Outlook: dreary

Saw a show today at the Sydney Opera House Studio space. Sorry to say we found it rather lame. It was called "Outlookers" and it was aimed at young kids, and although it had a lot of energy and a fair bit of money spent on it, where it was lacking was in the overall concept and the script.
Three actors playing 5 characters telling a story of a villain sucking souls from zoo animals to put into collectible toys, and 2 kids who outwit him and become friends along the way. The characters were very pantomime-obvious in a manner I found rather cringeworthy, a lot of it due to the corny dialogue. Not helped, really, by the constant use of radio-mic headsets...I was sitting right up the back and it still all seemed too 'big'. And yet even with the mic's the songs weren't always that clear. I think perhaps all three of the actors were often singing in a key too low for them.

The set, two large, rather abstract, inflated balloon blobs with appendages that when released could spring out in the shape (usually with a huge stretch of the imagination) of animals, was sadly under-utilised. It was a weird and interesting (actually, distracting) object to be sitting in the background, but apart from masking entrances and exits, it didn't really mean anything for most of the play. When the first appendage was revealed there was an element of surprise, but after ten more such reveals the point was a bit laboured. It then became a scary forest during a surreal section of the play set in the 'land of souls', but that effect was mainly helped by the use of lighting.

I think my main dissatisfaction was that the set-ups were so obvious, you could see things coming long before they did. A scene where a puppet was 'possessed' and speaks to the heroes was repeated too many times in exactly the same drawn out way to hold my interest. In the confrontation scene, a series of animals fought the bad guy one by one: have some dialogue to stall while the other actor is putting on a puppet costume/have puppet come on and 'dance-fight' villain/villain wins/repeat four times. Yet the final puppet, the one that was meant to be the scariest and wins, was the most lifeless and uninspired.
And the opposite as well: when it was not at all obvious what was going on, the links were justified by the most tenuous explanations that it became obvious that they were going to get out of each situation by a highly contrived solution rather than anything clever.

I found it hard to tell whether the audience of kids were enjoying it...in the main they seemed pretty quiet. This could have meant they were engrossed and listening intently, but it also seemed to make the rather limp gags go down like lead balloons with appendages. The performers were throwing a lot of energy into the show, but to me it seemed misdirected and didn't help save the script. I guess for most of the show the kids were amused...however I got a lot more from the clown street performers outside on Circular Quay.


Cheers,
Craig

[%sig%]