Mama

Popular Perth writer-director Helen Brett returns to the Don Russell Performing Arts Centre with Mama, her second play in less than two years, on Wednesday 22 August at 11am. Brett’s previous visit was last year with Three Women: True Life Tales of World War II. This moving drama was such a success with a March weekday performance it was brought back for a weekend show in November. Mama is a monologue-cabaret piece depicting the rivalry between a mother and her daughter who present a double-act on the vaudeville circuit in pre-WWII Sydney. The play is partly inspired by the life of French chanteuse Edith Piaf and features many of the classic tunes Piaf made famous with her distinctive, melancholic voice such as Sur le Pont du Paris and Lili Marlene. Also threaded through the narrative are other well-known songs from the era, including We Must All Stick Together, Naughty Lola and Under Paris Skies. The powerful drama stars experienced local actor-singer and fluent French speaker Alinta Carroll, who is accompanied by accordionist Eddie Staszak. Carroll graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and continued her studies at Trinity College of Music. She returned home to Perth in the late 1980s and performed in productions of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll and The Canterbury Tales. Carroll then moved to the Eastern states and found work in long-running musicals Buddy and Beauty and the Beast. Since arriving back in Perth in the early ‘noughties’, Carroll has appeared in Class Act Theatre’s productions of Hotel Sorrento and Twelfth Night. More recently, she has appeared in the comedy-musical What A Man’s Gotta Do and was the musical director for Red Ryder’s production The Mozart Fraction. Admission includes morning tea, which begins at 10.15am. --