by Holly Champion, 4 August 2018. Three out of five stars ***
The Sydney-based director-composer duo Coco Grainger and Ludwig van Distortion (a stage name to end all stage names!) have now, trading as the bootstrapped Distortion Forever Productions, created and staged their third original musical in less than two years. My hat is off to them. This an incredible feat, especially given Sydney’s ragingly expensive cost of living and the resulting few hours that are left each week after earning one’s keep, for making (non-commercial) art.
This time Distortion Forever are presenting the über-intellectual and often very funny new show TYRANNO, at the Erskineville Town Hall. I have seen all three of their shows, including the two productions of their debut, the Aussie Christmas musical Somewhere Else Today. It is interesting to chart their progression. I note that the vocal writing is becoming much more voice-friendly and the staging is becoming more assured. Despite my longing for a real band and conductor, all four productions so far have been accompanied by pre-recorded accompaniment that seems to have been synthesised in Finale or Sibelius. (Blame the cost of living.)
Overall, it has to be said that I am not so keen on TYRANNO as I am on the other two shows, even though the concept is if anything, more interesting. I have to make the disclaimer at the outset here that I am friends or acquaintances with several of the cast and creative team, which makes the criticisms I have to make all the more difficult to write. The show has many good points, however, and plenty of potential. You can see a trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UP4L4PnbPS0
The main issue is that TYRANNO just takes itself a bit too seriously. (There is one exception: there is a brief hilarious moment in Act I about “the demise of musical theatre,” where the show most definitely laughs at itself.) The show’s overall concept is an exploration of the past decade’s polarisation of extreme right and left-wing views on society and art, and the resulting endless, sometimes petty and personal, sometimes politically ground-shaking debate online and especially on social media. The show seems to draw inspiration from the protest-dogged December 2017 Australian tour of British ‘alt-right’ social commentator Milo Yiannopoulos. In TYRANNO, internet celebrity and intellectual shock-jock Tyranno Frei is visiting an Australian university, and posters advertise his scheduled speech “The Western Canon: A polemic defence”. Meanwhile, angry students picket the hall, and academics gather to voice their concerns. In Dickensian style, Distortion and Grainger have given all the characters names that reflect their function. Tyranno Frei is the personification of white, male cis-hetero privilege and oppression—tyranny running free, exulting in its own power. Tyranno is an art-obsessed version of Yiannopoulos, and the show keeps building up to his scheduled speech. But as with today’s online debates, the disputed turf ends up being less about art and more about social values, justice, power and oppression– to Tyranno’s distaste: he scoffs late in the piece that “cultural studies” have taken over literary studies.
In addition to Yiannopoulos, TYRANNO also seems inspired by David Williamson’s 1995 play Dead White Males, particularly in its somewhat ambiguous stance: on the one hand, like Williamson the creators obviously deeply love and admire the Western Canon, but on the other hand, they see the socio-political problems that are reflected and perpetuated by its dominance. In its third source of inspiration, TYRANNO is also a nostalgic Millennial paean to the Baby Boomers’ 1960s Civil Rights movement. This thread is most noticeable in its Prologue, “The Ballad of Tyranno Frei”, which introduces the main character and the setting beautifully, as a homage to Bob Dylan’s “For the Times They are A-Changin'”, complete with onstage acoustic guitar played by a ‘fro-haired student, tambourine and harmonica in the recorded accompaniment, and the quoted line, “this little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine”.
The concept is really very interesting, and unashamedly postmodern. The show is also well-written in many ways: many of the lines are clever, and the polyphonic writing for the ensemble is often lovely. As mentioned, however, the main problem is that the show is just too intellectually self-indulgent. As in their other shows, especially Smash Hits and Stereotypes (which is being given its second production at The Newsagency in Marrickville from 12 September) the lyrics are often highly verbose and use a lot of ‘big words’ for the sake of intellectualism, rather than to define characters. Thankfully this is broken up, as in their other shows, by sometimes shocking, often very funny one-liners and ripostes. Here they come mainly from Tyranno. Some good examples include “diversity can suck my black dick”, “Karl Marx is your Jesus, I’ll be your Pilate”, and the exchange, Professor Dio: “I don’t think they’re satisfied”/ Tyranno: ” From the sound of it she’s never been satisfied”. To be fair, in the university setting the verbosity is not quite the problem that it has been in Distortion Forever’s other shows, which are set in more casual environments, but watching their shows I frequently find myself wishing that the characters would express themselves more, instead of being mouthpieces for the creators’ ideas.
Most importantly, however, TYRANNO is just too long for so slight a plot. This is related to its intellectual self-indulgence: it is very heavy on dialectics and very light on action and character development. Almost nothing really happens in Act I. There are long stretches of song and complex music, exploring exposition, ideas and static emotional states, punctuated by brief moments of dialogue in which action actually happens. I didn’t feel this was the case in their previous productions, except for a slightly-too-long debate about art in Smash Hits and Stereotypes. With TYRANNO, I felt that the balance was off. I was not alone. In Act I, there is a point where Professor Dio resolves in dialogue in the space of 5 seconds, the tension that has been drawn out in song for the past 30 minutes— by simply asking Gratia, the students’ representative , if she would debate Tyranno publicly. (Dio ex machina!) At this, I heard an audience member behind me laugh softly and mutter “thank Christ”. My two main suggestions for Distortion and Grainger are that if they intend to give TYRANNO a second outing, they should sit down and take the scissors to it, and turn it into a one-acter; and as with their other shows, the lyrics need to be revised with a good lyricist, to be less verbose and to ensure that natural emphases in the words correspond more consistently with downbeats and other stressed notes. Then TYRANNO stands a good chance of being a really tight, flowing, clever, punchy show.
Bec Power as Gratia (L) and Denver Naude as Tyranno Frei (R).
The other main problem is the singing, which has been a problem with all the Distortion Forever productions so far, to lesser or greater degrees. TYRANNO seems to have been cast to a large extent on looks.As Tyranno, Denver Naude looks and acts the part of the tall, handsome, white-but-tanned, dentally perfect, arrogant, right-wing celebrity very well. He brings a charisma to this odious character that makes sense of Tyranno’s supposed huge following. But unfortunately, Naude’s voice and musicality are just not up to the mammoth task that Distortion has set for him. Naude has a pleasant untrained baritone, and with 3-4 years of lessons with a good teacher he could become an excellent singer. But currently he suffers from vocal tightness, little register integration, and sub-par intonation. He often also completely ignores the accompaniment’s tempo and cues. In some ways this apparent super-confident lack of awareness helped his performance on opening night, because he never really faltered—the accompaniment be damned. But if he doesn’t intend to make a serious investment in vocal training, I would suggest that he would be much better off putting his good looks, charisma and decent acting skills to use in spoken theatre, or better yet, in film and television.
I always enjoy watching the performances of Myles Burgin, here playing the well-meaning but slightly bumbling Professor Dio. He unfortunately didn’t have as much scope for his wonderful comedic skills in TYRANNO as he has been given in other Distortion Forever shows, but he always holds the audience’s attention and has a very pleasant rock tenor voice. Bec Power as Gratia was suitably confident, beautiful, sneering and articulate. Power gave us the most exciting, action-filled moment of the show, with an enraged scream and foot-stomp when Tyranno tells her she is a spoilt brat and to “pack up your books and get back to the kitchen”. Power seems more musically trained than Naude, but like him, while she has natural talent, she still has technical issues and needs to decide to either invest in proper vocal training or use her star quality in spoken theatre and on screen. Richard Holborn gave a really very interesting performance as Tyranno’s male sidekick, though I did find that he seemed slightly too camp to believably be one of the homophobic Tyranno’s true believers, or for Tyranno to tolerate having him around. (EDIT, 8 August: I have received some protest about the previous sentence, with readers thinking that I was not aware that Milo Yiannopoulos is openly gay. I note that Tyranno, while inspired by Yiannopoulos, is not a copy of him. Tyranno as portrayed by Denver Naude is homophobic, and seemingly heterosexual –or at least, not obviously gay, and within the oppressive Western societal default that is heteronormativity, characters portrayed as not-obviously-gay are usually read as ‘straight’. Therefore I stand by my criticism.) Ricci Crane, Samuel Feitelberg and Ella Arendelle gave fairly unremarkable, good performances in the ensemble. Zoë Crawford’s very attractive and supple soprano voice was a welcome surprise – as with Holborn, this is her first show with Distortion Forever. She is frankly the best singer in the show, and I would personally have cast her as Gratia. I was afraid she was going to be relegated purely to the ensemble, but she had a good solo at the end as the journalist.
Why the journalist had to have almost exactly the same costume as Crawford’s earlier role as one of the academics, I don’t know – this is so easily fixed. Another couple of staging issues that are easy to fix before the rest of the show’s run include having the two students be publicly humiliated by Tyranno’s female sidekick (it just didn’t ring true that they would sit there and take it, with no resistance); and finally, having no bows for the performers. Along with the show’s very subdued ending after two hours of sound and fury, this felt very awkward and anticlimactic. Please, give the hardworking creators and performers a chance to accept the audience’s appreciation.
And despite all my criticisms, appreciate it they will. There is plenty to like about this unusual show. As mentioned, it has lots of potential for improvement—I don’t want to sound patronising, but this is a first outing and it should be a given that Distortion and Grainger seek feedback and tweak the show as they go along. This run consists of seven more performances at the Erskineville Town Hall – the 4th, 8th, 10th, 11th, 15th, 17th and 18th of August. I give the show 3 stars out of 5, and while I have my reservations, I do recommend going to see it. It is so important to encourage the development of new Australian musicals. More importantly, this one is interesting, striking, clever, fresh and topical, and comes from a creative duo who have tons of drive and are definitely going places. ***
Tickets to TYRANNO are on sale for $35 each until 18th August through Ticketebo: https://www.ticketebo.com.au/distortion-forever/tyranno.html
