THEATRE ... with Don Gordon-Brown
Cut and Died!, the latest production from Stage Door Dinner Theatre at Bowen Hills, is a classic example of what makes amateur theatre so enjoyable. Go up and take in it. It’s not brilliant but there’s something rather special about watching seven seriously talented people busting their buns for the shear pleasure of giving people a good time.
Enjoy their work as they do their utmost with some fairly average material, for it’s fair to say the storyline to this show, touted in the blurb as the Blow and Go Musical, is patchy at best.
It’s based on a murder in a hair salon, and when the plot fails to thicken, there’s always a toe-tapping number to come to the rescue. It’s not even all that important that many of the songs don’t seem to dovetail too neatly into proceedings, such as Eric Idle’s Always Look on the Bright Side of Life that brings to a close the first act.
But then again, maybe that’s the whole point of the exercise. It’s not meant to make you think too deeply and the aim is to deliver a good time and that commitment is kept. It’s true that it’s rather fortuitous that the story is set in a salon, because a few of the gags are old enough to have more than just a few long hairs on them. But there were enough of those and some better ones to keep a forgiving and sympathetic opening-night crowd happy. That audience seemed to contain a fair swag of friends of the cast, a number of other actors who have strutted the Stage Door boards before and definitely one freeloading newspaper reviewer who enjoyed the complimentary food platter.
It perhaps needs a little more creativity, such as the ring tone of the mobile phone of the investigating police officer Randy Taylor, played by the show’s director and theatre maestro Damien Lee. It was the theme tune from the original Police Academy and maybe also the 123 sequels and it got a well-deserved laugh.
Not sure who the author was – or if indeed they would want to own up to it – but it’s all hung rather loosely together with a fair sprinkling of anti-male jokes, along the lines of “men are like a snowstorm, you don’t know how many inches you’re going to get” to some outrageous camping up from Ryan Thomas as a gay hairdresser – who would have thought, hey? – and some good honest toil by Bliss Nixon as his co-worker. The good-looking redhead took a little while to warm up the vocal chords, but she has oodles of talent.
Sarah Brooks plays the salon’s owner and can I just say, if I can be permitted to carry on a little with the sort of saucy cabaret-style jokes that are sprinkled throughout the show, she has an enormous future ahead of her. I mean, really, the Stage Door Dinner theatre is a very intimate venue – any cosier and someone could get pregnant – and she could really poke someone’s eyes out with those things!
No, but seriously though, there’s nothing all that serious about this show – and I guess that’s the point.
The cast is rounded out by the rival hairdresser down the road played by Ken Cunz who ends up the murder victim, Colleen Crisp as his grieving widow and Dallas Fogarty who plays a couple of minor parts but who does provide the show’s little piece of gratuitous nudity, if a brief glimpse of a puny bare arse can be deemed nudity.
So there you have it. It’s a dinner-theatre, folks. It’s not an overpaid professional ensemble doing justice to some great playwright’s famous work. Nor are you paying for that, mind. And it’s not going to last in the memory for long.
But everyone has fun – I’m told the three-course meal for paying patrons up at the theatre is always good fare – and there are much, much worse ways to spend a night.
So get up there and give those damned-awful TV reality shows a miss for just one night! The show runs until 25 August, with bookings to 3216 1115.
More details about the show and upcoming productions are at www.stagedoordinnertheatre.com.au
