Red Dog - the legend lives on! ***** — Theatre Australia Forums

‘Red Dog - the legend lives on!’ is the latest production from Black Swan and Rio Tinto Ore, showing at the Playhouse Theatre in Pier Street, Perth until 21^st October.

If you were asked ‘Would you like to see a show with puppets and mime, and not a word spoken in the 105 minute production?’ the answer would probably ‘Thanks, but I’m washing my hair that night!’ in which case you would have missed the brilliant Red Dog experience. Did I say puppet? Wrong, this red kelpie – credit to Cecile Williams’s puppet design skills - is very much alive, and with further thanks to his ‘handler’, Michael Barlow, he breathes, eats and does everything a dog does. It is VERY easy to forget that you are watching a puppet.

The show starts with a musical quintet accompanying Luke Hewitt’s efforts on ukulele, so very quickly the laughs commence. The talented musicians one at a time then become the actors. Cathie Travers gives her wonderful, as always, background music throughout.
The scene opens at the Saturday Night hop in a north-western mining town in WA, and as Shaun Gurton’s set and costumes vividly portray, the year is 1975. Yes tastes really were that bad then! Will cool Brendan Coleman get the chick of his dreams? Will his acrobatics impress?
When Red Dog (originally a series of short stories) appears on the stage, the bond of affection with the audience is immediate. Red’s owner (Richard Seidel) plays ball games and gets the audience involved.
The coaxing Grim Reaper appears a couple of times. There are dream sequences, wonderful effects by Paul Jackson. Then the elegant Geisha (Ella Hetherington) and the pregnant woman (violinist, Jessica Ipkendanz) become involved with Red. The whole show is alive!

The creator and director, Neill Gladwin, can be truly proud of his imaginative and inventive masterpiece and the team behind it. This will probably go on to be an Aussie icon.
If you are a mature 10-year old or upwards, will love it – but take the paper tissues. If you are over 50, laugh at the OMO box again.

P.S. I saw the preview and Neill asked for feedback - perhaps lose 60% of the shadowgraph scene.

when i went to see this play i had read very little about it. it wasn't until i arrived at the theatre that i found out it was a non-speaking show. despite that i tried to remain optimistic. I was let down. although the actors performed well..it was a boring, barely funny, hard to follow peice of work. after seeing it i read into the story of red dog and realised the play no where near does it justice. the only highlights of it all was the extremely random yet very amusing puppet show where they had crazy hand sex and when the dog was farting, purely because the person next to me could not contain themselves from laughing. maybe older audiences would enjoy it but i would not recommend this to anyone under the age of 30.

Red Dog - the legend lives on! *****

when i went to see this

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