before and it’s wonderful working with someone who’s never done Shakespeare before because it’s all so new, especially to have a Juliet who hasn’t done Shakespeare before.

Tell us about the production of Henry IV which you’re sharing the space with?
I studied at La Trobe which is where Rob Conkie is basically head of theatre and drama. He was my honours supervisor where I did my original production of Romeo and Juliet. Rob developed his production of Henry IV using five male actors and traditional Elizabethan practices. So his Henry IV is completely the opposite of my Romeo and Juliet in every way imaginable.

We’ve got a young female cast, and his is all older males. Mine is really modern and really performative, very directorial and concept driven; his is really traditional, reflective of how the Elizabethans performed. The audience and the actors are lit the whole time. It’s very interactive in the way the actors perform to the audience – more theatre for the people. There’s no fourth wall in his production. And ours is romantic tragedy and his is historical comedy.

But they will work well together. They both use very sparse sets. We do night for night. The sets just roll in and roll out.

More information on The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo & Juliet available here.

MCV interviews Dan Giovannoni – see the article in its original context here.

Two by Two is a modern take on the classic bible tale Noah’s Ark but with a gay twist. Playwright Dan Giovannoni talks about the play’s plot, issues and themes.

Dan, what’s the story behind Two by Two?
It’s set in a futuristic Melbourne, during a great flood. An ark has been built and parts of the city are being evacuated. Carl and Jack don’t qualify for passage on the boat because they don’t meet the requirements of a ‘family’ – they’re gay, they have no kids, and they can’t procreate with each other. The play follows them in their struggle to find a way to get on board. Their home is gatecrashed by Duckie, who for her own reasons is also looking for a way to get on the boat, but has something they all want and need – a ticket, which comes in the form of a baby.

This could be a very bleak piece. Is that the case?
At its core, it’s a love story, and I think that cuts through the broader, more serious themes. It’s a bleak world, but I’m interested in what survives the bleakness. The play hones in on characters that are being tested by the most intense circumstances, and discovering what is important in those times.

The biblical story is about ‘breeding pairs’.
It’s a key theme. Carl and Jack aren’t a breeding pair (though they try very hard) and that’s what’s keeping them off the Ark. They don’t have anything they can contribute to the rebuilding of humanity – they can’t breed. That’s one of the bigger discussions in the play – attributing worth to people based on what they can offer you. It’s something I think we do a lot in this country, and that was something I really wanted to explore. When it comes down to it, no matter how accepting and lovely life might be now, at the very end of days – who would get on the ark, and who wouldn’t? And why?

How does the baby figure in the play?
The baby is this really charged little guy – in this world, a baby is a ticket onto the Ark, so as soon as he’s in the room, things start to change. People want him because they want to live, people want him because they want to be parents. I think it brings up lots of interesting issues around children, and the role children perform in a person’s life – why you choose to have them, how you come to be their parents, etc. A baby is full of hope and potential, as is the future – so in this world they’re kind of the same thing. If you believe in one, you believe in the other.

Do babies validate a relationship? Are they a measure of success?
I don’t personally think having a baby is a measure of success. I’m looking forward to having kids, but that won’t mean I’ve succeeded at anything. For Jack and Carl, a baby stands in for something else – a belief in love, life, the future. It’s tied up in their fight. They’ve struggled to have a baby, and that’s affected them, made them tougher or weaker. I don’t think you often see young men who speak about and actively pursue wanting children. I to put that on stage because that’s what I want for my life, and I don’t want anyone to think it’s not normal.

You studied at NIDA, what was that experience like?
I did the new full-time playwriting Graduate Diploma. It was a pretty intense year. There were only six of us in the course, together in a room for nine hours a day, every day – it was like a very creative, very fulfilling Big Brother, and we became very close.

It was hard sometimes – there’s no time to work, so you spend the year pretty poor, but at least everyone’s in the same boat, and no-one’s judging you when you add a can of beans to a packet soup in an attempt to turn it into a meal. I think I’m still wrestling with lots of the things we were taught – I didn’t walk out of there a ready-to-go-playwright, but I did walk out with an appetite for it. It’s not a hobby anymore, it’s my job. Two by Two was my major project – I don’t think I could have written this play at home in my spare time. It really was the most rigorous sort of training and thinking I have ever done.

Two by Two plays at fortyfivedownstairs February 9-19.  More information available here.

We can’t quite believe it ourselves, but it’s true! Our first production at 45 Flinders Lane, which opened on January 29th 2002, was Sailing on a Sea of Tears – and now, hundreds of exhibitions and performances later, we’re still going strong…

We’re celebrating ten great years on 25 February with a performance party that will include many of the early musical performers here, featuring Fiona Roake, Faye Bendrups & Guillermo Anad (tango piano & violin) Michael Dalley (Urban Display Suite) Benn Bennett (Black Bag Comedy Festival) singer Henry Manetta, the inimitable Moira Finucane, star of Gotharama, The Burlesque Hour, Carnival of Mysteries…and more to be announced!

It’s going to be a night of revelry and we’d love to see you there. Tickets include a welcome drink on arrival and profits from ticket sales go to our sparkling performers.

The subterranean haven of fortyfivedownstairs is the perfect place to settle down with a champagne and suspend one’s disbelief at a man, sans costume and makeup, announcing that he is, in fact, Madonna. So does Michael Griffiths, who doesn’t bat an eyelid when declaring that he is, in fact, Madge herself, before merrily launching into a night of musical and comedic repartee.

The premise of In Vogue: Songs By Madonna may seem a little strange, but the execution is virtually flawless. Griffiths is a rare and wonderful performer of the variety that could sell wood to a beaver – but with such charm and conviction that they’ll buy it, just because he wants them to want it so badly.

Every single look from Griffiths is a wink and a nod to the near-ridiculousness of the show’s premise. “Don’t you think this is insane? Of course!” his eyes seem to be saying, twinkling with mirth. After all, it is a bit insane for a grown man to be sitting at a grand piano and announcing, with his deep, dark voice, that he is Madonna, the most famous bitch in the world. And it’s just insane enough that it works, in the most captivating possible sense. Disbelief is readily suspended in exchange for the pithy jibes at Madonna’s career trajectory and Griffiths’ exceptional realisation of her back catalogue.

Written and directed by the deservedly lauded Dean Bryant, the entire look and feel of the show – a piano, cabaret-style seating, and incredibly smart lighting design – is a triumph. Of course, it’s how the show sounds that’s most important here and the audience isn’t let down in the slightest. The stripped-back arrangements of some of the most iconic songs of the last 30 years plumb the melodies and lyrics for fresh meaning. One moment, the audience is marvelling at a nifty deconstruction of ‘Express Yourself’, and the next sniggering at a montage of Madonna’s attempts at film stardom. (Does anyone else remember that Die Another Day song? You will if you see this show!)

It’s not all cleverness and cattiness, though – there’s an incredible amount of heart present during In Vogue as well. Griffiths finds moments of genuine loveliness in his rendition of the notoriously tacky ‘Crazy for You’, and taps into a fresh vein of emotion when performing ‘Like a Virgin’ as an ode to the joys of motherhood. He creates a sense of togetherness in the room, reminding audiences that pop songs aren’t popular because they’re ordinary or vacuous, but because of the joy and connectedness that they inspire in the people who hear them. To miss this show would be even more of a crime than Madonna’s cover of ‘American Pie’.

Rating: 4.5 stars out of 5 stars

Aleksia Barron
ArtsHub
24/01/2012

Dean Bryant’s pop-inspired cabaret continues to delight audiences: Christie Whelan returns in Britney over at Chapel off Chapel, and at fortyfivedownstairs, Michael Griffiths is camping out as Madonna.

In Vogue doesn’t reach for humane impersonation in the way the Britney show does, but it shares one quality that makes it unusually engaging as entertainment. By salvaging Madonna’s tunes from the tinny iterations of 80s pop, and twisting them into intricate arrangements for the baby grand, the show gives a lively sense of how good the songs really are.

Griffiths’ tea-sipping Madge exudes an aura of monarchical confidence that grounds the script’s garish incursions into celebrity parody. He makes no bones about being a man, and if the performance is limited by that fact, it is unconstrained where it counts – in its rangy vocal stylings, and in its creative musical adaptations, which slip chameleon-like through genres from easy listening to soaring ballads in duet, from up-tempo jazz-piano to slow and plaintive a capella.

The smartest numbers deconstruct pop music, as when Griffiths breaks down Express Yourself, building the song from its constituent elements through a crescendo that makes you appreciate the craftsmanship behind it. In contrast, he slyly quotes some of Madge’s lyrics out of context, and you wince at how vapid and banal they often sound.

Much of the show’s humour is low camp, and I could have done without obvious jokes based on Madonna’s controversial coffee-table book Sex. Griffiths also emphasises his subject’s 80s tracks at the expense of her later career; the ivories sometimes lose their tinkle (perhaps in imitation of the off-notes Madge is infamous for in live performance); and the songs aren’t welded to potted biography with quite the sparkle or dramatic force Bryant achieved in Britney.

Still, the audience was Griffiths’ to command, and if you’re a Madonna fan, In Vogue is great fun.
Cameron Woodhead
The Age
23/01/2012