"Fonzo Journalism"

Benito's play in Darlinghurst Theatre's 2012 Season

2011-11-25T09:11:00.002+11:00

The whole team is very excited about our new show at Darlinghurst Theatre next year. I gave my pitch at the media and subscriber launches last week and the vibe is high. To learn more go to http://www.darlinghursttheatre.com/

2011-11-12T13:47:00.001+11:00

Benito & Gerri host a roundup of this week in Sydney theatre (with Benito even panelling this time.)

Stages Nov 12th 2011 by Stages Twoser-Fm on Mixcloud

2011-11-08T12:43:00.000+11:00

LAST WEEK'S SHOW (MY REPORT IS ABOUT 24 MINUTES IN)

BDF

STREAM: Saturday 5th November, 2011 SHOW by Stages Twoser-Fm on Mixcloud

Newtown Cheat Sheet

2011-11-07T09:00:00.004+11:00

Ciao Magazine (http://ciaomagazine.com.au/) recently asked me to do a Newtown for dummies type piece in the lead up to the Newtown Festival this Sunday November 13th (where I will be MCing the poetry event in the Writers' Tent at 11am.) If you can't read it my own (unedited) copy is below.

Ciao Magazine’s Cheat Sheet to Newtown.
by Benito Di Fonzo.

“I never knew where I belonged … [but] on King Street I’m a king…”
John Kennedy’s Love Gone Wrong, 1985.

Newtown essentially squeezes Melbourne into a suburb of Sydney’s inner west, sans the climate of course.

Victoria Park Pool, where we will begin our tour, has been referred to by locals as Newtown Beach with it’s musicians, artists and nearby Glebe backpackers sunning themselves amongst the summer ants. Some argue Newtown begins here outside Sydney University, although it is literally Darlington. More correctly Newtown begins at Gould’s Books. Here at what is now pricier North Newtown, Socialist activist extraordinaire Bob Gould spent many a decade eyeing loose-fingered students lost amongst the aisles searching disordered piles for their own cheat sheets, perhaps pocketing some vintage porn in the process.

Now walk on, trying to forget what you said to that dame at the Jeff Duff gig at The Vanguard as you stumble past it, and grabbing one of Sydney’s friendliest falafels from Rowda Ya-Habibi. If you’re pedalling get your bike checked at Cheeky Monkey as you gaze down the majestic Moreton Bay Fig-lined Georgina Street at the once grand homes of Colonial gentry, now trophies for lawyers.

You’re hovering around the 1980s artist’s collective Alpha House, now commercial apartments (Alpha’s residents pushed to South King when it was redeveloped). You may want to grab a quick hair clip at Noddy’s On King whilst here. It won’t matter how it comes out because in Newtown you’ll probably be donning a dead man’s fedora. You can wander to the nearby St. Vinnie’s but your chances are better at C’s Flash Back, next to the neat little vegetarian restaurant lined with Buddhas.

Time for your first beer since the Lansdowne, so have one at the Marlborough. This formerly grungy hole for locals is now more for tourists, but it’s close to RPA if you feel the need to get your liver checked. Likewise a little further south the Coopers, formerly The Coopers Arms, formerly The Shakespeare. The ‘Shakey’ was once riddled with local musos (The Whitlams’ Tim Freedman still lives a few doors down if you’d like a refund) with a lobster ($20) grabbing one a ‘foil’ of grass in the back room. The Coopers is now glitzier and more law abiding. However local artist Val Nart’s King Street mural (which legend says he painted over many months for beers) still adorns a wall of the roofless upstairs bistro, old windows giving a fine view of the wildlife.

Some pubs look like they’ve raided Fox Studio’s props department for their outfitting. Kelly’s Irish Pub for example, called by locals The McDonald’s Pub as it is on the site of that rare thing - a McDonalds run out of town. Likewise the ZanziBar (formerly The Oxford) looks constructed from leftovers of a Baz Luhrmann remake of Lawrence of Arabia. The Bank Hotel is more Moulin Rouge upstairs now than the tough Islander bar of past days. However The Town Hall Hotel (AKA The Townie) whilst losing it’s heritage horseshoe bar, still remains largely a locals’ late-night hole of choice, with bands several times a week and a great view of the camel toe of King Street and Enmore Roads. The Sando also, which lost it’s way during the Pokie plague, has under the steerage of Tony Townsend become one of King Street’s best music venues, with headliners playing upstairs and free bands downstairs. Let’s stop and have a cheap Sando Lager and catch Australia’s sloppiest band The Hoo Haas, fronted by dishevelled local painter, reprobate and Newtown cafe addict Phil Ricketson.

Speaking of caffeine you’ll need some by now to soak up the alcohol. You’re nearby Buzzzbar, with it’s regular exhibitions, but why not sit outside Corelli’s across the road, a much loved haunt of those who wile away whole sunny days over frappes.

Speaking of musicians it’s important to note that, like New York cabbies, King Street buskers will be expecting their share of your change - be it locally raised Ilya and his crew scat-hip-hopping over live loops, or Maddox the bearded jazz bassist killing time between gigs. Your change may take them down into the dark centre of South King street, the feral end most tourists avoid. Grab pastizzis at The Maltese Cafe, a show at Newtown or New Theatres, some kitsch at Faster Pussycat, or bands at The Union, behind which hungover artists count change in communal gallery, studio and hovels of the new Alpha House to get them to The Botany View for beer and Rockabilly.

You’re more likely to find affordable ironic 70s body shirts and 50s fedoras down here, as well as the better of Newtown’s ubiquitous Thai restaurants.

You could even grab a guitar from Pete’s Musicians’ Market and some concoction from the Happy Herbs shop and join the buskers!

Newtown ends as it began, in a park, this time the smokestacks of Sydney Park beaconing the deadly Hume and St. Peters.

The alternative route from Newtown Station would take you up Enmore Road for a show at Notes, Enmore Theatre, or The Sly Fox. Perhaps one of Ali’s fine pide at Saray’s, or a classier meal amongst candlelight at Banks Thai or from New York trained local chef Sophie at Pickwick’s.

New mini bars such as The Green Room Lounge sit alongside bizarre op-shops such as The Cat Protection Society’s.

After grabbing a book from Better Read Than Dead, Berkelouw's, Art On King, or Gould’s, best to end your sojourn by veering off King at Newtown Square (dodging Hare Krsnas and ad hoc flea markets) and head up Australia Street. Grab a long-neck at the Courthouse Hotel, then wander through Camperdown Park (where Newtown Festival will be gated) for a traditional drink in St. Stephen’s cemetery. Poets like the late Michael Dransfield scribbled here, reclining under the ancient Moreton Bay, or the grave of Eliza Donnithorne (Dickens’ inspiration for Great Expectations’ Miss Havisham.)

'As night falls you’ll be accompanied by a murder or emos or perhaps resident poltergeist Bathsheba Ghost who has haunted the cemetery since 1848. The former head nurse was once described to Florence Nightingale as a “Sluttenly alcoholic.” She fits right in on King Street.

#

BREAKOUT BOX
Tribes of Newtown (in chronological order)

- The Ancient Greeks
Newtown was reputedly named after a 19th Century tailor on the ZanziBar site called New Town Fashions, but it was the Greek migrants of the 1950s that gave Newtown it’s cosmopolitan feel. The Greeks began moving out in the 80s but wisely kept the leases. Aside from a multitude of houses they still own sites such as The Hub, The Cyprus Club (with it’s backgammon basement) and the tram sheds behind Newtown Station. The sheds and station are being developed into shops and flats so no doubt alleged familial bickering over The Hub will eventually end. There are even still a few, formerly illegal, Greek card clubs.

- The Students.
Newtown’s locality to Sydney University has always drawn students to it, creating the basis for a share-house culture of bars, bookstores, bands, and op-shops. They grow into yuppies, or never grow up and become artists.

- The Artists & Ferals.
With the late 1980s gentrification of Surry Hills artists and their ilk moved west for cheaper rents. Warehouses such as Alpha House and share-houses became their garret-studios. The colour, excitement and vibrancy of these alternative life-stylists combined well with the Mediterranean feel, making Newtown Sydney’s Bohemian epicentre.

- Young Urban Professionals (Yuppies)
Ironically, by the end of the 20th Century the cosmopolitan bohemianism created by decades of poor migrants and artists made Newtown a smart investment. The accompanying rent rise, and Pokie plague, meant that many of those that had given the area it’s unique flavour were driven to Marrickville, Redfern or Melbourne (AKA Mexico or Shelbyville).

Perhaps continuing gentrification will make Newtown unrecognisable in coming decades, but the migrants and bohemians will just be somewhere else by then, waiting for the real estate agents to follow.

Stages 6 August '11 Show (2ser-FM 107.3)

2011-08-12T12:50:00.001+10:00

Stages 6 August '11 Show by Stages TwoSer-Fm

Artists, Exhibitionists and Underbelly Rediscover Sydney's Vicious Razor Gangs (CNN Go)

2011-07-18T13:12:00.008+10:00

This article was commissioned by CNN Go and originally appeared at
Razorhurst | CNNGo.com http://www.cnngo.com/sydney/life/mums-word-razorhursts-female-gangsters-145199#ixzz1SQHq1gr0 (click blog post headline to go to the CNN original)

Mum's the word on 'Razorhurst's' female gangsters

A play is being staged in secret in former sly-grog shops and brothels around the inner city, as a book, TV series and exhibition see unprecedented interest in Sydney's sleazy days gone-by

By Benito Di Fonzo 3 June, 2011

The stylish East Village Hotel in Darlinghurst has gone up in the world since it opened in 1918 under the name that still adorns its façade, “The Tradesman's Arms.”

It was an underworld criminal capital in a time of partial prohibition. After the introduction of strict anti-gun laws, gangs fought for control of the sex, cocaine and sly-grog trades with cutthroat razors. Inner city Kings Cross, Woolloomooloo, Darlinghurst and Surry Hills were collectively termed “Razorhurst.”

It was a time when female gangsters, Kate Leigh and Tilly Devine, lorded it over their respective bootlegging and brothel empires.

The notorious 1920s and 1930s era is now receiving unprecedented, retrospective attention in Sydney.

A play, "Mum’s In: Stories from Razorhurst," is due to begin in the former sly-grog shops and sex dens around the inner city. True to its underworld content, Sydneysiders have to unravel the secret venue from the Internet and give a password to enter.

This year’s Underbelly TV series will be based on Larry Writer’s book, "Razor." A photographic exhibition from the era is touring and even an opera is rumoured.

The Six O’clock Swill

The Tradesman’s Arms was once, as Larry Writer records in "Razor": “A bloodhouse with sawdust on the floor to soak up the spit and vomit.” It was populated by “prostitutes, pimps, pickpockets, muggers, con men, SP (starting-price) bookies and drug dealers.”

At sunset, things grew ugly. Temperance movements, unable to achieve full prohibition like their American counterparts, had nonetheless convinced politicians to enforce a six o’clock closing rule -- resulting in the infamous "six o’clock swill."

“You could buy as many beers as you wanted before six o’clock,” explains playwright, performer, singer and songwriter Vashti Hughes, who performs in the upcoming "Mum’s In: Stories from Razorhurst." “At quarter to six you could say I want 10 schooners and they’d sell them to you, and then you’d have to try and skol them because they would kick you out and shut the doors at six.”

Anyone not content to follow church leaders’ suggestions and use early closing to spend more quality time with their families, or for those who didn’t have families, there was a huge hole in the market.

“People wanted someone to kick on to,” says Hughes.

The Female Gangsters

Notorious hooker Nellie Cameron, photographed by police on July 29, 1930.

Kate Leigh escaped to Sydney from her abusive family in Dubbo at the age of 10. Tilly Devine was a London prostitute by the age of 12 before emigrating "Down Under" with a Digger who claimed to own a kangaroo station.

The women became two of the wealthiest, powerful and most ruthless people in Australia.

Kate Leigh operated a score of illegal "sly-grog shops" during the 1920s and 1930s across “Razorhurst.” Tilly Devine became a brothel matriarch.

"Mum’s In." (That’s the password)

Vashti Hughes (and only Vashti Hughes) stars in "Mum's In: Stories from Razorhurst."

Leigh and Devine are two of several characters Hughes will bring back to life in her one-women show "Mum’s In: Stories from Razorhurst."

Hughes will embody in monologues and songs (co-written with partner Ross Johnston) the lives of Sydney criminals. Sly-grog queen Kate Leigh, brothel matriarch Tilly Devine, Sydney’s most sought-after prostitute Nellie Cameron, as well as the equally ruthless Frank Green and leader of the Darlinghurst Push razor gang, Guido Caletti.

Hughes will be staging her show amidst Tilly’s former brothels and Leigh’s sly-grog shops. In keeping with the underground nature of the original venues, audiences will have to find the location via a website (www.mumsin.com.au)

Upon reaching the door they will have to give the traditional password, "Mum’s in" before being allowed entry and sipping their first jam jar of sly-grog.

Hughes won’t be shying away from that violence either.

“It is comedy cabaret,” says Hughes, “but it’s got a lot of grotesque violence in it. Comic grotesque violence, with songs.”

Those who turn up in 1920s and 1930s clothing will receive a discount, which is appropriate given that both Tilly and Kate were seen as exotically glamorous in their time. In fact when Kate Leigh was arrested at the Melbourne Cup, her rich furs and jewels received as much attention as her crimes, and Tilly Devine was reported to wear twice as many rings as she had fingers.

Razor

Hughes is not the only artist pouring life back into the anti-heroes of depression-era Sydney. Australian TV screens will soon be awash with "Underbelly: Razor," the Nine Network’s adaptation of Larry Writer’s non-fiction "Razor," first published in 2001.

“To have two women crime bosses who were so tough and so ruthless ... They clawed their way up to the top in a hard man’s milieu,” says Larry Writer in "Razor," “They had to be tougher, smarter and nastier than the male of the species.”

Writer puts this renewed interest down to the death of the cultural cringe concerning our criminals.

“For so long,” says Writer, “there has been a feeling that our criminals and our heroes could not be as interesting as those overseas. All of a sudden there’s a realisation that in Tilly Divine and Kate Leigh and Guido and Frank we have some really wonderful characters."

"You can walk down Palmer Street, you can walk around Kings Cross, and though a lot of it’s changed, a lot of it hasn’t.”

Femme Fatale: The Female Criminal

Nerida Campbell, curator of the Justice & Police Museum’s nationally touring exhibition, "Femme Fatale: The Female Criminal," feels Kate Leigh and Tilly Devine may be perceived as being crueler because of their sex.

“I think society’s expectations of them were so much higher because they were women. They were expected to be feminine [but] these women were ruthless and violent.”

A journey into Sydney's sleazy foundations

“Mum’s In: Stories from Razorhurst,” 8 p.m., June 8–11 and June 16–18. Contact "Mum" at www.mumsin.com.au for secret Darlinghurst location. $30/$20 for those in 1930s attire –- cash only at the door (just like the old days).

Pan Macmillan will publish the “Underbelly” tie-in rerelease of Larry Writer’s “Razor” in July.

“Underbelly: Razor” is scheduled to air on Channel 9 in September.

“Femme Fatale: The Female Criminal” is touring nationally until June 2012. See www.hht.net.au for locations.

Benito talks with Simon Stone and Thomas M. Wright re "Baal" at the STC for CNN Go

2011-05-19T16:07:00.003+10:00

Below is the unedited copy of an article I wrote for www.CNNGo.com
The edited article originally appeared at http://www.cnngo.com/sydney/play/perverted-drunkard-murderous-monster-sydney-theatre-company-brings-baal-back-life-178630

“Baal”
by Benito Di Fonzo.

It’s raining on the stage of The Wharf theatre, literally gallons of water galloping down upon a dirty mattress where five naked women and two men, one in stilettoes, caress and kiss one another. Facing them a sixth girl in dark glasses plays an electric guitar, standing upon an amp somehow unhindered by the storm splashing down. A man named after one of the Old Testament’s seven princes of Hell sings them a dark ballad from the opposing corner, then downs a can of bourbon and coke, before bludgeoning the head of his male lover. Welcome to Baal’s house.

At the tender age of 20 Bertolt Brecht, still a university student in 1918, penned his first play Baal. Baal is a beautifully dark poem chronicling the decadent downward spiral of an almost-famous singer and poet on Munich’s debauched cabaret circuit. Baal is a primitive monster, a fallen god from an earlier time, but of a different order to his Old Testament namesake.

“He’s a social misfit,” says translator and director Simon Stone. “We meet [Baal] at the point that he’s already an outsider and it’s unsure whether he’s ever got along in some socially condoned way with the rest of the world. By the time we meet him he shows no desire, as well as a complete incapacity, to live amongst people in a healthy, social way. He’s an antihero and really anti-social and that’s what a lot of his work as an artist, poet, songwriter derives from. He’s constantly questioning the way things in society are set up in his art, and people find that fascinating.”

35 years before Brecht penned his tale of Bacchanalian decent countryman Friedrich Nietzsche had written of the Übermensch, the Superman, a man beyond societal mores who creates his own life code.

“I have absolutely no doubt Brecht would have been reading Nietzsche,” says Stone, “but people get when they see this show that there is absolutely no condoning whatsoever of Baal’s behaviour. It is a desolate view. People love watching Don Giovanni, going ‘How many women has he slept with now, 3,042?’ And it’s funny, but Brecht had the bravery to paint a picture of someone who actually behaves like that and portray the reality of the consequences for someone who has chosen to opt out of the social contract. I think it’s not a mistake to assume that Brecht was being fairly scathing of the idea that there are certain people who are allowed to behave in certain ways because of a certain kind of socially important output they can give in the form of their creativity.”

However like so many other artists in the public eye – be it a Sheen, Manson or Cobain – the public disapproval is only equalled by their fascination with such a protagonist. Why is that?

“At a certain point in our upbringing,” says Stone, “we learnt that it’s easier to get on in the world by accepting the rules that adults were teaching us and yet there’s a massive instinctual part of us that wishes we could have just done whatever we wanted for the rest of our lives. So when we come across someone who actually never grew up, who never accepted the rules that were being laid down, who said no, fuck this, this is my way of living, if you don’t like it then move on, then there’s this amazing allure. You go (sighs) maybe there is a version of life where I don’t have accept to do things I don’t want to do?”

Thomas M. Wright who plays Baal adds, “Mike Tyson or Charles Manson or any of these people become like a fractured prism through which you can see a human being, they’re like a million pieces of shattered glass and we’re shining a light through it and watching it dance, these people who are eaten alive and eat back.”

Wright has no doubts about just how dark a monster he is embodying.

“I have people come up to me all the time and say ‘oh I’ve known a few Baals in my time,’ and it’s like this guy wakes up in the morning a rapist and a murderer and goes to bed a rapist and a murderer, he didn’t [just] sleep with your friend after he told you that he liked you!”

However while not condoning the actions of a man who Stone prefers to call omni or poly-sexual rather than bi-sexual –

“I think he wouldn’t necessarily turn down having sex with an animal,” he says.

“Or a tree,” adds Wright, “or the ground. The difficult thing for Baal to accept is why can’t we fuck plants? Literally, why can’t we?”

Brecht seems to be saying that it is perhaps part of the artist’s role in society to explore these dark, wet woods.

“I think what he’s saying about artists,” says Stone, “is that they sign a very dangerous pact with the devil. If you want to be able to bring the brutal truth, if there is such a thing as truth, to the surface, then you need to accept that that truth is going to start weighing on you and will start affecting the way your brain works. If you open yourself to the void the void will eventually swallow you up. And the dangerous thing in being an artist is that you do have to look at the incredibly dark parts of human existence because that’s what good drama is about, and if you do that too often you’ll go mad.”

“By the time we get to Baal,” adds Wright, “he’s so open to that black hole that it’s totally inescapable.”

“Yeah,” says Stone, “you’re watching a man in the last instance before he gets sucked in [to the void.]”

Composer Stefan Gregory has arranged Brecht’s original songs for electric guitar and Baal delivers these dark ballads in a style reminiscent of a meeting between Kurt Cobain, Tex Perkins and Nick Cave as he swings betwixt poet and caveman. Surely playing such a monster night after night must take a toll on Wright’s own psyche?

“No, you know, the show goes for an hour and then I go and have a coffee.”

#

"Baal"

written by Bertolt Brecht.

Directed by Simon Stone.

Sydney Theatre Company, The Wharf, Pier 4 Hickson Road, Walsh Bay.

Now until 11 June, 2011.

$30 - $77

(02) 9250 1777

www.sydneytheatre.com.au

Critical Stages take on Chronic Ills for National Touring

2011-05-04T10:21:00.003+10:00

Critical Stages are now handling "The Chronic Ills of Robert Zimmerman, AKA Bob Dylan (A Lie): A Theatrical Talking Blues & Glissendorf." Their first production was last years Seymour Centre season, after The Chronic Ills won one of two places in BITE (Best of Independent Theatre.) Info on upcoming productions will be posted here and on Critical Stages Chronic Ills page -

(insert below or click on title of this post)
http://www.criticalstages.com.au/page/the_chronic_ills_of_robert_zimmerman_aka_bob_dylan_a_lie.html

2011-04-15T08:55:00.001+10:00

30 Great Short Stories by W. Somerset Maugham

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

As a young man I read Somerset Maugham's novel 'Cakes & Ale' and it did not, from memory, make an outstanding impression upon me. Perhaps I was too young to appreciate it, or perhaps the novel is not Maugham's medium?

I have decided now that the latter is the case since, whilst on holiday in the Southern Highlands at the country home of a generous patron, I started reading Maugham's collected short stories (three volumes of the four volume set occupying the lake-side cottages small library) and was blown away not so much by the stories events as by Maugham's magnificently elegant writing style.

Reading one of Maugham's short stories is like lunching in the tropical sun with a glass of Pims or Pastis de Marseille (both of which were on hand in Burrawang, near my reading-hammock) whereupon you are joined by the most witty, erudite and charming person you're ever likely to meet. And then he tells you a tall tale.

I particularly like the way Maugham switches between long, almost ramblingly convoluted, many paragraphed, sentences. To short tight ones. A literary music of the highest order.

Upon my return to the big smoke I rushed to Gould's Book Arcade, Newtown, and finally, amongst the piles of mouldering tomes and kipping inner-western addicts that occupied the aisles of the last of Sydney's great second-hand book warehouses, I found this old hardcover. Whilst not the Complete I was looking for it is rather a selection of thirty of the best stories from the four-volume set. I will, at some later time read all four volumes, but this is a good start, and a great traveller.

View all my reviews

Benito's 2007 Short & Sweet comedy finalist "9/11 Conspiracy: The Musical"

2011-02-21T12:48:00.001+11:00

A review of Keith Richards' 'Life' in the form of a 2,500 word monologueness spoof, AKA "One Day In The Life of The Human Riff.”

2011-01-20T14:43:00.003+11:00

Life: Keith Richards by Keith Richards

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A review of Keith Richards' 'Life' in the form of a 2,500 word monologueness spoof, AKA "One Day In The Life of The Human Riff.”

So by lunch time we’re driving through Stangefruit, Mississippi. We’ve got three runaway Mexicans in the boot, each carrying 25 balloons of charlie up their jacksy, and a 15 year old transsexual Moroccan kid Bill Burroughs had left in the back seat with a beaker of smack in shim’s silicon tits. Just another day in the life of the human riff let me tell you.

We were stopped outside town by a couple of cops who looked like they hadn’t slept in weeks. When we explained we were preachers from England - hence the hair, the communion wafers, and the kid - they confiscated the vehicle and threatened to throw us across the pond, till my lawyer turned up with a drunken judge, the senator for Mississippi and a series of Polaroids of a non-descript scene involving a yak, seven acrobats, and a lawn trimmer. So they threw us back the keys and told us never to burrow through their borough no more, but I just spit and nodded, fucken coppers, all queers, and not in a nice way let me tell you. But that’s just the way life is when you’re the greatest rock guitarist of all time. I’m sweating, it must be the humility.

Let me find the 1 and begin at the in then.

I was born at dawn in a scum pit on the outskirts of Dartboard. We were beaten awake by the police and made to cover ourselves in the muck of the pit and make our way to the local school where they would teach us naught but how to be muck gleaners for the land owners thereabouts. With that soot and shit on my face from my early morn I knew in my heart I was a black man, never a proper pale English git.

By the morning tea horn, a sound our landlord created with a cat, a leather strap, and my younger cousin Nathan, I’d decided to do a runner, and by mugging a rich git I met on the tube and stealing his ration card I pretended I was an arts student called Jagger where I fitted right in amongst the reprobates of aspiring bohemia.

By lunchtime I was bored with the whole bag and teamed up with some likely lads who were playing guitar under a tree in the school’s yard. I beat them silly until they let me join their band and so that rolling bag of bones was born, Brian on sitar, Ian on keys, and me on a guitar I’d stolen off the local vicar. The teachers began saying something about getting back into class so that could get us gigs designing advertisements for Babylonia or some such guff, so we did a runner and moved into the basement of a pub on Dean Street, Soho called The Pirate’s Bitch. They wouldn’t serve me at first as I was naked but for the stain of black muck, so I wandered into the street, threw on whatever rags I found lying around, and went back in and told them firmly that we were the entertainment for the evening. When they asked where was our rig Brian was stumped until a boy named Wyman wandered in and tried to sell the publican a stolen PA system, to which we all plugged in and climbed the charts, wallpaper peeling.

We hung at The Pirate’s Bitch for much of the afternoon, sucking on the leaking pipes of Watney’s Red Barrel and eating the crisps that fell through the grate from the firm of lawyers what lived upstairs from us. One day the lawyers came down and informed us that through the magic of the radiogram what had been perfected during the war our last six jams where a hit in the United States, and they wanted to fly us over the pond. We didn’t have the heart to tell them they weren’t our songs, what with them being rather old negro spirituals and blues what white devils in the US had through some physical peculiarity bestowed on them by Jehovah been unable to hear until they was played by us sons of the dying Empire. An anomaly that still baffles biologists to this day, or so I hear.

The lawyers bunged us all into a plane so swiftly that I still hadn’t had time to wipe the pit muck from my features, so when we did arrive in the States there was still some confusion as to my native hue, and hence we were played on both the coloured and white radio stations, most Americans assuming London was some borough of Boston or some such guff. Charlie the maître d' at the hotel where they bunged us was short of a buck so we let him sit in on drums, and it turned out he had quite a talent for it, even though he admitted he hated the music. Likewise little Mick the bellboy who tagged along beside him, a thick git with a minuscule prick but elephantitis of the bollocks what gave him a unique style of dancing that strangely endeared me to him, god bless the little bugger.

Halfway through the first set I realised I had no more Chuck Berry numbers up my sleeve and all the boys were looking to me. I said, “we’ll be back after this break,” and I ran to the bog only to find the destitute and whistling 300 pound form of Howlin’ Wolf whitewashing the johns in his paint-spattered overalls. As I spattered the rim of the bowl with a little of my own London smokestack I told him my predicament, and he in return taught me how to play the blues.

He said, “Just pick up that guitar Blind Boy Slim left by the water cooler and strum it with that broken bottle neck on the floor. You don’t have to know no chords or nothing, it’s in banjo tuning, open G slide, just wipe off the blood before you start.”

“What about the words Mr Wolf?” I said.

“Damn boy, make a little story over the top about how ragged, sad and horny life can be and you’re with it.”

So I wiped me arse, thanked the Wolf and stumbled back to the stage, grabbing said guitar from beside the water cooler. I grabbed it a little too eagerly, resulting in my breaking the sixth string and smashing the bottle-neck slide, so five string guitar in slide tuning it had to be, I’d just figure out the fingerings as I went along. And so it is and so it will always be.

Later after the gig when John Lennon dosed us on LSD and gave us a lift to the airport in his Bentley he verified that he’d had much the same experience, only with Muddy Waters in a Dole office in Liverpool while he was bashing McCartney for his milk money.

When we got back to Old Blighty we’d gained a few hours and a few thousand quid, but 98 per cent of it would have to go to Her Majesty for the sour milk we’d been given as kids and the new teeth my granpop had got on the National Health, or so Mick informed me, so I banged the poor blighter with a rifle I’d picked up in a Texas drug store and he has never walked the same again. I apologised as I put the dosh in a brown paper bag and we went looking for somewhere to hide it.

We decided on a place in the country, a straw thatched cottage outside Stonehenge, and hung there the rest of the morning having all the drugs and women we could eat. We had a dandy lot round for pink gins and a pet junkie that we milked hourly for heroin, everything a Englishman could need. But of course by the time we were telling Charlie what to cook up for lunch Mr Plod had to turn up and piss on the whole damn scene.

The cops dragged us up into the Old Bailey but it turns out they’d forgotten the pot. All they had was Marianne Faithful’s smack-soiled bathmat and some dead spliffs. The judge sentenced me to life nonetheless, deciding I was the ringleader of the whole shebang, which I was.

Luckily the prison van got a puncture on the way to Wormwood Scrubs and while the boys were changing tires Ronnie Biggs and I did a runner. We decided we better part ways to throw off the beagles so he went to Spain and I holed up in a lovely little hashish palace in Tangiers were Brian’s old bird Anita and I picked up a nasty case of Bill Burroughs for our troubles.

During a game of Missouri Lame Mule Snap I’d won a palace in the South of France from some dispossessed Russian royal, and when Anita and I arrived there we learnt that by providence both Charlie and Mick had gained employment once again as bouncer and busboy, so I pulled out the old Telecaster and we jammed on a few tunes whilst in exile in rooms in the basement.

Things got ugly however. Anita and I had become hooked on hummus whilst in Tangiers and unbeknownst to the rest of us she’d had a container load of the chickpea based junk flown in and transported by the portable studio truck back to our palace where she had had the engineers and photographers, who circumstance demanded we employ now, not to mention her bevy of pet tabouli addicts she kept in a mini-bus outside the East wing, fill the swimming pool with the Levantine Arab spread as an early afternoon surprise. But Brian, who we had left in a veterinary clinic outside Paris during our Moroccan sojourn, had jumped into the pool and drowned in the wheaten coloured sea of chickpeas, tahini, lemon juice, and garlic. He was found by the gardeners who immediately informed the gendarmes, so I decided to split.

I jumped in my speedboat, pointed it due South, and stuck my Telecaster in the steering wheel while I had a siesta. When I woke it was almost din-dins and I was on the filthiest shore I’d seen since that childhood holiday in Bournemouth. I wandered through the faecal sea-water and finding a young lady with a packet of Mandrax and an eye dropper lolling by the Pavilion I was informed I’d discovered St. Kilda Beach. So I claimed it in the name of Her Majesty and went back to this bird’s house on the outskirts of Melbourne suburbia. I must say I adapted nicely to suburban Australian existence that afternoon and within the hour I was signed on to the rock n’ roll and spending my first fortnightly payment on VB and pudding for her sprog what I done sit while she scoured the city for quaaludes and greens. It was a happy dinner indeed and I would have stayed the night if Mick hadn’t turned up suddenly with my suitcases and I realized the silly queer had been trailed the whole way by Anita and the bevy of gendarmes what now followed her, not to mention a horny black-faced Marlon Brando on a bicycle looking to gun down Terry Southern. It would be an ugly scene if they found me so I jumped back into my speedboat and didn’t stop till I reached a Jamaica, where I knew they wouldn’t let Anita in on account of her accent. It was late evening by then and the only light came from the crown of an enormous volcano above the beach from which a pungent odour emitted.

Suddenly I was surrounded in the night and I realized that I had been taken hostage by a band of vicious Rastafari pirates. All looked dire till I pulled out my five string and strummed a little Jimmy Cliff. I explained that I wasn’t really the white Babylonian devil I appeared but rather a brother musician blackened deep in his soul by the muck of working class London. The leader of the band, who called themselves the Legless Angels, pulled a reassuring smirk then passed me a hookah pipe that I observed went into the ground at the mountains feet. The Rastafari pirate king explained that this pipe went straight into the volcano. Jah, he explained, had seen fit to fill the bowl at the volcano’s crown with the most powerful cannabis plants in existence. This hierophant herb was constantly heated by the molten lava stirred by the white devils Jehovah had imprisoned beneath it, all for the medicinal service of the pirates and their kin. If I truly was a brother then Jah would grant me the power to pull the cone, but if I was a Babylonian devil attempting to deceive them Jah would see that I was sucked through the hookah the moment my lips touched it and hence into Satanic service in the volcanic basement.

It was quite an effort but I pulled the cone cleaner than Haile Selassie’s underdaks and a roar of cheers and drumbeats arose as they carried me to their mountainous kingdom on high where, they explained, no gendarme or Mr Plod of any proportion would dare take arms against them.

And that’s where I remained the night, smoking through till the morning and jamming for Jah with the Legless Angels. At dawn they had me pay for my board and whatnot by making it over to the USA in various guises so as to flog a few of my musical wares and the odd bag of weed. The shit I sold Mick was just parsley.

So that’s just a normal day in the life of a human riff, honestly, no exaggeration.

I’d love to chat but I’ve just dropped a blue, might be time for a kip. Catch you on the next tour, cheers, and if the Shepard’s pie arrives just wake me up.

THE END

by Benito Di Fonzo.

DECEMBER 2010/JANUARY 2011.

View all my reviews

From the vaults of Fonzo Journalism, 2004: FBi Radio Play, live from The Sydney Opera House.

2011-01-19T15:56:00.001+11:00

Broadcast live from the Studio at The Sydney Opera House, September 19, 2004. Written by Benito Di Fonzo. Starring Brendan Cowell, Kate Mulvany, Damon Herriman and Tug Dumbly as Napoleon Hangover. Directed by Laura Milke. Music by Brett Maverix. Foley (SFX) by Miles Merrill. Produced by 2FBi-FM and The Studio at The Sydney Opera House.

part 1 of 3

part 2 of 3

part 3 of 3

super review from some surfing cats...

2010-11-02T14:13:00.000+11:00

This reviewer seems to have waxed his intellect beautifully on my show and ridden the strange wave to the unsure impeccably. I should read more surfing mags!
BDF

THE CHRONIC ILLS OF ROBERT ZIMMERMAN AKA BOB DYLAN (A LIE)
Sunday, 31 October 2010

The Chronic Ills of Robert Zimmerman AKA BOB DYLAN (A Lie)
A Critical Stages and Tamarama Rock Surfers Theatre Company Production
The Seymour Centre, Sydney
www.sydney.edu.au/seymour

If you surf, it goes without saying that you must be into Bob Dylan. After all, he wrote all those classic surf songs – Visions of Johanna, Song to Woody, Blowin' in the Wind, Tangled Up In Blue... Plus he directed a couple of underground surf movies in the 70s, invented the wetsuit and was the first guy to surf Teahuúpo switchfoot.

Now some of that is true, and some of it is not – but it all makes for a good story. And that's as good a cue as any for Benito di Fonzo's "The Chronic Ills of Robert Zimmerman AKA Bob Dylan (A Lie)", currently playing at the Seymour Centre in Sydney.

It's billed as "A Theatrical Talking Blues and Glissendorf" ('Glissendorf' is an expression His Bobness invented to describe witty wordplay that enabled the hip to remain aloof from the unhip). And it delivers as a rapid-fire soliloquy on everything that has set Bob Dylan apart as the smartest, sharpest and hippest Song and Dance Man of our time. It has the added advantage of being hilarious.

In "The Chronic Ills...", our man Bob talks us through his life and times, from the iron hills of Minnesota to Greenwich Village and beyond, from spurious beginnings to even more fanciful destinations. The fellow travellers along the way include Joan Baez, John and Yoko, TS Eliot, Ezra Pound, Johnny Cash, Robbie Robertson, and Abe Lincoln as a Jewish huckster from New York. All the great Dylan milestones are referenced – the Woody Guthrie connection, going electric, the motorcycle crash, born-again Bob, the 90s comeback, the Never-Ending Tour – but the devil has got into the detail, making this a very unreliable memoir indeed. Or is it?

You don't have to be a Dylan freak to enjoy this ride. A smattering of rock culture will mean even the most uninitiated will be able to join enough dots to follow the trail and be tickled by its absurdist twists and turns. But if you do happen to be a Dylan tragic – and there are all too many of us about – then"The Chronic Ills..." is the truth transformed into a riot. Sydney playwright di Fonzo seems to have taken every Dylan biography, interview, documentary and film clip ever released, stuffed them into a giant word processor, shaken it around and then let fly. Dylan was invariably sly, enigmatic and right-on when he used these words the first time around; di Fonzo's extended dance mix takes them in new directions without losing any of their potency.

Matt Ralph does a champion job as Dylan, ably supported by Andrew Henry and Lenore Munro and the instrumental backdrop conjured up by Simon Rippingale. It's a Critical Stages/Tamarama Rock Surfers Theatre Company production, reinforcing their credentials as leaders in independent theatre in Australia. The only down side is that the current season ends this Saturday, 6 November. Get onto the Seymour Centre now for tickets – it'll put you in touch with your Bobcat within.

- Ian Cameron

(originally published at http://www.pacificlongboarder.com/news.asp?id=2760&category=2)

Australian Stage review

2010-10-26T18:12:00.002+11:00

The Chronic Ills of Robert Zimmerman: AKA Bob Dylan (A Lie)
Review by lloyd bradford (brad) syke
Tuesday, 26 October 2010 06:46
http://www.australianstage.com.au/201010253975/reviews/sydney/the-chronic-ills-of-robert-zimmerman-aka-bob-dylan-a-lie.html

Phew! What a mouthful. Oh, not just the title, the whole shebang. I can't even begin to imagine the task of writing down such tracts, in the form of a monologue; albeit one punctuated with songs and a coterie of other characters, from Woody Guthrie, to John & Yoko, Abe Lincoln ( for some reason sounding like you can take the boy outa the Bronx, but you can't take the Bronx outa the boy), Joan Baez, Sara Lownds, Bono, Johnny Cash and a host of others, including Dylan the younger. Of course, writing it down is one thing; memorising it, quite another. Surely there must've been prompts. Either way, both are astonishing feats.

This play, if it can be called that (it's billed as a 'theatrical talking blues and glissendorf'), first saw light of day last year and I was disappointed, at the time, not to have caught it. So I made doubly sure this time. And thank God. Well, Critical Stages, actually; it being a laudable initiative of Darlinghurst Theatre Company, designed to take not just their own but independent productions from small, urban theatres Australia-wide on the road, to remote and regional areas.

Also to be congratulated is TRS, Tamarama Rock Surfers, the unassumingly-named big hitter in indie stagework, resident at the characterful Old Fitz pub, carrying the flag for new Aussie theatre, putting run after run on the boards; at The Stables and Opera House as well.

Writer, Benito Di Fonzo is my new instant, personal superhero. Coming to the work intrigued, but utterly uninformed, I'd surmised it must've been penned by an American. Uh-uh. Much like yours truly, 'the Fonz' is a starving, eccentric 'writer extraordinaire' (to borrow his own, tongue-in-cheek' bigging-up) based right here, in Sydney; the founder of Fonzo journalism. As well, he's a playwright, puppeteer, poet, pauper, pirate, pope, pawn and a king. Well, according to him. I, for one, to not dissent.

It's almost impossible to believe he could've written this unrelenting, rhythmic rave, which falls somewhere between beat poetry, spoken word and hip-hop (but tending towards the former), without the benefit of certain stimulants (even if it was just espresso). It has a rollicking cadence that's believable of the Dylan as a young man, if not an older one. It matters not that he mightn't have been like that. It should, perhaps, but, somehow, it doesn't. Nor does it matter if this is more, much more, a work of imagining than reality; fiction, faction, half-truths, or outright lies. It's the cred that's important and makes it work. The man once said, 'chaos is a friend of mine' and, either literally or intuitively, Di Fonzo seems to have embraced this and put it at the very centre of his approach to this work. Mind you, if it remained on paper, it wouldn't be a fraction of the fabulous thing it is, pregnant with broadly cultural, historical, literary, sociopolitical and academic references; shining with wit and wry, dry humour. Much like Bob, I guess.

The production isn't utterly flawless, but it's but a gnat's nut away. It takes a while for Bob (Matt Ralph) to settle into his accent but, hey, Bob is almost a dialect unto himself. From the ground up, producer Luke Cowling and director Lucinda Gleeson have done a sterling job. James Browne's grungy 60s underground music vibe genius set built, ostensibly, of painted speaker stacks, has been constructed brilliantly by Tom Bannerman and lit likewise by Richard Whitehouse. Emma Howell's costume design affords an easy air of authenticity.

The performers are, each, bloody marvels. That virtually all can act, sing and play with such vivacity is jaw-dropping. Ralph almost becomes the charismatic and compelling Dylan. Andrew Henry shows incredible versatility and comic sensibility, as countless characters in Bob's passing parade: Robbie Robertson, Daniel Lanois, you name him. Lenore Munro is hysterical as Yoko, stingingly effective as Baez (including her staggering vocal impression) and the Z man's other women. And Simon Rippingale is a beautiful bassist, uke and harmonica player.

As Woody Guthrie famously stated (to paraphrase), a guitar is a machine that kills fascist. So is a pen, whether in the hands of Bob Dylan, or Benito Di Fonzo. And the roll of a well-chosen string of words, whether off Dylan's tongue, or Ralph's. It might be about an American, but this play, I'm proud to say, is all-Australian. And, with bugger-all shopping days till Christmas (if retail clocks can be believed) and 2011, Zimmerman is vying with, say, August: Osage County and Namatjira as my Curtain Call of the year. Don't think twice. It's alright. Better than alright. Chronic Ills is fully-sick, man. AAA.

The Chronic Ills of Robert Zimmerman: AKA Bob Dylan (A Lie)
by Benito Di Fonzo

Part of the 2010 BITE program (Best of Independent Theatre)

Venue: Downstairs Theatre, Seymour Centre | Corner Cleveland Street and City Road, Chippendale
Dates: Fri 22 Oct - Sat 6 Nov, 2010
Times: Tue 6.30pm, Wed-Thu 8pm, Fri-Sat 6.30pm & 8pm
Tickets: Adult - $28, Concession $24
Bookings: 02 9351 7940 | www.seymourcentre.com

ZIMMERMAN PLAYS THE SEYMOUR CENTRE, CLICK HERE TO FIND OUT MORE!

2010-09-29T11:51:00.005+10:00

Benito's house busting show continues it's unhinged journey with a season at The Seymour Centre as one of the winners of Best Independent Theatre (BITE) 2010. Click the title above or go to http://sydney.edu.au/seymour/boxoffice/program_chronic_ills.shtml

Benito in conversation with Netta Yashchin re Woyzeck at Belvoir St.

2010-07-26T12:58:00.005+10:00

(This article was originally commissioned by, and appeared in, The Sydney Morning Herald, 23rd July, 2010)

“It’s a dark fairytale for adults,” says director Netta Yashchin of her vision for Buchner’s 19th century fable of murder, torture and deceit Woyzeck.

Loosely based on the real-life crime of a Leipzig soldier beheaded for murder in 1821, the play tells the story of Woyzeck (Michael Piggott), a passively loyal soldier tortured by a sadistic doctor (Rebecca Johnston) who constricts him to a diet of peas and conducts experiments in turning soldiers into donkeys. Meanwhile a cruel Colonel (Anthony Hunt) makes Woyzeck double as his barber as he as he belittles him. Woyzeck battles humiliations and hallucinations as his wife Marie (Zahra Newman) publicly cuckolds by carousing with other men till he is driven to an insane act of vengeance.

Woyzeck has been adapted steadily since it’s 1879 debut, including versions scored by Tom waits (Blood Money, 2002) and Nick Cave (2005) as well as the Alban Berg opera (Wozzeck, 1925) and a film by Werner Herzog (1979).

“It’s iconic,” says Yashchin, “directors with a bit of taste want to touch this play at some point in their career.”

Yashchin was an acclaimed actor in her homeland of Israel before falling in love on tour in Adelaide in 1998 where she later formed her own company. Since then she has moved between Tel Aviv and Sydney, studying Direction at NIDA under Egil Kipste.

Yashchin hopes to bring out the dark carnivalesque heart of Woyzeck with the aid of musicians, dancers and actors who will break into songs by artists ranging from Bob Marley to Jacque Brel during the show, creating an unsettlingly macabre comedy.

“I’ve called it a human circus,” says Yashchin. “I’m heightening the reality ... pushing it into grotesque, absurd and magic realism.”

Having served compulsory military service in Israel Yashchin can empathise with Woyzeck’s predicament.

"There’s a great suppression while you’re in the Army that comes out in strange forms in your adult life ... I’ve met soldiers who’ve suffered tremendous trauma.”

Yashchin sees Woyzeck not as a madman but an everyman trapped in an insane world of Kafkaesque proportions.

“He gives so much of himself that eventually the self-sacrifice becomes something repulsive,” says Yashchin.

“How far do you turn the other cheek - till your head turns around?”

“Any human-being put in this situation might execute [Woyzeck’s crime] in a fit of rage.”

“Who knows what the line between sanity and madness is?”

WOYZECK
August 6 – 29, preview August 5, Belvoir St Theatre Downstairs, Surry Hills. 9699 3444, $12 - $32. http://www.belvoir.com.au/320_whatson_downstairs.php?production_id=291

click here to SPONSOR BENITO & The BARDFLYS @ DRY JULY

2010-07-09T09:11:00.007+10:00

I'm doing Dry July, which gives me a month off the piss and raises money for cancer research. You can sponsor my team The Bardflys (well, it's only Chris and I at present, but hopefully it will grow - you can join us) by clicking on the title of this blog entry (the title, not the picture). Who knows, the life you save may be a future member of my audience!

Benito V Todd Haynes (In A Friendly Way)

2010-06-11T11:36:00.005+10:00

Click the title above or the link below to read an interesting article by Matthew Clayfield in this months Real Time magazine that favourably compares my Dylanesque show "The Chronic Ills..." with Todd Haynes' Dylanesque film "I'm Not There."

http://www.realtimearts.net/article/97/9878

2010-04-24T11:36:00.000+10:00

Click HERE to read my interview with Lee Bemrose re Chronic Ills, a shorter version of which was published in Drum Media magazine.

2010-04-18T23:33:00.001+10:00

Sydney City Hub CHRONIC ILLS review

2010-04-18T23:21:00.004+10:00

Author:
Alex Britton
Posted:
Monday, 12 April 2010

“Good poets borrow. Great singers steal.” Thus speaks Bob Dylan (Matt Ralph) in The Chronic Ills of Robert Zimmerman: AKA Bob Dylan (A Lie) – a theatrical talking blues and glissendorf. Sydney playwright Benito Di Fonzo does a little of both in his surrealo-absurdist re-imagining of the life and times of cultural legend Bob Dylan, combining quotes, lyrics, myths and his own special brand of writing to create a memorable piece of theatre. The play follows (roughly) Dylan’s life, moving beyond his own self mythologising and teaming him up along the way with, among others, Jesus, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, a hipster-Yiddish speaking Abe Lincoln and the ghost of Baudelaire hiding under a leaky faucet. If you think the title is a mouthful, spare a thought for the actors from The Tamarama Rock Surfers who manage to triumphantly tame Di Fonzo’s version of Dylan’s glissendorfing. The action is interspersed with creative arrangements of Dylan classics, artfully tweaked by Ralph and musical director Simon Rippingale to avoid licensing infringements. The overall result is a fantastically engaging hour of off-the-wall theatrical comedy. Wash it all down with a beer and laksa and you’ve got yourself a winning evening.

Until Apr 24, The Old Fitzroy Theatre, 129 Dowling St, Woolloomooloo, $17-25, 1300 GETTIX, www.rocksurfers.org

http://www.altmedia.net.au/theatre-the-chronic-ills-of-robert-zimmerman/18468

Rabbit Hole Urban Music (RHUM.org.au) review of Chronic Ills,

2010-04-18T23:10:00.003+10:00

Written by Julie Lawless

The Chronic Ills of Robert Zimmerman is a neological journey through the life of Bob Dylan and his search for his Holy Grail (embodied in Woody Guthrie’s mythical basement stash of unrecorded songs). A beautiful montage of the nonsensical answers Dylan delights in giving journalists, and with outstanding performances from all the players, writer Benito Di Fonzo’s work is just wonderful - Chronic Ills is a celebration of the roguish wordsmithery of a true artisan and mischief-maker.
From the second he steps on the stage, Matt Ralph is Dylan. This would have gone horribly wrong if the actor playing Bob had chosen to parody or mimic him in the manner of a cover-band but Ralph plays him to perfection. His Hedburg-esque delivery adds to the fun. I’ve never particularly been a fan of Joan Baez, so I found Lenore Munro’s portrayal of her far more palatable than the real thing. With a powerful voice more than capable of pulling of Baez’s “three octave scale with a vibrato you could wash dishes with”, Munro’s various cameos throughout were all terrific, in particular her scene-stealing Yoko Ono.

The show was peppered with hilarious visitations from the likes of Lennon and Ono, a hipster-Yiddish speaking Abe Lincoln, Allen Ginsberg, Johnny Cash, Jesus and of course the keeper of the Grail, Guthrie himself. Most of the afore-mentioned parts were played by Andrew Henry, with a terrific grasp of accents and impeccable comic timing. Although the play is essentially about Dylan and love of language, this was truly an ensemble piece.

Di Fonzo’s stream-of-consciousness scripting was so fast-paced and kinetic that it could almost be hard to follow- but such is the essence of a Dylan interview and it would have been trite to have played it any other way. Interestingly when I left the theatre I had not Dylan songs in my head but Bowie’s Song For Bob Dylan - in itself a tribute to the man that to me captures the spirit of Di Fonzo’s masterpiece.

Clever, witty, sharp and surreal, I was already planning on coming back to watch it again within the first twenty minutes of the show.

The Chronic Ills of Robert Zimmerman is playing every night but Mondays at The Old Fitroy Hotel in Woolloomoolloo until April 24, 2010. Every performance so far have sold out so I strongly urge anyone who loves music, words and fun to get in and book NOW!

9.5/10

http://www.rhum.org.au/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=898:the-chronic-ills-of-robert-zimmerman-aka-bob-dylan-a-lie-a-theatrical-talking-blues-and-glissendorf&catid=38:gr&Itemid=110

2010-04-13T19:36:00.001+10:00

Chronic Ills Sun Herald Review April 2010

2010-04-13T19:34:00.000+10:00

Chronic Ills Sydney Morning Herald Review April 2010

Benito being interviewed on 2UE about his play The Chronic Ills of Robert Zimmerman

2010-03-29T10:50:00.002+11:00

Fonzo Journalism from The Village Idiot #2

2010-03-25T11:06:00.003+11:00

(from the March Issue of The Newtonian - http://issuu.com/thenewtonian/docs/www.thenewtonian.net?mode=embed&layout=http%3A%2F%2Fskin.issuu.com%2Fv%2Flight%2Flayout.xml&showFlipBtn=true

Fonzo Journalism from The Village Idiot #2.
(This month a special report on Reclaim The Lanes.)

It’s strange when Reclaim The Streets (RTS) goes down a gear and becomes Reclaim The Lanes. Nonetheless the whole concept had been so sorely missed we were happy to welcome anything – Reclaim The Neighbour’s Driveway would have been an exciting venture back into Newtown’s bolder past. So we turned up, many a bit more jaded and world-wearing than we were at that original RTS over a decade ago when no-one had really known what to expect, just to meet in Camperdown Park. By day’s done we’d annexed Newtown’s arterial hub - the groin where King Street and Enmore Road jut out like hairy legs and the torso moves up towards City Road. We’d taken it all from the Dendy down and turned it into a street party, throwing in Wilson Street for good measure. At later RTS’ we’d taken everything from the street outside Villawood Detention Centre on one occasion to the whole of George Street on another, outside the Sydney Town Hall and Woolworths – turning the CBD into a little piece of freak culture. Sure a few times things got ugly with the cops, like when we took over the freeway below the Art Gallery of NSW, and said CBD endeavours. They’d manage to find some breach relating to rubber lesbian vampire nurse, nun or most dangerously police-drag, outfits.

While police-party relations were all cool this time a kind of reverse police drag is what I couldn’t help but notice as we stood in the Enmore back lane, a band competing with DJs in garbage bins and people of all hues dancing in day-glo Reg-Grundies. I spotted the strange occurrence of the feral cop. Later as I took a breather at the Queens Hotel so my enviro-photographer friend could review his work I got to examine pictures of this urban Sasquatch more closely. These were young, tall, lanky guys in dirty dungarees and Blunnies or Volleys, and raggedy worn-out t-shirts, like the civilians dancing around them, except that these cats had official NSW Police baseball caps and a utility belt, Batman style, with a radio and a large, black handgun hanging from it.

The sight was so odd that for a second I wondered if they were cops or just very militant ferals. I decided on the former. But where, I began to wonder, do they get these guys? Are some nice, clean-cut kids at Goulburn Police Academy trained up to pass as inner-city freaks?

“OK gentleman,” says the dreaded trainer, “now Smith has smoked some Lebanese Blonde and mixed it with the GBH. You’ll notice that suddenly the music of Squarepusher begins to make sense to him. While Johnson over here’s on hash-oil and MDA and is being really affected by his mother’s old Carpenters LPs. Now you kids, Digby and Wiggim, are taking a walk in the Anna Woods, so brace yourselves.”

Either that or the opposite occurs and they recruit students and hippies. Imagine an ominous knock at a share-house door.

“Hi we’re from the NSW Police and we’ve got a special offer for you kid. How would you like to protect young people. We’ll give you a walkie talkie, a baseball cap, and a big black gun with bullets in it.”

“Wow, intense. Can you get my Austudy renewed?”

“Done and done kid. We can even talk to that tutor you been having trouble with, catch him with a little Lebanese blonde thing in the teachers’ lounge if you like. Now what’s your Blundstone size?”

Either way it seems to be working. The only thing that wasn’t working in Reclaim The Lanes favour was Sydney’s new and greenhouse-gas improved monsoon season. By the time my friend and I dragged ourselves from happy hour we ended up losing them somewhere between the rain and the Bedford Street tunnel. But I’m sure they wetly ended up somewhere, perhaps reclaiming someone’s kiddie pool.

“It ain’t Reclaim The Streets,” my friend said, “but it’s a start.”

“As long as they were enjoying themselves,” I said, “and got some dancing in.”

“The kids?”

“No, the feral cops of course.”

Chronic Ills इन Sydney - ticket on sale now!

2010-03-17T14:17:00.005+11:00

buy tickets at http://www.rocksurfers.org/thechronicills or click on the title of this post

The Chronic Ills of Robert Zimmerman: AKA Bob Dylan (A Lie) - A Theatrical Talking Blues and Glissendorf (April 6 - April 24)

Following a critically acclaimed season at the Adelaide Fringe
("a wonderful strange... marvelously engaging theatrical experience" theatreguide.com.au) the surrealo-absurdist rhythmic reimagining of the life and weird times of Bob Dylan plays at the Old Fitz this April.

go to http://www.rocksurfers.org/thechronicills to BUY TICKETS or click on the title of this post

Presented by Tamarama Rock Surfers.

Penned by award winning Sydney poet, playwright, journalist Benito Di Fonzo,The Chronic Ills is a reverently ironic homage to the man born Robert Allen Zimmerman, better known as Bob Dylan.

We follow Bob/Robert as he begins his career by running away from home at ten, twelve, thirteen, fifteen, fifteen-and-a-half, seventeen and eighteen years old. Instructed by Woody Guthrie, he goes in pursuit of a holy grail of songs armed only with a fascist-killing guitar and a dream. Accidentally renamed Dylan in a New York public hospital, he then encounters, corrupts, jams and gets lost at sea with fellow icons Ginsberg, Lennon, Pound, Eliot, Joan Baez, Johnny Cash, Billy Bragg, and a hipster-Yiddish speaking Abraham Lincoln (to name a few).

Following a sell-out, critically acclaimed season at the Adelaide Fringe, the Chronic Ills returns to Sydney's mainstage for three weeks only.

“It’s a long story mister, involving bible, ghosts, chaos, clocks,watermelons, everything”

"Benito di Fonzo's Dylan-esque stream of consciousness is fun ... Fonzo has invoked the spirits of everyone who might have influenced Dylan ... with John Lennon and Yoko Ono being a particular crowd pleaser."
Tim Lloyd – The Advertiser

“Wonderfully strange … so well written … a marvelously engaging theatrical experience."
Brian Godfrey – theatreguide.com.au

“You don’t need drugs to enjoy … the wackiest show in the fringe.”
Matt Byrne – Sun Mail

“The musical accompaniment is outstanding in it’s subtlety and effectiveness.”
Troy Foster – Rip It Up!

“It was fantastic and will be a hit of the fringe!”
David Grybowski

"this was a bloody brilliant show, every bit as entertaining as Bowengabbie… and that’s a massive compliment." http://ff.moobaa.com/?p=1422
Cast & Crew

Playwright: Benito Di Fonzo
With: Andrew Henry, Lenore Munro, Matt Ralph and Simon Rippingale
Director: Lucinda Gleeson
Producer: Jennifer Hamilton
Publicity: Emma Jones
Designer: Eliza McClean
Production Manager: Caitlin Porter
Graphic Design: Think Five
Lighting Design: Richard Whitehouse

buy tickets at http://www.rocksurfers.org/thechronicills or click on title of this post

ADELAIDE FRINGE 2010 REVIEWS #5 & 6

2010-03-03T00:53:00.004+11:00

SAYS:

“Benito di Fonzo’s Dylan-esque stream of consciousness is fun … Fonzo has invoked the spirits of everyone who might have influenced Dylan … with John Lennon and Yoko Ono being a particular crowd pleaser – * * * * ” Tim Lloyd

AND HERE'S A VIDEO REVIEW BY SOMEONE CALLED MEMA WITH FOOTAGE FROM THE ADELAIDE SEASON:

Adelaide Fringe 2010 Review #4

2010-02-23T14:33:00.010+11:00

Fringe review: The Chronic Ills of Robert Zimmerman
PETER C. PUGSLEY 22 Feb, 2010
The Independent Weekly, South Australia.
(A Fairfax Regional Paper)

Hey, hey, Bobby Dylan but I wrote you a play. The Chronic Ills of Robert Zimmermanis a well-crafted journey into the life and times of one of the most enigmatic recording artists of our lifetime.

Constrained by Dylan’s notoriously tight copyright control of his music, this strongly performed play still manages to catch the essence of the man and his music. It is presented by the Sydney-based Tamarama Rock Surfers. Matt Ralph plays Dylan as the unreliable narrator, the song-and-dance man, the master illusionist. Thankfully, he avoids mere imitation of Dylan’s singing style and is ably backed by Simon Rippingale on upright bass, ukulele and harmonica (though not all at the same time).

Lenore Munro plays nicely with a litany of characters, including Joan Baez and Dylan’s ex-wife, Sara Lowndes – and her Yoko Ono is not to be missed. And while Ralph’s Dylan is the anchoring performance, Andrew Henry’s remarkable supporting role(s) as Woody Guthrie, John Lennon, Allen Ginsberg and Johnny Cash threatens to steal the show. Despite the occasional rushed delivery by Ralph, playwright Benito Di Fonzo has penned a great ode to a wordsmith of puzzling proportions. With a bowerbird-like randomness, Di Fonzo grabs and snatches at Dylan’s lyrics, off-hand comments and literary ripostes, threading them into a (mostly) coherent narrative.

Diehard Dylanites can sit smugly congratulating themselves as they identify key phrases and separate the real from the fictional. Those less familiar with the work of His Bobness will enjoy the rapid-fire exchanges and snippets of what could well pass as Dylan songs (the take on "Girl from the North Country" is a hoot!). If you’re confused by the title, just track down Dylan’s recent biographical tomes.

– On for a limited season, February 22-27, at the Bakehouse Theatre.

http://www.independentweekly.com.au/news/local/news/entertainment/fringe-review-the-chronic-ills-of-robert-zimmerman/1757694.aspx

Adelaide Fringe 2010 Review #3

2010-02-22T23:32:00.005+11:00

The Chronic Ills Of Robert Zimmerman
The Bakehouse Theatre, Sat Feb 20

The Chronic Ills… is a freewheeling ‘glissendorf’ pastiche of folk history, interview, myth, song fragment, biography and musical interlude that rattles past at breakneck speed like an angel-headed methamphetamine jive-talking ‘60s hipster. Unable to secure rights to Dylan’s catalogue, the production avoids a nostalgic run through the highlights of the canon. Instead, musical interludes are distorted renditions of tunes performed by Dylan; the result almost as contradictory, confusing and irreverent as the man himself.

The cast rise to the challenge of an astounding number of words, characters and identities. Joan Baez is as annoying as she should be, John Lennon is hilarious and Simon Rippingale’s musical accompaniment is outstanding in its subtlety and effectiveness.

Those new to Dylan may get tangled up in blue but for fans of the man, concept or era, don’t think twice, it’s great.

Final Word: Dylanological.

Troy Foster

The Chronic Ills Of Robert Zimmerman continues at The Bakehouse Theatre at 8pm until Sat Feb 27.
http://www.ripitup.com.au/article/490

Adelaide Fringe 2010 Review #2

2010-02-22T23:10:00.008+11:00

THE CHRONIC ILLS OF ROBERT ZIMMERMAN - AKA BOB DYLAN (A LIE): A THEATRICAL TALKING BLUES & GLISSENDORF

Tamarama Rock Surfers
The Bakehouse
Until 27 Feb 2010
Review by Brian Godfrey

If there is a Fringe award for the longest titled production, then this show has won it hands down. The title is a small indication of the wonderfully strange, bizarre, theatrical experience awaiting.

As written by Benito Di Fonzo, this is Bob Dylan’s story as Bob himself would probably tell it - strange, lyrical, mystical and very heavy on name-dropping.

The play is so well written, directed and performed, that this non-Dylan fan was rapt. Director Lucinda Gleeson wrings every drop of talent from her very fine cast and has an obvious eye for humour and emotion that never becomes overdone.

On a nicely cluttered, but never distracting set designed by Eliza McClean, Matt Ralph shines as the Man Himself, Zimmerman/Dylan. Looking not unlike the singer/poet, Ralph never leaves the stage during the show’s hour long run and barely stops speaking or singing - and certainly never stops performing. This man IS Dylan and the audience never once doubt that. Ralph is also the Musical Director of the show and excels at that as well.

Complementing Ralph wonderfully are the multi-accented, very funny Andrew Henry and the very talented, beautifully voiced, Lenore Munro; both playing a multitude of characters. One of their many great moments has to be as John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

Since Dylan and music go hand in hand, we must not forget the marvellous job performed by the nonspeaking muso, Simon Rippingale (also doubling as the second Musical Director).

This type of production can either turn out as a load of arty-farty wank or a marvellously engaging theatrical experience - Tamarama Rock Surfers have produced the latter.

Rating: 4.5 stars (out of 5)

http://www.theatreguide.com.au/current_site/reviews/reviews_detail.php?ShowID=chronicills&ShowYear=2010

Adelaide Fringe 2010 Review

2010-02-22T13:41:00.005+11:00

“The Chronic Ills of Robert Zimmerman: AKA Bob Dylan (A Lie)”

Tamarama Rock Surfers, Bakehouse Theatre.

Review by Matt Byrne, Sunday Mail.

February 21, 2010.

 ½

You don’t need drugs to enjoy this acoustic musical romp, Bonito [sic] Di Fonzo’s hallucinogenic script will suffice.

Tamarama Rock Surfers combine the music of Bob Dylan with a mess of other musical icons and poets to deliver one of the wackiest shows in the Fringe so far.

The music and singing is great, the acting and bizarre fusion of ideas mostly clever and the real Dylan fans in the house didn’t mind some Dylan Thomas thrown in for good measure.

It’s an entertaining mishmash that follows the Dylan mystique and persona through the decades from his humble start as Robert Zimmerman to revered musical giant.

Matt Ralph as Zimmerman/Dylan, versatile Andrew Henry in a range of roles and volcanic-voiced vamp Lenore Munro deliver the unique dialogue in the style that young Zimmerman rapped with his contemporaries.

It’s weird but good as the musical times keep changin’.

थे च्रोनिक्लेस ऑफ़ थे च्रोनिक इल्स ऑफ़ रोबेर्ट ज़िम्मेर्मन - थे प्रोदुक्टिओं ब्लॉग.

2010-02-08T10:19:00.002+11:00

follow my actors on their journey to Adelaide Fringe, via Albury Hothouse at this new blog -

http://chroniclesofchronicills.wordpress.com/

2010-01-21T13:51:00.000+11:00

Bob Dylan: A Biography by Anthony Scaduto

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is one of the better Bob bios on the market, the best being Bob’s self-penned Chronicles: Vol. 1.
Originally published in 1972 this could be said to be quite behind the times, ending as it does just after Bob’s 1971 New Morning LP. However having less of a time-period to cover than most bios means it can focus with much more depth on Bob’s youth and the first ten years of his career.
Scaduto’s bio is unique in having been vetted and approved by Dylan whilst still in the manuscript stage, something he didn’t normally do – reading books about yourself written by other people would feel understandably and decidedly weird after a while no doubt. Bob was moved to cooperate with Scaduto by fears (supposedly implanted by infamous Dylanologist and Garbologist AJ Weberman) that Scaduto would concentrate on the rumours floating around the Village in the early 70s that Bob was a heroin addict. He wasn’t, claims Scaduto.
Bob met with Scaduto at his recording studio after reading the manuscript and argued over it, while later filling in gaps in the story so graciously that Scaduto admits he became suspicious of Bob’s motives - afraid he was trying to seduce him into a white-wash. Scaduto stood up for himself however – this is man that has written books on the Mafia after all, a point that apparently impressed Dylan.
Most importantly Bob for the first time analysed his lyrical content, something he always claimed impossible when attempted by others. He paid particular attention to the violently surreal lyrics from Another Side of Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited, Bringing It All Back Home and Blonde On Blonde.
A few years before meeting Scaduto, and while recovering from the motorbike accident that almost killed him at his Woodstock home, Bob had an epiphany that all those bitter tirades against folkniks and fallen women were actually the author subconsciously aiming his superbly sarcastic blade at his own cynical self. He says his [at that stage three:] later albums are also about himself but that at least by then he knew he was doing it. He feels he is now a more whole and less fearful person, and hence free to less cynically celebrate his life and his young family with albums like Nashville Skyline.
Most interesting for Australian readers is the revelation that Bob worked on songs for the Blonde On Blonde album whilst on tour here, in particular whilst stuck in a hotel room in Perth, accompanied by Robbie Robertson from The Band and a woman who is only described as a ‘prominent Australian actress’ of the time whom he befriended through their mutual friend the Melbourne poet Adrian Rawlings. This mysterious actress (whose identity I am determined to discover) was hired by an un-named national publication to do a piece on Bob, but at Bob’s request she went off the idea - although she happily spills the beans for Scaduto under the condition of anonymity. This gets to the root of why this book works, and no doubt why Bob himself says,
“I like your book. That’s the weird thing about it.”
People really open up to Scaduto. Joan Baez talks very honestly and openly for a whole chapter, and old school friends tell tales such as how when a young Bob would get drunk at parties back in Hibbing, Minnesota they would trick him by saying,
“Hey Bobby, Woody Guthrie’s outside, he says he wants to me you.”
Little Bobby Zimmerman would then run out into the snow looking for his hero, calling his name and catching pneumonia while his friends chortled at the window.
Scaduto also talks to the Manhattan musicians Bob put on his manager Albert Grossman’s payroll then piled into a car to drive across America with him – playing shows to itinerant labourers, Dallas university students (two months after JFK’s assassination) and bemused elderly poets whose addresses he’d tracked down, it all ending in a dope fueled mess in a pre-psychedelic San Francisco – and all the time with a jar labelled Marijuana on the dashboard refilled by picking up certain packages at post offices along the way.
Bob himself talks extensively to Scaduto. This being less than a decade since he had been frightened by mobs calling him a messiah and then a Judas in quick succession, both of which he found equally terrifying – as he puts it, (to paraphrase) ‘Jesus was a messiah and look what they did to him!’ Hence Bob explain how he just wants people to realise he’s just a musician, and even if he was some kind of pop-cultural superhero then there’s no reason to follow him, constantly reiterating what he feels is his most important lyrical message,
“Don’t follow leaders,
and watch the parking meters.”

Benito Di Fonzo
21 Jan. 2010
www.benitodifonzo.blogspot.com

View all my reviews >>

2010-01-07T09:43:00.001+11:00

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I just re-read this slim yet insightful story after 20 years and it was even better than I remember, so I've added a star to my former rating of it. Siddhartha is Hesse's homage to ancient Eastern philosophical tomes he became enamoured with. It's the story of an Indian cat, Siddhartha, who lives a parallel life to the Buddha, their paths only crossing once, and them disagreeing on that occasion. Our Siddhartha goes on a very different journey towards the same enlightenment as Siddhārtha Gautama the Buddha. His individualistic anti-religious spiritual quest is also placed against that of Govinda, his childhood friend and sporadic life-long companion who becomes one of the earliest of the Buddha's followers. Siddhartha goes from rich kid to disobedient son to fundamentalist monk to wealthy, drunken, hedonist to poor ferryman to spurned father (with the child he has to the world's finest concubine) to finally, after his final breakdown by the laughing river, he becomes whole once more and prepared for whatever the river has in store for him, much to the elderly Govinda's admiration. It puts it all in perspective.

View all my reviews >>

Sunday Mourning

2009-12-21T21:51:00.005+11:00

This is a poem I wrote in my head while stumbling from a party in Stanmore to my home in Erko and managed to get down on paper while still fresh. It went on to win the NSW Writers' Centre's Inner City Life Poetry Prize in 2001. After helping my cousin Achilles with his video montages I decided I should start doing them for my own work - so much more interesting than a talking head I hope.

"Sunday Mourning" by Benito Di Fonzo
(1st Prize 2oo1 Inner City Life Literary Comp.)

The sun's coming up on Sunday as I stumble out of Stanmore,
and the cabs crawl out like cockroaches onto Enmore Rd.

As I steer myself down the spirituous sidewalk I see them search the soiled streets like Sirens
for lost sailors to entice with their warm vinyl Islands, and directions to their cousin Abdul's
where you can purchase a gram of Turkish delight to lull away the recovering day.

As I pedal my feet down the street; blindman's brain riding my body like a battered bicycle,
the stench of fresh sick swims towards me from the bent over boy in the Commodore door
as he attempts to kiss the tarmac with his intestines like a Pope turned inside out.

The Bank Hotel’s bouncer; bored broad shoulders bursting sluggishly through his suit,
looks as fresh as the apathetic kebab that I purchase next door
as he sways from sole to sole, wishing some young Goth would get smart with him
enabling him to expel that pent up energy that bubbles inside of him like a nun's libido.

I veer right and roll towards Erskineville where, outside The Imperial,
a cornucopia of subterranean scenes blend like Bailey's and cream,
and a boy with a beer glass embedded delicately in his face boldly refuses an ambulance
as he floats painlessly on beer, battery acid and testosterone,
then falls flatulent and flat at the fatigued feet of a paramedic like a drunken fish.

I dive through my back door as the dawn clouds change hue, and I escape the segue into day.

Yeah, the sun's coming up on Sunday as I collapse on the couch like a concubine,
with the kidneys of a cockroach and a liver like a stone.

2009-12-07T17:35:00.001+11:00

Australian Tragic by Jack Marx

My rating: 4 of 5 stars While at first this took a little time to take hold of me, about halfway through something happened and I became gripped by these poor victims of pathos and warm tales of bathos. Of particular mention are the stories of the bush doctor who performed miracles with monkey glands only to have his research lost to a funeral pyre, and the anger-inducing anecdotes of injustice to simple warm-hearted working folk and felines through nothing but cold greed or apathy. These are tales that will haunt me as they obviously did Marx, when he wasn't fearing alien abduction that is (you'll have to read the book.) Equally fascinating is the fresh angle Marx gives to familiar tragedies such as Steve Irwin as a study in media back-flipping that would make Rupert Murdoch look idealistic, Martin Bryant through the eyes of his father's conundrum, and Micheal Hutchence as he would be considered had he not pranced around impersonating Jim Morrison in front of some fortunate synth players but rather just been some bloke in the corner of the local beer garden. By the end I put "Australian Tragic" on a par with what I consider Marx's masterpiece, "Sorry: The Wretched Tale of Little Stevie Wright." (www.goodreads.com/book/show/4450564.Sorr...) Buy it for someone for Honika or Christmas, then borrow it back before you leave. Or like me, just knick it from Tug Dumbly's kitchen when he's pissed. BDF View all my reviews >>

Benito in Cordite # 31

2009-12-01T09:35:00.002+11:00

Go to http://www.cordite.org.au/content/poetry/epic/ to see it, and feel free to comment (being firm but fair.)

2009-10-23T10:45:00.002+11:00

“The tabloid trap”

Absurd ... Bliss intertwines fantasy with the mundane world.
Photo: Edwina Edp

Benito Di Fonzo
Sydney Morning Herald, October 22, 2009

French-Canadian playwright Olivier Choiniere's Blisstakes us into the tabloid-fuelled minds of four shopping centre employees. Like the pages of a trashy mag, it juxtaposes their obsession with Quebecois chanteuse Celine Dion against the tragedy of a crippled girl beaten by her father. Blissdoes this in a heightened world – it is in turns a serious social commentary and blackly comic theatre of the absurd.

The director of the Australian premiere, Shannon Murphy, says: “What really drew me to it is that even though it is so incredibly dark there's actually a lot of humour in it, some of it disturbing and some just outright funny.”

Much of the story emerges from the mind of character the Oracle (Krew Boylan).

“We are actually watching the production through her mind. In a way the Oracle is the Celine Dion character in the sense that she moves from being the girl at the supermarket to being Celine Dion who becomes the victim because she has the miscarriage who then becomes the daughter who the family come to visit, which then becomes a domestic violence case who then . . . ” Murphy says, before trailing off into laughter.

Boylan, along with Libby Fleming, Simon Corfield and Matt Hardie, portrays the characters in the real and imagined worlds of the play.

“My job is to work hard at creating as much clarity within the piece as possible,” Murphy says.

Murphy is no stranger to controversial productions – her shows My Name is Rachel Corrie and Age of Consent dealt in turn with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Jamie Bulger murderers. Murphy believes that, though never purposefully courting controversy, her non-conventional choices stem from being born in apartheid South Africa and growing up in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square riots.

“These things have really informed what I do and I believe that I pick stories that do make a bit of an impact,” she says.

Bliss uses its bizarre narrative form to examine a cult of celebrity where, Murphy believes, the turns and travails of celebrities carry too much weight in our lives.

“Like when Michael Jackson dies and how terrible that is [but] a guy that's lived down the street for 20 years dies and we don't even notice,” she says.

Are trashy magazines a blackly comic theatre of the absurd all of their own?

“Completely, and that's what this piece is," Murphy says. "These people work this job and for their escapism they fantasise about celebrities and then their fantasies get incredibly out of control.”

BLISS

Previews Thursday, runs Saturday to November 22, various times, Belvoir Street Theatre, Surry Hills, 9699 3444, $29/$23.

In coversation with Toby Schmitz, Travis Cotton & Peter Carstairs concerning Martin McDonagh's "The Lonesome West"

2009-10-13T09:58:00.007+11:00

Play fight … Schmitz & Cotton.
Photo: Marco del Grande

"Brothers up in arms"

Sydney Morning Herald, August 21, 2009

An Irish play about squabbling siblings will resonate here, writes Benito di Fonzo.

Merging psychotic characters, bleak outlooks and frank episodes of violence, controversial Irish playwright Martin McDonagh's tragicomedies have been hits around the world. So much so that in 1997, McDonagh became the first playwright since Shakespeare to have four plays running concurrently in England.

Peter Carstairs, best known as the director of award-winning Australian film September, has chosen McDonagh's 1997 black comedy The Lonesome West for his first foray into the world of theatre.

Carstairs feels audiences respond to the dramatic range of McDonagh's works.

"He moves from teenage love through to the hypocrisy of the church through to consumerism versus relationships through to happiness compared with living a miserable life - all within the space of two hours," Carstairs says.

The third part of McDonagh's Leenane Trilogy, The Lonesome West tells the story of squabbling Galway brothers Coleman (Toby Schmitz) and Valene (Travis Cotton). Whiskey-priest Welsh (Ryan Johnson) tries to steer them towards a love he himself is unable to secure, despite the attentions of bootlegger's daughter Girleen (Sibylla Budd).

The action takes place in a harsh landscape, where the local girls' football team is celebrated for putting its opponents in hospital and where murder, suicide and verbal abuses are everyday occurrences.

Welsh's reformations are hampered by a hypocrisy that allows the brothers to be absolved of murdering their father via the confessional, while a boy who commits suicide in the lake is eternally damned.

"There is an overlap between Australian taste and Martin McDonagh's style,'' Schmitz says. ''The Irish oral tradition of being a great storyteller even if you are illiterate has some currency here. It's a bard culture, if you will.''

Cotton adds: "I think Australians identify with underdogs. They can relate to these people."

Carstairs felt their years as friends and flatmates would inform the lead actors' portrayal of the constantly fighting kinsmen.

Schmitz admits such violence can be draining. "It does cost you having four fights, six days a week."

Cotton adds with a wry smile: "It's all about not hurting Toby."

THE LONESOME WEST

Until September 13, various times, Belvoir St Downstairs, Surry Hills, 9699 3444, $29/$23.

some tom waits, just because I can...

2009-09-22T09:14:00.000+10:00

Eggs and Sausage from Jackie Lay on Vimeo.

"Whore" by Rick Viede

2009-06-01T13:50:00.003+10:00

It's a wild world

Sydney Morning Herald, May 29, 2009

An explicit play explores voyages of self-discovery, writes Benito di Fonzo

RICK VIEDE doesn't shy away from the question of whether his "gap year" was as debauched as those described in his acclaimed debut play, Whore.

"I once masturbated on Tennessee Williams's grave, does that count?" the 26-year-old playwright says.

Whore tells the story of Tim and Sara, two gen Y-ers who have relocated to London in order to anonymously embark on a wild year away from their old lives. Their risk-taking leads to them working in the sex industry and, by the play's end, putting their own lives at risk.

Along the way, Tim and Sara - played by Paul-William Mawhinney and Rhiannon Owen - explore what sexual, moral and commercial boundaries they will accept in the adult lives that await them, if they can survive their early 20s.

"I think everybody, when you're in your late teens and early 20s, goes through a sexual awakening and that awakening is often tied in with your journey into the world, figuring out what the world is about," Viede says. "This play ties those two things together quite explicitly."

During Viede's own gap year - which took the form of a journey across the US, complete with appendicitis, and a stint studying drama at California's UCLA - he managed to avoid the lure of the sex industry.

Like Tim and Sara, however, he had a process of discovering his own limits - his obsession with visiting his hero's grave driving him to ignore the complications he was suffering after a stay in hospital.

"Sometimes a strong personality and willpower are good but there are limits," he says. "Sometimes you have to draw a line in the sand and say, 'Enough is enough, time to go heal, time to go home,' which is pretty much the story of the play."

Back in Australia, Viede began to move from acting to writing. Out of his early experiments came his cabaret alter-ego Glace Chase, whom Viede has toured around Australia. Viede later attempted more serious drama and produced the first draft of Whore. Director Christopher Hurrell spotted its promise. "The level of progress he'd made in his writing in just a few months was amazing," Hurrell says. "Whore seemed so exciting in its first draft that we thought we'd give it a reading straight away."

Hurrell suggested Viede enter the play in the Griffin Award, which it won before being commissioned by B Sharp. More recently, Whore was one of eight plays chosen from 1500 to be staged by the Summer Play Festival in New York.

Hurrell found from readings that what he calls the "psycho-sexual parable" at the heart of Whore resonated particularly strongly with younger audiences.

"Rick's just a little bit older than his characters and I think that that's the crucial element — he's within this culture enough to understand it but outside it a little to be able to observe and analyse," Hurrell says. "At some point I wanted to be able to draw on this connection I found between other young artists and this play and throw open the doors a bit, so I came up with this idea of looking for responses between each of the 10 [scenes] and local musical artists."

Hurrell brought in David Heinrich of the band Lions At Your Door to source songs from local artists that would resonate with the themes of risk, rule-breaking and self-realisation that run through Whore. The soundtrack will be on sale during its season.

"It's not just about finding 10 songs and playing them," Hurrell says, "it's about finding elements of that music that [Heinrich will] work into a more abstract soundscape."

Viede hopes the play pays testament to those people who test the boundaries of who they are and what is acceptable and thereby redefine for all of us what life can be.

"We should tell their stories because they're fascinating," Viede says. "What - do we want to tell more stories about middle-class people living in the 'burbs and how hard it is to be financially secure and successful and have Christmases? I just go no, that's not particularly interesting to me."

And as for his own risk-taking, culminating over a bottle of gin at his hero's grave? "Tennessee would have appreciated it."

WHORE

Previews Thursday, runs June 5 to June 28, Belvoir St Theatre Downstairs, Surry Hills, 9699 3444, $29/$23.

Review of my play

2009-05-26T17:58:00.007+10:00

The Chronic Ills

of Robert Zimmerman:

The Old Fitzroy Theatre

By Victor Kline ArtsHub | Thursday, May 21, 2009

The Chronic Ills of Robert Zimmerman: The Old Fitzroy Theatre

Go, go go!

Do not miss this show!

Benito Di Fonzo has a

decidedly twisted view

of existence which only

serves to feed the madness of this quirky show –

The Chronic Ills of Robert Zimmerman: AKA Bob Dylan (A Lie) -

A Theatrical Talking Blues –

playing at the Old Fitzroy.

He is a writer and performer of diverse tastes and he

doesn’t shrink from tasting

all there is.

This gives his talented director and ensemble

of actors the opportunity

to also taste the fruits of their own art with relish and delight.

I enjoyed seeing a kaleidoscope of

characters from my own past a singin’ and a dancin’ their celebrity

heads off. Congratulations to

Andrew Henry, Leonore Munro,

and Matt Ralph as the Zimm.

As for Lucinda Gleeson’s direction and Simon Rippingdale’s music, why be shackled? I agree.

Go for it! That’s what theatre

needs. And the metaphorical burning of the effigy? If you blinked you missed it, but then you would really be missing something.

Well done to all.

The Chronic Ills of Robert Zimmerman: AKA Bob Dylan (A Lie) - A Theatrical Talking Blues

The Old Fitzroy Theatre,
Woolloomooloo, Sydney
Dates: May 11, 15-18, 22-25
Friday and Saturday nights at
9:30pm, Sunday and Monday
nights at 8:00 pm

Cast and Crew

Playwright: Benito Di Fonzo

Director: Lucinda Gleeson

Musical Directors: The Company

With: Andrew Henry, Lenore

Munro, Matt Ralph and Simon Rippingale

Photography and Graphic Design: Dan Collopy for Think Five

Producer: Jennifer Hamilton for

Bicycle User Group

To purchase tickets please visit

the Rock Surfers website

Victor Kline

Victor Kline started his working life as Sydney's youngest barrister. He is now Editor of the Federal Court Reports, and an award winning playwright, director and actor who has worked extensively in theatre in Sydney and off Broadway in New York. He is also author of the novel 'Rough Justice'.

E: vkline@bigpond.com

W: http://www.victorkline.com

http://www.artshub.com.au/au/news.asp?sId=178081

my Dylan parody opening tonight!

2009-05-11T11:20:00.002+10:00

(from TRS site - http://www.rocksurfers.org/node/150)

The Chronic Ills of Robert Zimmerman: AKA Bob Dylan (A Lie) - A Theatrical Talking Blues

(May 11, 15-18, 22-25)

By Benito Di Fonzo

The Chronic Ills of Robert Zimmerman is a surrealo-absudist theatrical re-imagining of the life and weird times of folk-rock legend and pop cultural icon Bob Dylan. Written by award winning Sydney poet, playwright, journalist and kazooist Benito Di Fonzo, The Chronic Ills is a reverently ironic homage to the man born Robert Allen Zimmerman sixty-eight years ago this May 24.

We follow Bob/Robert as he begins his career by running away from home at ten, twelve, thirteen, fifteen, fifteen-and-a-half, seventeen and eighteen years old. Instructed by Woody Guthrie, he goes in pursuit of a holy grail of songs armed only with a fascist-killing guitar and a dream. Accidentally renamed Dylan in a New York public hospital, he then encounters, corrupts, jams and gets lost at sea with fellow icons Ginsberg, Lennon, Pound, Eliot, Joan Baez, Johnny Cash, Billy Bragg, and a hipster-Yiddish speaking Abraham Lincoln (to name a few).

“It’s a long story mister, involving bible, ghosts, chaos, clocks, watermelons, everything”

Cast and Crew
Playwright: Benito Di Fonzo
Director: Lucinda Gleeson
Musical Directors: The Company
With: Andrew Henry, Lenore Munro, Matt Ralph and Simon Rippingale
Photography and Graphic Design: Dan Collopy for Think Five
Producer: Jennifer Hamilton for Bicycle User Group

Producing Company: bicycleusergroup.wordpress.com

The Chronic Ills of Robert Zimmerman is part of the Tamarama Rock Surfers 2009 'Late Sessions' Season, and is in development with TRS's 'Early Sessions' development Program.

go to http://www.rocksurfers.org/node/150 TO BUY TICKETs

Theatre Preview: Ollie and the Minotaur

2009-04-11T11:20:00.004+10:00

Benito Di Fonzo
Sydney Morning Herald, April 9, 2009
Secrets and lies flow when three women get together for a drunken seaside reuinion.

TO WRITE convincing dialogue for his all-female cast, playwright Duncan Graham needed to find a way to get inside the "tribe", as he calls it, of 28-year-old women.
The Adelaide playwright, with director Sarah John, achieved this by setting actresses Adriana Bonaccurso, Wendy Bos and Sarah Brokensha a series of secrets and tiny betrayals to act out on one another.

"'From my point of view it's [a way of] trying to become an insider," Graham says of the process through which he created his critically acclaimed play Ollie And The Minotaur. "We see so many plays about men doing harm to each other that I wanted to explore how women might do this.

"We didn't tell the actresses anything when they came in on day one and started to introduce secrets to them and giving them actions to play, setting up improvisations that gave me a chance to listen to the way they spoke, the way they interacted, the way they dealt with these secrets."

Graham, 34, says this allowed him to understand the three women's interactions more - how they thought, the way they said certain things. Such observations helped bring about Ollie And The Minotaur.

The play tells the story of three female friends at a drunken seaside reunion on the cusp of their "Saturn return". At first, the bitchy poking at one another is all in good fun, bearing a chick-lit innocence to it. Soon, the flow of alcohol calls forth demons from a dark place within their friendship, in particular a secret from their past that occurred - like the mythical Minotaur of the title - in the centre of a local cave. As the play unfolds, the girls are brought back to that dark moment at the centre of their relationship.

"It sneaks up on you, which is great," director John says. "The three women could really bring their experiences and the stories of their friends, then Duncan could really craft it and set up the idea of those masks, so he could set up this Sex And The City world and then slowly reveal these darker themes."

Ollie And The Minotaur, which will have its Sydney debut at Belvoir St Theatre, was hailed in Adelaide and Melbourne as a triumph of naturalism. Along with the dark deprecatory humour in much of the dialogue - "That's one part of the play we can definitely say came from the actors," John laughs - the naturalistic staging is designed to help punters identify with the women as they move towards their own feared self-revelations.

"It does have that faux-doco feel," Graham agrees. "It really invites the audience to be a voyeur and get in the room with the actors and go on the journey and the downstairs space at Belvoir Street is absolutely ideal for that set-up."
John admits there have been defensive reactions from some female audience members about the same age as the protagonists but the real surprise has been how men react to the show.

"Men love it," she says. "Across the board I haven't come across or heard of any response from a guy who hasn't loved it. I think it's
nice to see three young women on stage but also it does provide some insight into this secret life of women."

Just what sorts of secrets were the girls fed in rehearsal? "They were simple ones to begin with, just telling them about their character, and then little bits of information about the other person because the devil's in the three, the interaction of three people, particularly in friendships with women."

So it's a play written through Chinese whispers? "Yeah, it is, almost. What you get is these women hovering around the deeper secret and the way they interact around that deeper secret and the way that secret gets revealed. It becomes a labyrinth of lies, betrayals and deception."

Betrayal, it would seem, is a dish best served with gin and tonic.

Genre
Theatre
Location
Belvoir St Downstairs
Address
25 Belvoir St, Surry Hills
Date
17 April 2009 to 3 May 2009
Tickets
$29/$23
Phone Bookings
(02) 9699 3444
Online Bookings
www.belvoir.com.au
Details
Previews April 16. See website for performance times.

Stream Of Unconsciousness Book Review - ""Bare-Faced Messiah: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard""""

2009-04-11T09:46:00.004+10:00

Bare-Faced Messiah : The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard by Russell Miller

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is the amazing tale of the world's most deluded, and most posthumously successful, con-man and really gets inside the machinations of his strangely mendacious imagination. You almost admire Hubbard as he streams off one ridiculous lie after another from adolescence onwards so as to make his place in the world with his few other talents - a fact he never faces by creating an ever greater history of himself which often you wonder if even he believes. You can see then just how, sporadically between the 1930s and 1950s, he was able to pump out a several thousand word sci-fi, western or fantasy adventure story nightly by just going out to the shed, often accompanied by a bottle of rum to aid his already overactive imagination, and typing away till dawn when the first of his three wives would send it off (inferring he somehow made very few typos or mistakes in 1st drafts) to whichever magazine he left instructions while he slept till 3pm that afternoon when he would wake up, have a big breakfast, perhaps go fishing and drinking with one of his buddies, to whom he would invent more hole-ridden and stupendous lies about his [in reality:] very flawed military record, and then stumble out to the shed and do it all over again. This would make a fantastic film if it wasn't for the fact that the Dianeticians/Scientologists would sue your ass off. I've heard of one British producer who did attempt to get such a project green-lighted in the 1980s only to have the studio chicken out. I would love to make a film just from the chapter in which Hubbard teams up with a black magician in California under the tutelage of an obviously close-to-death Alistair Crowley back in the UK. This Satanic trio rope in red-headed prostitutes to create a "Moon Child", (envisaged as some kind of Black-Magik Jesus with great powers and under their command.) The whole episode ends with Hubbard running off with the warlock's wife and a whole lot of his money which he uses to buy a yacht and sail away from the cops who have him, even back then a good ten years before he invents Dianetics, as a suspect on fraud charges. This echoes his later life in which he is pursued across the world on his large ship The Flying Scot Man (sic) attended by his followers who are thrown overboard if they disobey, and his nubile teenage "messengers." Even to the end, his cover blown in the press when some of his followers, including his third wife, are caught are caught and tried after attempting to destroy all Hubbard's government records, despite the fact that he sent many of them in himself (constantly denouncing his enemies, including his second wife and her suspected lover, as Communists in letters to J. Edgar Hoover throughout the 50s and 60s, causing the FBI to write him off as someone suspected to be highly mentally unstable and not to be trusted in his official file) Hubbard still believed he would persevere, and on the verge of his death created a film production company in the desert, directing the actors himself and sending those who he deemed unworthy of his direction off to his own feared re-education and punishment corps where they were treated as less than human - as opposed to MORE than human as they had been before, i.e. Thetans, but that's a whole other shtick we don't have time or space to get into here. You can discover the rest for yourself by buying the book online as it's apparently out of print for legal reasons in Australia. (I found this hardback US First Edition for only $US20 on Amazon.) Russell Miller is a former journalist for the Sunday Times in England and importantly lends a strong sense of journalistic integrity to his style. Hence while the first couple of chapters concerning the Hubbard family history and LRH as a child may seem a bit dry and superfluous they are there for a reason which becomes readily apparent in both humanising this weird anti-hero with whom it would otherwise be impossible to empathise with, and as exposition for the later ever-increasing action of the story as it really starts to rise, making the majority of the twenty-two chapters an action packed and hilarious ride, made frightening by the obvious veracity of the Russell Miller's well-researched revelations and anecdotes from those who knew and worked with Hubbard throughout his long, strange life.

View all my reviews.

Gutenberg! The Musical!

2009-03-02T15:57:00.003+11:00

(unedited version of article originally published in print version of The Sydney Morning Herald.)

“Highway To Helvetica” by Benito Di Fonzo.

“As a form it’s kind of insane,” says Scott Brown, one-half of the writing team behind Gutenberg! The Musical!, “a musical is sort of an inherently unnatural thing that has to be forced into existence by madness, or money, or the equivalent.”

The equivalent in this case were the pitches that the other half of the creative team, and Brown’s childhood friend, Anthony King had to sit through as an intern at Manhattan Theatre Club.

“I had to see readings of tonnes of musicals” says King, “and most of them were really terrible, and after a while I started asking myself who are the people who write these horrible things and how does no-one tell them it’s terrible? Not just a terrible show but terrible ideas and everything? So it was kind of on a dare at first - we decided to write a few songs from a terrible musical and submit them to my boss under fake names to see what he would say about them, and then it took on a life of it’s own and we were seduced by our own horribleness.”

Brown says, “That sort of insane determination that must go into [creating those horrible musicals] was interesting to us, and that’s why we came up with Bud and Doug.”

Bud and Doug are the fictional authors of Gutenberg! The Musical, the show-within-a-show they have written with little knowledge of it’s real-life subject; Johannes Gutenberg, inventor of the printing press. Aided only by a pianist and a series of hats Bud and Doug recreate 30 characters from Gutenberg’s life, including fictional love Helvetica to whom they mistakenly attribute the type-font, all as part of a pitch to the Broadway producers they imagine are secreted within the audience.

For the Australian premiere Bud and Doug will be portrayed by local musical stalwarts David Harris (Helpmann Award nominee for Miss Saigon) and James Millar (Green Room Award Winner, author of The Hatpin) accompanied by Bev Kennedy’s piano.

Scott and Brown originally performed the show themselves as a 45 minute skit at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, which King now runs in New York. It turned out there really was a producer in the audience, and he offered to take the show to London if they added a second act. After success in London they brought the show home where it won the 2006 New York Musical Theatre Festival Award for Excellence in Musical Theatre Writing.

“It grew up in the nurturing atmosphere of a basement comedy club and we didn’t necessarily envision it going beyond that,” says Brown.

“We definitely never dreamed that it would become something that would play around the world,” says King.

While Bud and Doug aren’t the most talented guys in the world Brown and King had to create characters that audiences would want to see succeed nonetheless.

“It’s definitely like the audience is laughing at these guys a bit but the charm of the show is that they’re incredibly likeable and energetic, so the audience is [also] rooting for them,” says King.

Like Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers?

“That’s a good term for it – we’ve always really liked people who have no idea how off the deep end they are.”

Brown adds, “They are beautiful losers who over the course of the show create their own reality just with the force of their own idiotic aspirations.”

Like many satirists Brown and King admit to loving the target of their jibes.

“We were big musical theatre nerds growing up,” says Brown, “there’s something glorious and sort of liberatingly stupid about bursting into song to express oneself. I think [Gutenberg! The Musical!] isn’t so much a critique of musical theatre as our full embrace of it’s silliness and it’s triumphs.”

A truly unconditional love then?

“It is I think. We were really careful when we wrote the show, we weren’t interested in punishing Bud and Doug for their stupidity, we weren’t interested in their hubris.”

Are there any musical theatre practitioners that should be punished?

“I don’t think there’s anything that Guantanamo Bay could do to musical theatre that it hasn’t already done to itself, it is an art form for masochists, that seems pretty clear.”

GUTENBERG! THE MUSICAL!

17 – 21 February, return season 14 - 25 July, various times, Seymour Centre (Downstairs Theatre), Chippendale, 02 9351 7940. $39/$32.

http://www.seymour.usyd.edu.au/subseason/seasons_gutenberg09.shtml

Benito's New Play - Short & Sweet 2009 - Meat Puppet Epiphany.

2009-01-17T10:30:00.005+11:00

Benito Di Fonzo's most recent short play "Meat Puppet Epiphany" will be playing downstairs at The Seymour Centre, Sydney, from Feb 4 - 7 as far as Short & Sweet 2009, the world's largest short play festival (www.shortandsweet.org ). I've had a play in every Short & Sweet so far, including "Pokie Face" in 2002 which later toured around Australia as part of the best of Short & Sweet, and "9/11 Conspiracy: The Musical" in 2007 which won 'Best New Talent' at the Gala Finale. Last year's show "The Chronic Ills of Robert Zimmerman, aka Bob Dylan (A Lie)" has been expanded into a full length show to be staged at The Old Fitzroy in a few months (watch this blog for details.

MEAT PUPPET EPIPHANY - Short+Sweet Top 100
Seymour Centre (Downstairs)

Written by Benito Di Fonzo
Directed by Luke Berman

Wed 4th - Saturday 7th February at 8pm
(Four shows)

Bookings essential

"...I've never been backward in coming forward but i'd hate for you to end up beside yourselves in the end..."

This journey through Benito's imagination is an absurd visual feast, showcasing an awesome cast from Wollongong and Sydney.

Short+Sweet is the world's largest and highest profile short play festival bringing together some of the best talent in Sydney with the vision from writers both Australian and abroad.

Written by the talented Benito di Fonzo, writer for the Sydney Morning Herald, Meat Puppet Epiphany is not to be missed.

Cast:
David Stretton
Marta Fischer
Jenna Linehan
Jack Michel
Rebecca Lee Slade
Simone Tree
Louise Williams

The Seymour Centre is conveniently located on the corner of City Road and Cleveland Street, Chippendale and can be easily reached by public transport or by car.

Bookings & Information go to:
http://www.shortandsweet.org/node/157

For the full programme of Short & Sweet 2009 go to
http://www.shortandsweet.org/sites/ss.ish.com.au/files/FestivalSchedule.pdf

2008-10-30T12:25:00.001+11:00

Bound for Glory by Woody Guthrie

My review

Woody rides the rails and takes us along for the journey. It’s growing up with a smirk and a knowing smile and seeing your country for all it is – the good, the bad, the ugly – and finding a way to put it all in song, in a way that feels special and pure to you. It makes you want to pick up an old nylon string and hit the road yourself. Sure, there’s probably a little poetic license in some of Woody remembrances, but that’s art – like Kafka said; it should be larger than reality, while still reflecting it.

From a dust-bowl boyhood with a mentally ill mother and financially struggling old man to falling in love with an apricot picking young girl whose family wait out the depression while Woody’s stream-of-consciousness singing keeps them alive.

Woody sees the inherent unfairness in the failed lassaix-faire Free Market Capitalism of his time, much as we are seeing now, but like another gangly man with a good voice that we are hearing today, he never gives up hope in the actual people he encounters and their ability to survive, mend and learn from their predicament.

Particularly poignant in this time of recession reading of whole groups of men going from door to door begging for work, (before Keynes pointed out that social security was a right and need and not a privilege) as Woody himself does before realising he can live by peddling his songs to sailors, dipsomaniacs and insomniacs in late night bars and taverns. Telling how those men are often turned away by those who can help most (nuns, priests and the middles classes) while those with barely enough to feed themselves will wrap something sweet in some oil paper without hesitation, and the only string attached being some recycled cooking twine.

I love the scene’s Guthrie vividly paints of his boyhood gang (The Boomtown Rats) fighting in hot dirt, then a young man discovering the magic and music of people and travel, and finally, when offered the chance to sell-out and become an Idol-like crooner in a fancy big show for The Rockefellers, he instead escapes to stroll as a proletarian pied piper through the streets of New York, a trail of children dancing behind him, before sailing into the unknown with bad whiskey on his breath on a stray barge...

View all my reviews.

2008-10-07T14:13:00.002+11:00

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars

This beautiful piece of writing could be described as an epic prose poem. With no chapters, instead broken up into self-contained stanza-like paragraphs, it's simple story of a father and son lost in a post-apocalyptic landscape is creamily rich with vivid poetic imagery and powerful emotions that are carried across with the sparsest of Everyman dialogue that subtly carries real human soul through the little white lies of caring the father creates for his son as he unconsciously begs for him not to lose faith, as his mother did, in humanity and the hope of finding other 'good people' alive in what remains of America.

The source of the apocalypse, or it's type, is only inferred and never named, as it is how the father and son deal with their imbroglio that is important, not what or who caused it.

In this and other senses it is often what McCarthy and his characters don't say, rather than what they do, that makes one feel the booms and bust of luck and misfortune as if you were a silent impotent deity watching these two hapless travellers and wishing them luck in their seemingly doomed journey along a road lifelessly bereft of all hope, or is it?

The evocative descriptive narration that says more that simple straight exposition could ever say is a fine example of that great creative writing teacher cliché 'show, don't tell.'

View all my reviews.

Braindroppings - Featuring Juke Baritone, & MC'd by Benito, after the yob-mardi gras this Sunday (Click the poster below to enlarge it.)

2008-10-01T12:28:00.003+10:00

In Conversation with comedian Des Bishop

2008-09-25T16:49:00.002+10:00

Des Bishop

By Benito Di Fonzo
Sydney Morning Herald, September 18, 2008

A former altar boy is one of Ireland's most controversial - and constructive - comedians.

"GHETTO tourist is the term I prefer," says comedian Des Bishop when reminded of accusations in the Irish press of being a "ghetto voyeur". It was his 2005 TV series Joy In The Hood, in which he mentored aspiring comedians in poor housing projects, that provoked such comment.

"When you decide to do a project like that there's a couple of things you expect, and one is some journalist is going to say that you're being exploitative, a ghetto voyeur, and you just take that on the chin because you go 'OK, fine'," he says. "But even if that was true it doesn't change the fact that perhaps some of these people will get something out of it."

As it happens, Bishop says at least two of his former mentees are working full time as comedians. Not that that's stopped the controversy in his adopted homeland. The 32-year-old was born the US but has lived in Ireland since he was expelled from school in New York at 14.

"Things have gotten so crazy [in Ireland] that if I say something out of line, it can end up on the front page of a tabloid, even though I didn't really say something out of line."

Bishop's supposed controversy stems from his comedy that often explores social issues such as alcoholism, the plight of the underclass and migrant workers, even Bishop's own battle with testicular cancer. How long after diagnosis does one start thinking of jokes about testicular cancer?

"What happened was very soon after I had it some of the tabloid papers decided to print stories about me having testicular cancer including an enormous front-page headline. I went to the Irish Cancer Society and said I have no interest in publicity about my illness. However, if you can guide any of this in a way that's positive for you guys I would be a hell of a lot happier. As a result of working with them I wrote a [humorous] piece for The Sunday Independent, and that was only within a couple of weeks, and it was in writing that piece that the largest majority of the material came out."

Although punters are always handy with more suggestions. "You'll say something like 'balls' to people and they'll go 'don't you mean 'ball'?"

With his accent swaying between New Yorker and Dubliner depending upon the topic - Catholicism bringing out the Irish, social change the American, Bishop is infamous in Ireland for telling audiences what they don't want to hear and admits he has always been drawn to somewhat dark social themes.

"The positive side of that is that when you can make them funny it helps other people to engage with things that sometimes they don't engage with, but that's the high ideal, in reality people are just laughing, which is fine by me as well."

Bishop believes comedy can bring about social change and remain entertaining.

"I think comedy can work in that way. Like, I did a TV show in Ireland about living on minimum wage [in the fast-food industry]. That did genuinely cause people to look at the way they behave when they're drunk. It was really just people looking and going, 'Oh, my god, is that what [we're] like at two in the morning? Is that the way we treat foreign workers?' "

Bishop himself is a teetotaller. "I stopped drinking at 19 but that wasn't because I went to too many chippers at two in the morning and abused staff. I was just a bad drinker."

The former altar boy also mines his Catholic upbringing for humour. Why does it appear that there is a disproportionate number of comics, and alcoholics, among lapsed Catholics?

"I think there's a lot of shame that goes with Catholicism," he says. "Particularly around sex, but even around expressing yourself and being who you want to be. If you've been shamed on a load of those things it's natural that when you get a voice you're going to want to, like, f---ing liberate those things."

DES BISHOP

September 23-25, Gaelic Club, Surry Hills, 1300 438 849, $32.

"Bardflys" TV Show (Pilot Episode) now online!

2008-09-25T16:22:00.000+10:00

A Piece of Fonzo-Journalism from the Past

2008-09-19T16:17:00.003+10:00

I've been asked to be part of Herding Kites, the 10 year Anthology of The National Young Writers' Festival in Newcastle. I will have the piece I first performed in Newcastle many years ago, "Case Management" in the anthology, as well as performing it at a launch tomorrow night. While remembering those days I found the report I wrote for Revolver magazine in 2001. It's not so bad as I remember, so here it is.

The 2oo1 National Young Writers’ Festival.
by Benito Di Fonzo.

(Originally Published in ‘Revolver’ 8th Oct. 2oo1.)

The ‘National Young Writers’ Festival’ (NYWF) has given the former steel town of Newcastle a fine local tradition. That of writers from Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth, Ballarat, Brisbane and all points in between swilling beer, bourbon and hash cookies as fast as they can scam them, whilst their ‘compoetriates’ rant black rivers of cynicism or blow Utopian hope-bubbles from the stage and street. It’s a great feeling for a two-bit wordsmith like myself, trying to cash in on everything from ethnic stereotyping to performance poetry, to find that all over Australia there are like minded merry pranksters.

At times it feels as if, for one week a year, Newcastle becomes Newtown by the sea, with a healthy dose of Fitzroy and St Kilda thrown in. Electro-ferals and day-glow turntablists share the town with bad-shirted poets, hip-hopping revolutionaries, confused short film makers, pissed street press, and the just plain ‘lost.’ This is because NYWF falls under the umbrella of the ‘This Is Not Art’ Festival, which also includes ‘The National Student Media Conference, ‘’ Sound Summit,’ and ‘Electrofringe.’

Aside from the odd interview for 2SER’s ‘Poetic Off-Licence’ (6pm Tues), I had earned my free bed by volunteering to MC the Saturday Night Cabaret Spectacular. Or something like that. As far as I knew the rest of the weekend could be devoted to ‘finding myself’ as it were. However, NYWF is a strange animal. A kind of drug fucked octopus in a vat of Kent Old. Hence, no sooner had I found Newcastle, found my Hotel, found my old muso buddy Philasophigas, found the Hunter Hotel, and found a likely seminar to attend, than that strange beast’s tentacles sprung maliciously out in the form of Australia’s most violent poet - Melbourne’s Phil Doyle.

Phil Doyle earned his reputation when he pulled a Bowie knife at the first NYWF. At the time it made the papers and got the event some free publicity. Phil Doyle handed me an article he had published in ‘Overland’ criticising NYWF, with particular venom pointed at “the Sydney poets” who were accused of committing what is considered a grave crime in Melbourne. We had made poetry entertaining. I was to defend the charge. Luckily, Philasophigas had bought half a bottle of bourbon off a guy in the street whilst asking directions to the nearest chemist. He left me with the bottle as he was off to see something ‘electrofringy.’ I poured myself a little poets’ courage, studied the article, and vehemently defended the charges. Sydney poets entertaining? Ludicrous!

There were a lot of other laid back yet informative events to attend between drinks. Highlights included Linda Jaivan talking about how to write sexy text, AJ Rochester on comedy writing, and of course the afore mentioned Cabaret night. For the sake of the Melburnians I tried not to be overly entertaining. In the end, failure is it’s own reward.

Of course, come Sunday the brutal reality of being in Newcastle on Grand Final night hit us like a bad simile. The afternoon went eerily quiet as several poets followed local boy and organiser Marcus Westbury’s advice and donned blue and red clothing. There was a sigh of relief when the local team won their little football game.

As a writer, I probably learnt more about humanity on that night than at any seminar, as I wandered through a cross between a kind of footy-yob Reclaim The Streets, and the Star Hotel riots.

“This is what football’s about” said one delirious Novocastrian as he passed me a beer in the street before climbing a traffic light so as to jump into a mosh pit of locals from the roof of the Great Northern Hotel. Now that, I thought, is art.

#

"Instructions For Modern Living"

2008-08-27T16:07:00.002+10:00

Instructions For Modern Living

Sydney Morning Herald, August 21, 2008

Kiwi Duncan Sarkies's combination of spoken word and music has been described as "stoner theatre".

Testing ideas, one two... Duncan Sarkies.

Genre

Spoken Word

Location

The Studio

Address

Sydney Opera House, Sydney

Date

3 September 2008 to 6 September 2008

Tickets

$30/$25

Phone Bookings

02 9250 7777

Online Bookings

www.sydneyoperahouse.com

Details

Wed 7pm, all other nights 9pm

"Hang on," says writer Duncan Sarkies over the phone from Wellington, New Zealand, "I've got one of those devices where you put the headset on and you can walk around the house. I walk outside and I continue with my stuff - like putting out the rubbish - while I'm rabbiting away. I think the neighbours think I'm a bit mad."

Sarkies's slightly manic state could be the result of insomnia, if the show he has written with fellow New Zealander, composer Nic McGowan, is anything to go by. In Instructions For Modern Living Sarkies and McGowan perform a series of vignettes about the psychological machinations of those who occupy the witching hours when most of us are asleep, performed against a background of "found" video footage.

"When we put together the show I really dreamed up this mythical world where someone was working from their basement full of old video tapes, so I went out to the tip and bought 50 bucks worth of VHS tapes," Sarkies says.

"They have all sorts of weird stuff on them," says composer McGowan. "From Nan's 80th birthday party to training videos for things you'd never want to do."

The show was born when Sarkies began word-jamming with music loops McGowan created with iconic instruments such as a Moog theremin and a Rhodes piano.

"Straight away," McGowan says, "we were creating great moods and [Sarkies] was dropping text and characters in there just like a musician would on an instrument."

Sarkies: "Nic builds these beautiful loops and they grow on each other and you get hypnotised. I think Nic and I infect each other. He can start playing in a gloomy fashion and I'll roll with him. There are a lot of laughs in the show but it's certainly a gloomy, moody experience."

The show is constructed from the best of the collaborative vignettes.

"It's a bit like watching a radio play being made in front of you," McGowan says, "but with lots of imagery. With the projection behind us you can watch us perform or just watch the screen."

Sarkies: "We do refer to them as songs in a way but of course it's all spoken word. I do have a device that shifts my voice around as I take on a variety of characters all making it through the middle of the night experiencing the same thing - loneliness."

The characters - including a bored astronaut, a talkback radio host without any callers, and a ghost - sound like grim subjects but Sarkies, who has written for hit comedy series Flight Of The Conchords, reassures me it isn't all gloomy.

"It's definitely not like the Conchords in that I don't try and pull a gag every three minutes," Sarkie says. "You know when you listen to Nick Cave or Johnny Cash and they go to quite a dark place in front of you? It's a really nice feeling to hear someone doing that because it proves you're not alone in those thoughts. I do show a side of life that is quite dark - you do need the comedy to go there."

After success in New Zealand, Sarkie and McGowan bring their show to Sydney via a sold-out season at the Barbican Theatre in London, where the themes of ennui and loneliness proved universal.

"They really dug it," says Sarkies of London audiences. "It's really nice when you discover there's whole communities of like-minded people all around the world."

McGowan feels the unpredictability of much of his old analog technology adds to the sense of theatre.

"It really is a live performance," McGowan says. "I get very disappointed by going to electronic acts and they're just stabbing a button on a laptop."

Sarkies dislikes the term "multi-media art" and admits he has trouble labelling the mixture of spoken word, music and visuals. Some have called it "stoner theatre".

"The stoner thing is fair because it's obviously a good thing to watch when you're stoned. We do take people on a crazy, hypnotic ride. I think I would describe what we do as black-black comedy."

So it's blacker than black?

"Yeah!" he says, laughing, possibly as he puts the bins out.

"Brain Droppings"

2008-07-24T15:11:00.001+10:00

Press Release:

"Wordjammin", in association with The Empire Hotel, present -

"Brain Droppings"

Grand Opening Night

Sunday August 3rd, 5 - 7pm

(first Sunday of each month thereafter)

an eclectic blend of music, poetry, spoken word, comedy and performance art.

First show -

MC: Benito Di Fonzo,

band: The Outer Space Cowboys (featuring Vashti Hughes)

poet: Colonel Funtastico.

PLUS OPEN MIC SECTION

Empire Hotel, cnr Parramatta Rd & Johnson St. Annandale.

A new spoken word and music evening will be happening launching at The Empire Hotel, corner of Parramatta Rd & Johnson Street Annandale, the first Sunday of every month, emceed by poet and performer Benito Di Fonzo, and with special guest poets, comedians, performance artists and musicians.

The Grand Opening Night on Sunday August 3rd, will feature absurdist-neo-retro-spoken-word freak Colonel Funtastico and band The Outer Space Cowboys, featuring Vashti Hughes, who says of the group -

"Think Kraftwerk mixed with Patsy Kline, Bobby Gentry crossed with Roni Size or Elvis done electro clash style and you will get the idea."

There will also be an open mic section for those bold enough to accept the challenge, and possibly some crap encouragement awards found on the street on the way to the gig by Benito.

for more info or interviews contact:

Angela Stretch (Wordjammin) [ info@wordjammin.com ]

Benito Di Fonzo on [ benitodifonzo@hotmail.com ]

Live Comic version of Alfred Hitchcock's 'The 39 Steps',

2008-07-12T11:16:00.002+10:00

Benito Di Fonzo
Sydney Morning Herald, July 10, 2008

Alfred Hitchcock's spy thriller film becomes a stage comedy - with four actors playing 139 roles.

"I don't like it when they come out all wicked at the beginning," says playwright Patrick Barlow of his villains. "I like it when they're played so that you think they're a perfectly nice English gentleman, terribly urbane and posh, and then slowly you realise that the guy's a terrible raving Nazi."

So it is that in Barlow's comic stage adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock's 1935 spy thriller The 39 Steps, itself adapted from John Buchan's novel, he has used history to embellish Hitchcock's gentleman villain.

"I made him into one of those extreme right-wing English aristocrat Hitler appeasers," he says. "There was a movement with Lord Halifax and that lot that thought Hitler was quite a good bloke, [which] is all kept quiet in English history books."

The 39 Steps tells the story of Richard Hannay, played by Mark Pegler, who has a close encounter with a beautiful murdered spy and is pursued across the muddy Scottish moors before heading back to England to clear his name and foil the villain's dastardly plan. Hannay famously does all this while remaining unruffled and clean-shaven in his spotless three-piece tweed suit.

Helen Christinson, who plays the beautiful dead spy among other female leads in the show, says the now-peculiar style of 1930s British cinema provides much of the humour.

"As Australians we're very laid-back and the idea of the British stiff upper lip is quite comedic in a lot of ways," she says. "What's particularly lovely is that it's Brits laughing at themselves."

The idea of a comic adaptation of Hitchcock's classic was brought to Barlow by producers after his troupe, the National Theatre of Brent, staged award-winning epic adaptations of the Zulu wars and the Russian revolution with only two actors. Shortly after her death, it even dramatised the life of Lady Di.

"That was our most controversial production," Barlow says. "It was called Love Upon The Throne. [John Ramm] played Diana and I played Charles and the Queen and all the other characters."

For The 39 Steps, Barlow doubled his usual cast, to four actors, to play all 139 roles.

"As soon as I looked at the film I had this instinct that it would work great on stage, particularly because it was such a challenge ... a railway chase, the fourth bridge [scene] and the Scottish Highlands. I said, 'Let's do it with four people and just a packing case and a ladder so the actors are absolutely challenged to the hilt."'

Barlow is right about it being a challenge. The New York Times described it as a "tour de farce" but Christinson confirms that it's no picnic for the cast - herself, Pegler, Jo Turner and Russell Fletcher - to keep up with the multitude of characters they play, as well as changing their minimal set into everything from a moving train to the Scottish Highlands.

"We all have about 20 costume changes during the show," Christinson says. "As they're walking through the downstage entrance a dresser is following, pulling off wigs and coats and putting on another wig and coat as they walk through the top entrance ... so literally it's a matter of seconds."

Barlow and director Maria Aitken knew the production would work best if the comedy was played as straight as the pleats in the hero's three-piece tweed.

"My obsession with this is to keep the style very innocent, very not-knowing," Barlow says. "They shouldn't know that they're funny, it should be played absolutely straight, very English."

The play also contains trainspotter moments for Hitchcock aficionados such as Bernhard Herrmann's original scores, references to other Hitchcock films and even the obligatory cameo by the big man himself, all done in what Barlow describes as "that kind of British, Pythonesque, Goons-type humour". So is it a spoof or a homage?

"It's a homage to the film, definitely, which is an absolutely brilliant piece of work and a wonderful style of cinema that you just don't get now. It's got a slickness and spirit and dash that is gone now. It's a very respectful homage, even though we do make a few jokes about it."

The 39 Steps

Genre

Comedy

Location

Playhouse

Address

Sydney Opera House, Sydney

Date

31 July 2008 to 17 August 2008

Tickets

$34.90-$79.90

Phone Bookings

(02) 9250 7777

Online Bookings

www.sydneyoperahouse.com

Benito in Cordite

2008-07-02T10:07:00.002+10:00

Have a gander around the newly released Cordite # 28: Secret Cities, now with added Benito Di Fonzo... Just like a chocolate milkshake, only poetry... in particular, one I wrote in a bar in Roma one sultry July night...

6ix Quick Misfits...

2008-06-20T12:27:00.002+10:00

Six Quick Chicks

Benito Di Fonzo
Sydney Morning Herald. June 19, 2008

Six Quick Chicks go where conventional cabaret fears to tread.

Lucy Suze Taylor (left) and Annabel Lines of Six Quick Chicks.

Genre

Cabaret

Location

Riverside Theatres

Address

Corner Church and Market Streets, Parramatta

Date

4 July 2008 to 25 July 2008

Phone Bookings

(02) 8839 3399

Online Bookings

www.riversideparramatta.com.au

"We call it comedy cabaret," says Vashti Hughes of the eclectic mix of onion-enhanced burlesque, satire, song and vaudevillian comedy produced by the collective Six Quick Chicks.

Hughes created Six Quick Chicks after years hosting cabaret nights she felt needed more quality control. After touring her own show to Hong Kong, Singapore and Shanghai, Hughes returned to Australia and put together a line-up she knew could come up with the goods.

After 18 months of performances, including a successful season at Adelaide Fringe Festival, Six Quick Chicks are heading for a return season at Parramatta's Riverside Theatres.

Hughes's character and long-time MC of Six Quick Chicks, the "repressed secretary extraordinaire" Mavis Brown, hopes to break her seven-year drought of sex and get lucky out west.

"When we started off it was as if it was [Mavis Brown's] living room and they were having a girls' night in, entertaining each other. [For this show] Mavis has decided she's going out west to find someone out there because here [in the inner city] she only finds gay guys and married men."

Among the melange of strange sisters keeping Mavis company will be her sibling Christa Hughes, formerly of Machine Gun Fellatio (MGF) and Circus Oz, and fellow comic-chanteuse Jackie Loeb. Other regulars of underground performance nights also appear, including Celia Curtis, who plays burnt-out Las Vegas showgirl Anita Douche, Liesel Badorrek as German vamp Iva Sveetvun, and Lucy Suze Taylor as Carmen.Taylor describes Carmen as "a fabulously bosomy opera singer" with a 10-minute, over-the-top operatic tale of "woe, tragedy and, finalmente, death". No doubt with tongue firmly in corset.

One reviewer particularly praised the bizarre Vladimira, played by Annabel Lines. The character is an Eastern European sensualist whose 10-minute act consists of doing strange things with the onions she fries on stage, the skins of which mirror the layers of leopard print she strips off to Japanese sexploitation soundtracks.

Lines, who worked as an aerialist, contortionist, razor-blade swallower and burlesque dancer with MGF as well as circuses including famed new-circus pioneers?Archaos, fears that burlesque is becoming too safe and predictable for performers such as herself.

"When it first got popular in Sydney you could do different things," she says. "Now it's very much like, the last burlesque I did at [club] 34B, six out of the eight acts used feather fans!"

Lines turned to the strange world of leopard-skin onion-stripping in an attempt to give her act a darker edge.

"It's all about layers. I wanted to cry, that's why I came up with onions, but I could never actually cry."

Will she be getting her produce locally? "Well, I'm actually very particular with my onions," Lines says.

"Do you have to connect with them?" Hughes asks.

"Yes," Lines admits, "they have to be exactly the right looseness of the outer skin."

Spanish or white? "I only use the brown onions. I did use a white one once but I didn't like that."

Surely the Spanish onion would be more burlesque? "Yes, but they don't have that good, loose skin."

Vegetables aside, the women admit they were at first wary of taking their bizarre show Parramatta way but felt the urge for new audiences.

"The thing is we are misfits because you can't slot us into anything that already exists," Hughes says.

"But anyone who comes to see us generally really likes us. It's interesting out at Parramatta because they weren't our mates. We don't have any of our normal support groups out there."

For one thing, audiences "weren't the people that go to those nights that are underground comedy-cabaret-burlesque nights that do happen [in the city]. We thought we might not get anyone."

However, their boldness - and the Riverside's - was rewarded with a return season. "I was sitting behind three little grey-haired old ladies and they were loving it, giggling the whole way through," says Hughes before breaking into an old-lady giggle. "I was so excited. I thought, 'If the old ladies like it, we're doing great.'"

Jabbernoir hits the airwaves, and stores!

2008-06-08T13:29:00.012+10:00

Benito is happy to report that the first recorded (and written) piece of Jabbernoir (that blend of film noir and Lewis Caroll-like absurdism that permeates http://jabbernoir.blogspot.com/) "Jabbernoir e Lychee Whine" has been released, with backing music by Andy Lane, on Going Down Swinging #26.

Furthermore, as well as local favourites 2SER FM, Jabbernoir e Lychee Whine has also been getting airplay on ABC Radio National, where Tim Richie talked glowingly of the way the authors 'play with words' on his show Sound Quality.

I must say, I feared I was hallucinating when I first switched on ABC RN late one Friday night after stumbling home from the Allen & Unwin party at The Sydney Writers' Festival. However, as Mr Richie said when I told him that tale,

"I really like the way you came across the playing of it on air.... that's about my dream scenario for someone who makes something and then finding it on the airwaves"

You can read Jabbernoir e Lychee Whine here.

And you can hear the track in the mp3 player on the right, or here.

"Celebrity Terrorist Makeover" (in conversation with Van Badham)

2008-06-06T12:08:00.008+10:00

(UNEDITED VERSION OF ARTICLE ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD, 6/6/08)

“I don’t do worthy,” says playwright Van Badham, “and [director] James [Beach] doesn’t do worthy. We had to hang out with those worthy people. At one stage in our political development the two of us were sitting in a room full of people who only ate fruit that had fallen from trees.”

So it is that for Poster Girl, the controversial playwright’s return to the Australian stage, Badham has camouflaged her political agenda in a day-glow-pink coat of black comedy.

“Essentially I followed the story of Patty Hearst’s abduction by the Symbionese Liberation Army in the 70s and recast it with what would happen if a similar organisation abducted a celebutante heiress of the likes of Paris Hilton,” says Badham.

“I’m fascinated with celebrity culture of the contemporary period because celebrity has reached new heights since the advent of reality-TV and internet porn. In previous years celebrities were at least actors, singers, dancers or politicians. We now have celebrities who are just celebrities. What would happen if we snatched a celebrity like that and put her in a revolutionary context?”

What happens is celebutante Mindy Xyloine (Shannon Dooley) gives her abductors a lesson in how to work the media. Like Hearst, who assisted her abductors in realising their demands, Mindy gives the Army of Revolutionary Struggle (ARS) a celebrity makeover, teaching them how to stay ‘on message,’ the art of ‘branding,’ and the craft of public relations coups. In this sense Poster Girl comments as much on radical-Leftists’ inability to use the media as on celebutantes’ cynical manipulation of it.

“I think that a lot of the Left fails to compete with these guys like Lindsay Lohan, etc. They are the poster girls of neo-liberalism, the absolute symbols of everything the Right-wing free-market lunatics who’ve totally f*cked-up this planet believe.”

Surely they’re just harmless entertainment?

“No they’re symbols, brands, and they are sending a message – ‘consume, consume, consume,’ because neo-liberalism doesn’t function without consumption. There’s no Market theory if there’s no Market.”

It was Badham’s passionate politics that drove her to “flee” Australia in 2001.

“I’m not a violent person, but five years of Howard was really pushing my boundaries. There are only so many demos a day you can go to. I needed some ‘me’ time so I went to another country.”

Van went to several, working as a playwright in London, Edinburgh, Europe and the US, controversy her only hand-luggage. The US Embassy in Britain even issued a travel warning to American tourists about her play Capital, which foretold Abu Ghraib’s atrocities and how spin-doctors might deal with it. Likewise her play Camarilla predicted a London bombing during a G8 summit two years before it happened. Her musical Ca$h In Christ provoked 7,000 Christian websites to condemn her within 24 hours of it’s London premiere, and got her the front pages of both The Baptist Times and Islam Online. For Glastonbury Festival she staged a musical adaptation of Waiting For Godot performed by a cast of rabbits.

Upon returning to Australia she received a commission from her hometown Wollongong, submitting a play predicting the recent political scandal there, which the commissioning authority refused to stage.

Badham, who claims to read eight newspapers a day, says her Cassandra-like talent to foretell the future is no mystery.

“If you read news media, consume information, you can make predictions about events. That’s what I try to do.”

She believes it’s important to couch those bleak insights in humour.

“First and foremost I’m in the entertainment business, and I don’t think it’s worth mobilising everybody you know and the great unwashed to come and see a show to bore the shit out of them.”

If her predictions are consistent Al Qaeda will soon abduct Nicole Richie for a celebrity makeover. How will that go?

“I think they’d be better dressed. One of the reasons Al Qaeda has stayed very much a fringe operation is because they’re not very stylin’”

Badham believes the theatre should be the one place she can say anything she wants without fearing the consequences.

“That’s the point of going to the theatre. If you want to have a bland evening stay at home and talk to your partner.”

“Poster Girl”

By Van Badham.

Directed by James Beach.

Starring; Shannon Dooley, Fayssal Bazzi, Sam Haft, Susie Lindeman, Peter East, Marika Aubrey, Lucinda Gleeson, Andy Lees, Simon Corfield.

Old Fitzroy Theatre.

$28/$20 ($34 for beer, laksa & show)

Bookings 1300 GET TIX

Bob Dylan's Birthday

2008-05-29T13:31:00.004+10:00

It ain't he, babe

Sydney Morning Herald. May 24, 2008

A cyberspace homage to Bob Dylan has got everyone drawling, as Benito Di Fonzo found out.

Even Kris Felscher considers Bob Dylan's voice to be an acquired taste.

"I think a dog caught in a barbed wire fence is a good way to put it," he says when reminded of one reviewer's response to hearing Dylan for the first time.

The Florida computer programmer and musician is the driving force behind International Talk Like Bob Dylan Day.

The project began as a website (www.talklikebobdylan.com) which Felscher built last year to celebrate Dylan's 66th birthday. He encouraged fans to record themselves talking and singing like their hero and post the results to the site.

The response was enormous: hundreds of video submissions and more than a million hits.

Today is Dylan's 67th birthday. And with interest in the enigmatic American singer as strong as ever - he recently scored a Pulitzer Prize to accompany his Oscar and multiple Grammys - Felscher is hoping today's International Talk Like Bob Dylan Day will encourage Dylanophiles the world over to find and film their inner-Bob.

"I get a lot of people sitting in front of their webcams playing Dylan songs," says Felscher, 31. "And quite a few saying 'here's a song inspired by Bob Dylan."'

While most of the films are simple productions, a few fans have gone to extraordinary lengths to honour their hero. One hilarious spoof, No Direction, Period, claims that Bob Dylan has written every pop song since 1964 and includes impersonations of Dylan singing such unlikely material as Sir Mix-A-Lot's Baby Got Back.

Felscher and his friends need no excuse to talk like Dylan - they do it all year. But he hopes the event also makes a comment on today's music industry.

"A lot of the music you hear now is just manufactured and fabricated and you don't hear popular music like Dylan writes," he says. "His songs really come from the heart and mean something and really speak to the soul."

So far there's been no word on what the man himself thinks of a day designed to make people adopt his drawl. "I hope he would find it amusing, but certainly if he were to call up and say 'stop it! You're pissing me off', the site would be taken down in a heartbeat," says Felscher.

He believes the secret of Dylan's longevity is the uniqueness of his voice, as well as his lyrical substance.

"Part of the magic and the appeal is that he isn't pretending to be something other than he is. It's not something fabricated for mass appeal. He's presenting himself naked on stage. I think it's a hunger for substance that has brought him back into the limelight."

Yet Dylan, born Robert Allen Zimmerman in Duluth, Minnesota in 1941, is also famous for his many noms de plume. They include Elston Gunn, Blind Boy Grunt, Lucky Boo Wilbury, Elmer Johnson, Sergei Petrov, Jack Frost and Robert Milkwood Thomas.

Is it possible Dylan might post a video to the website under a pseudonym?

"It would be especially awesome to see whether he wins," says Felscher. "Jerry Lewis once came third in a Jerry Lewis lookalike contest, so you never know. He may not sound Bob Dylan enough."

FOR THE FANS

In 1966, when Dylan was asked for his thoughts on Australia, he said: "They don't have a baseball team here." The answer didn't suggest any great familiarity with the country but nor did it diminish his popularity.

More than 40 years later, Australians can celebrate Dylan's 67th birthday today by tuning in to 2SER-FM, 107.3, for its five-hour Bob Dylan Birthday Marathon from 8pm to 2am. Now in its 24th year, it is produced by Bill Kitson and Bruce Williams, who say Dylan was not at the peak of his popularity when the show first went to air in the 1980s.

"The Empire Burlesque album had disappointed many fans with its messy production," says Kitson. "Many were still getting over his 1979-1981 religious conversion."

However, the marathon created immediate interest and inspired the formation of the Sydney Dylan Society (www.sydneydylan.org.au).

"There were many people out there like myself and Bruce … who thought they were alone in their inordinate interest in the man and the music," says Kitson. "The show brought us together and soon we were having monthly meetings."

The society watched keenly as Dylan's fortunes improved with the release of critically lauded albums such as Oh Mercy (1989) and Time Out Of Mind (1997), which won three Grammys, including album of the year. His most recent LP, Modern Times (2006), went to No.1 in the US which, says Kitson, "in 1985 you would not have believed".

The Sydney Dylan Society also organises Dylan Conventions that occasionally coincide with his tours. Amanda Rose, 31, an Egyptology student, went to her first convention in 1998. She obliterates the stereotype of Bobfans as grizzled-hippies who trade bootleg recordings in beer gardens and says the society gives her a place to discuss the twists of Dylan's ever-evolving life-narrative with like minds. "From the '60s right through to now he has so many different threads," she says, "and they're all quite different."

Those not wishing to stay glued to the radio can attend tonight's Tangled Up In Dylan tribute show at Canterbury-Hurlstone Park RSL (tickets $25, bookings 9559 0000). It features Karl Brodie, Steve Balbi and Brett Hunt, and will be repeated next FRIDAY at The Basement (tickets $32/$25, bookings 9251 2797).

Says Hunt, "when you get inside a Dylan tune and really learn it you get centuries of songwriting. It's all in there - blues, folk, early rock; he had it all down."

in coversation with jay ryan & jeremy lindsay taylor of The Packer.

2008-05-01T12:21:00.002+10:00

(unedited version of preview published in The Sydney Morning Herald.)

“The Packer”

By Dianna Fuemana,

Directed by Jeremy Lindsay Taylor,

Performed by Jay Ryan.

Old Fitzroy Theatre,

20 April to 10 May.

$16 - $34 (for beer laksa show deal)

Bookings 1300 GET TIX

“One-Hander Job” by Benito Di Fonzo.

“That is definitely one to come and see,” says New Zealand born actor Jay Ryan, best known for his roles in Neighbours and Sea Patrol, of the multi-character sex scene he performs solo in Dianna Fuemana’s The Packer.

Ryan, who plays all eight characters in The Packer, has just come from rehearsing said scene in which an older Islander man engages in congress with a ‘gin-addled’ expatriate-Aussie named Joyce.

“It’s something that we’re working on at the moment,” says Ryan, “different positions.”

“He’s coming up with some crazy ideas,” says director Jeremy Lindsay Taylor, “I don’t know from where.”

The Packer tells the story of Joyce’s son Shane, a ‘white-trash Westie’ from the streets of West Auckland attempting to make it as a hip hop artist and escape a life packing boxes in a factory. By spending 24 hours in West Auckland through the eyes of this working-class hero audiences gain insight into the lives of those around him.

“He’s getting to that age where he wants to step up and live his life but he feels a responsibility to care for his mother,” says Taylor of the protagonist. “You get to learn a lot about all eight characters, they’re all multi-layered individuals.”

Ryan, who like the playwright is an Auckland ‘Westie’, has received glowing reviews for what one Edinburgh Festival critic called a ‘virtuoso performance’ of all eight characters, four of which are female.

“Well, three females and a trannie,” Ryan corrects me.

“That’s the challenge,” says Taylor, “to make them individual ladies. You’ve got to have the audience believing that it’s not a characterisation, they’re not stereotypes, they’re real, and they’re all different. It’s a tour de force for an actor. There’s not many actors I know who could even attempt this.”

While the original production was directed by the author, Ryan asked his Sea Patrol co-star Taylor to direct this Sydney debut, a mission that entailed a road-trip around New Zealand to see where the characters originated.

“A lot of them are based on Dianna and my friends,” says Ryan, “so I took [Taylor] to meet these people - my mother, a couple of my mates who still live in West Auckland and don’t really do much with their lives, but they’re still good mates.”

They devoted each day on the road to a character from the play, finding relevant characteristics in the locals, such as when Ryan found the template for his transsexual.

“I’d had a big night and I was just driving home, legally of course. On Edinburgh Street, which is the street where all the trannies hang out, just as the sun was coming up [there] was this huge black woman standing there right by the Edinburgh Street sign. As I went past she waved at me and winked and I went that’s her, so I’ve got her image in my head and that’s who I bring on stage.”

Taylor, who grew up in Campbelltown, saw much similarity between Sydney and Auckland’s ‘Westies’.

“The people were very similar, doing it tough,” says Taylor. “There was no difference but the accent really.”

“And a few more Islanders,” adds Ryan, who originally helped Niuen/Samoan/New Zealand playwright-performer Fuemana conceive the play as they waited backstage during a production of A Streetcar Named Desire.

“[Fuemana] was playing the prostitute and I was playing the young collector that Blanche seduces so we were on stage for like 10 minutes out of a three hour play so the rest of the time we sat backstage and ranted about family life. She had written a one-woman show which she’d won awards for and was really successful and I think she thought I’m going to give it another go but write from a different perspective. She wanted to have it from a white person’s point of view but still have the Islander culture-clashes and me being a white boy and giving some stories over gave her that freedom.”

After his experience in Melbourne and Edinburgh, where the author declined an offer by British filmmakers to buy the script and change the nationality of the characters, Ryan feels vindicated in the universality of the tale.

“It’s a love story and love stories work anywhere don’t they?”

In coversation with Brendan Cowell & Toby Schmitz

2008-04-04T13:50:00.002+11:00

Ruben Guthrie

Benito Di Fonzo, Metro, Sydney Morning Herald.
April 3, 2008

It's not easy working in an industry that encourages the odd night on the turps.

Just water thanks ... Toby Schmitz, left, and Brendan Cowell.
Photo: Marco Del Grande

Preview

"Yeah, the nights are hard," admits playwright and actor Brendan Cowell of his latest stint of sobriety, "but the days are unbelievable - the day's a whole new world."

Cowell's experiences during his first period as a teetotaller in 2005, the year he also won a commission from the Philip Parsons Young Playwright's Award, inspired his new play, Ruben Guthrie, the first production in B Sharp's 2008 season at Downstairs Belvoir.

"I got this incredibly raw, vivid perspective on myself and the universe," says Cowell of the time, "and a lot of my relationships changed completely. Some of them fell away, new ones started, everything looked different, myself included. Then I started to notice how society was completely geared towards drinking. Everything I went to, everywhere I went, everyone I met with, said, 'Have a drink, let's sit down and have a drink, we'll have a drink,' and I was like, 'My God, this is out of control.' "

Cowell's epiphany clashed with his love of pub culture, which still tempts him: "When the sun's just calming down a little bit, and you've worked really hard all day, and you want to take that f---ing edge off."

Ruben Guthrie tells the story of an enfant terrible of advertising who, after an industry-awards night, jumps off a rooftop into a kiddie pool, which leads him to consider temperance. All the inherent changes and challenges it brings into his life come into focus when his old drinking buddy hits town after being fired from his job in New York.

"I don't think what happened to me was as interesting as what happens in the play," Cowell says. "They were just little things I realised that I've dramatised for effect."

The problem for Guthrie (and Cowell alike), is that he works in an industry that encourages the odd night on the turps, as Toby Schmitz, who plays Guthrie, explains.

"Our industry has no office," Schmitz says. "It has no meeting place other than the foyer and the bar, which is hard for the ginger ale drinker. I've been cast in plays, sealed deals, over a glass."

Cowell: "I went to an opening night last week and there's thousands of glasses of wine. You've got to pay $4.50 to get a soft drink but you can drink a shit-tin of champagne, white wine, red wine or beer and not pay anything. I had two lemon, lime and bitters: I had to go to the bar [alone], so you're actually isolated."

It's this social isolation that Cowell and Schmitz, along with director Wayne Blair and designer Jacob Nash, will recreate in the intimate space of Downstairs Belvoir. Cowell hopes the audience's guffaws will have an uncomfortable edge as they see themselves reflected in the black comedy.

"For me, as a writer, that's heaven," Cowell says. "You've kicked your goal in the grand final as a playwright when you hear people swallowing their laughter or laughing out of an obscene discomfort."

Schmitz: "Ruben is what you could classify as a good drunk but the cracks are appearing from the beginning of the play. I think one of the great reveals of the play is how deep the cracks are."

Cowell: "That's exactly it. Because when I quit drinking everybody said, 'But you didn't have a problem? You never beat anyone up, you were a fun guy!' "

Schmitz: "You were still coming up with screenplays at 4am."

Cowell: "It's scary that you can lead two lives, because now [training for his role as Bell Shakespeare's Hamlet] my life is completely different. I'm up at seven, I'm at the gym. I'm reading more novels. I'm a nice guy. You end up doing weird things, like packing your bag the night before. And you call your grandmother, like you're really thoughtful. And then if I go back [to drinking], your life really switches - and who is the right person to be?"

Schmitz: "There's a problem with all artists, who are expected to retain their inner child. I think an inner child is a fantastic thing to have as an artist, even as a lover, person and conversationalist, but should inner children be allowed in the pub after 11pm? Or to have meaningful relationships or drive cars? I don't know. It's a good question."

Genre

Theatre

Location

Belvoir St Downstairs

Address

25 Belvoir St, Surry Hills

Date

17 April 2008 to 11 May 2008

Tickets

$20-$29

Phone Bookings

(02) 9699 3444

Online Bookings

www.belvoir.com.au

La La Land

2008-03-29T11:39:00.002+11:00

Benito Di Fonzo
Sydney Morning Herald. March 28, 2008

These black-comic tales of expatriates in Hollywood should be required viewing for NIDA students.

Photo: Natalie Boog

Preview

"Rolf de Heer told me a funny story," says Christopher Johnson, relating one of the many Hollywood anecdotes that inspired his play La La Land. "[De Heer] was given 'The List'. Studios have a list of actors they're willing to give you money for, and Richard Dreyfuss is like No.267 on the list out of 500, but he's on The List. After 266 people - starting with Harrison Ford, Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington - say 'no', then Richard Dreyfuss says 'yes'. Then [the studio will make the film] but for $4 million as opposed to $80 million because as it goes down the list the budget gets smaller."

Johnson is a Sydney playwright who has dual US-Australian citizenship and lived and worked in Hollywood for eight years. After the success of previous stage comedies such as The Young Tycoons and his 2001 hit, Dog Logs, which toured Australia, Johnson has pulled together the best of his black-comic tales of expatriate minnows in the sharkpit of Hollywood for La La Land.

La La Land tells the story of Aussie filmmaker Terry Swanton, played by Sean Lynch, and his best friend Jason Pegler, played by Sam Smith, who find themselves in Hollywood after the success of their independent Aussie film Bushdance, about a gay Aboriginal man coming out in his community.

"I'm thinking I might change it to Coming Out-Back," Johnson says. "Nobody goes to see it, nobody wants to see it, but it wins the AFI for best picture. He's cast his mate as 'the cop' in the community and he wins best supporting actor at the AFIs."

Bushdance brings Swanton to the attention of Oscar-winning producer Jimmy Fleishberg (Ian Watkin), who is a fictional blend of several real-life characters including the Miramax founder Harvey Weinstein and the late American film producer Don Simpson.

"Don Simpson was Jerry Bruckheimer's partner who produced Top Gun, Days Of Thunder and Flashdance," Johnson says. "His entire Hollywood career, he just snorted the coke, screwed the ladies and drank too much, so he set the template for the out-of-control Hollywood producer and it killed him. Harvey Weinstein is probably a little more temperate."

When the Hollywood money lenders enter the temple of Swanton's latest project, he discovers where he really sits in the pecking order. Soon his best mate has been pushed aside for the biggest star in Hollywood. Then it seems Swanton himself may be the next minnow to be spat out of the dream cannery, a reality that many Aussie filmmakers have discovered, Lynch says.

"I remember [Phillip Noyce] talking about when he was doing Clear And Present Danger and Harrison Ford didn't like where the script was going and [Noyce] stood up and went, 'Bugger that, the script was great. Why are we changing it?' And the producer pulled him aside and went, 'We're definitely going to make Clear And Present Danger with Harrison Ford; we don't have to make it with Phillip Noyce.' "

"That's a classic Hollywood line," Johnson says. "So many Australian directors have this story."

Torn between loyalty to his mate and getting his script produced, Swanton begins to question his own dreams, wondering if he really wants to work in a town where arrogance is a badge of success.

"[Fleishberg] talks about how he loves being arrogant," Lynch says. "He says when he met Buzz Aldrin he was a friggin' arrogant man, 'But I out-arroganted him! He's been on the moon but I've won four Oscars!' "

Johnson feels that perhaps some Australians rush to Hollywood a little prematurely.

"People are going quicker than ever, that's for sure," he says. "It's no longer 'you've got your third lead in an Aussie feature film, go to LA', it's 'you've got your fifth-credited role in an Aussie film, go to LA and give it a shot'. Some make it, some stick around for quite a while and some find it brutal and come back quite quickly."

Perhaps La La Land should be required viewing for NIDA students?

"You've only graduated once you've seen this play," Lynch says.

Genre

Theatre

Location

Darlinghurst Theatre

Address

19 Greenknowe Avenue, Potts Point

Date

30 April 2008 to 24 May 2008

Tickets

$25-$30

Phone Bookings

(02) 8356 9987

Online Bookings

www.darlinghursttheatre.com

I've had worse reviews...

2008-03-06T14:01:00.002+11:00

“The Chronic Ills of Robert Zimmerman, aka Bob Dylan (A Lie)”

As part of ‘Short & Sweet Short Play Festival 2008,’ Seymour Centre, Sydney.

By Joanna Erskine, www.AussieTheatre.com

As soon as this play commenced, I was wondering why we were watching the stage version of the recent Dylan biopic, I’m Not There. Onstage are three ‘Dylans’ each telling their story through song or nostalgia, but the piece soon takes its own track. Benito Di Fonzo’s script almost parodies itself and its subject matter, poking fun, concocting outrageous stories focused on the eccentric muso. Lucinda Gleeson’s production moves at a cracking pace, aided greatly by the guitar soundtrack played live onstage. It’s not mind-blowing theatre, but I found it immensely more enjoyable than the film ‘equivalent.’