Sizzling Summer Show Offers Real-life Laughs
Newcastle Herald
Thursday January 2, 2003
WE'VE all been to one: a barbecue where the gas won't light, the only cooked sausage falls on to the dirt and every blowfly in the bush turns up for a free feed. Welcome to Sizzle, which lets us laugh at all our worst barbie nightmares.
Jennie Rohr, the director of last year's delightfully inventive Bugga, which saw some weird insects invade King Edward Park, is returning there with a tribute to the great Australian outdoor pastime.
Sizzle, which begins a four-performance season on January 9, shows three families trying to enjoy a barbecue.
Two of the families are always trying to outdo each other, so there is rivalry over who has the best and biggest barbecue equipment.
The third family, a single mum and her two daughters, one of whom is pregnant, are the guests who cause havoc.
The competition between the two men who are cooking the snags leads to a lively `duelling tongs' ballet, with 10 pairs of giant barbecue tongs.
When a sausage bounces into the air, it becomes human-sized as it returns to earth and leads the hungry barbecuers on a merry chase around the park.
And after the pregnant girl eats chili, the audience gets to share her weird psychedelic reaction in a lively Mexican dance.
Rohr, a drama teacher at Newcastle High School, did her drama training at the Bathurst campus of James Ruse University, a unit which specialises in physical theatre.
This led her to establish Hands Free Physical Theatre, a group which puts acrobatic and circus skills into its productions.
Where Bugga featured 20 performers, Sizzle has 50 aged from 10 to 48 to play its marauding blowflies and limboing sausages.
Rohr said a major challenge with outdoor physical theatre was to use the space imaginatively, taking advantage of the features it had.
Like Bugga, Sizzle will be performed around the King Edward Park band rotunda, with the nearby clump of Norfolk Island pines being just the place for food-sniffing blowflies to hang out.
The barbecuers are played by Linda Campbell, Jayda Gardaya (also the choreographer), Michelle Gosper, Phil Johnson, Mark Kempton, Michael McCallum, Renee Mansbridge, Nicole Welch and Megan West.
Rohr said that in keeping with the cartoonish nature of the show, the costumes were `big and bright', and the music ranged from classical to contemporary and `cheesy'.
Sizzle plays nightly from Thursday, January 9, to Sunday, January 12, with performances starting at 7.30pm. The show runs just over an hour. Take a picnic (but definitely not a barbecue!).
There is no admission charge but audience members are asked to make a donation at show's end to help cover the considerable staging costs. Last year Bugga took enough money to enable Hands Free to make a donation to the bushfire appeal.
This year the group is hoping to be able to use surplus funds for drought relief. For more info, rings Hands Free on 4963-7069.
© 2003 Newcastle Herald
