ENTERTAINMENT COUNTRY CLUB COMEDY WELCOMES STEVE ALLISON! After two months’ hiatus Country Club comedy is back! Featuring Steve Allison as the January headline with S Sorrensen as support and Mandy Nolan as MC! Steve Allison has that rare gift of walking into a room and making everyone his mate. Steve Allison was born into show business. His parents (The Allisons) were Australia’s top sight act for more than thirty years. His dad always said as long as you live under this roof you will do things my way. So Steve had to come home from school every day drunk, and tell mum a joke. Steve Allison knows how to make people laugh. The confidence and experience earned from performing more than a thousand live shows is clear – he is funny! With a natural sense of humour and quick wit, Steve’s show is a well-crafted mix of snappy one-liners, hilarious stories, funny home truths and current topics. It’s Aussie humour at its best. Steve is joined by support act, the hilarious dry poster boy for pissed off ageing, S Sorrensen, and the outrageous wit of Mandy Nolan. Tuesday 2 Jan at the Ocean Shores Country Club. Free. 7pm.
SAE WORKSHOPS SAE’s Summer Series is a 3-day program for anyone who wants to come and work on inspiring creative projects in the fields of Audio, Design, Film or Games. Across the 3-day workshops, SAE Summer Series attendees will work towards building a creative piece of work to take away for use in a portfolio or showreel. Attendees will receive a certificate of participation to acknowledge the creative work they have undertaken. Don’t miss out on your chance to experience life as an SAE student, and discover what it means to be a creative professional in state-of-the-art facilities with industry experts by your side! $150 per person with lunch provided each day. Spaces for this event are extremely limited. Owing to the tertiary level of the workshop content, this event is open to anyone aged 15 years and older (Year 10 and over). 23–25 January 2018 | 10am–4pm each day, SAE Creative Media Institute, 373 Ewingsdale Rd, Byron Bay MORE INFO + TICKETS: https://www.picatic.com/summer-seriesbyronbay
THE UNDISPUTED QUEEN OF CABARET!
Lavish and loud, brazen and bold, Trevor Ashley premieres his brand-new show Trash & Trevor at NORPA on Friday 29 December. Featuring highlights from his sell-out cabaret shows I’m Every Woman and Star Struck with recollections from Priscilla and Les Miserables, TrAshley will sing your favourite divas like you’ve never heard them before. An evening with Trevor Ashley is the perfect way to kick off your Tropical Fruits Festival experience with a diva degustation of Cher, Tina Turner, Liza Minelli and of course Shirley Bassey. As well as a sizzling live band, Trevor will be joined by special guest Markesha McCoy (NYC), one of the stars of Las Vegas’s Rock of Ages. Show at 8pm. Lismore City Hall. Tix online at norpa.org.au.
cinema PADDINGTON 2 BY JOHN CAMPBELL
WONDER WHEEL
The circumstances of Woody Allen’s ‘courting’ of his current wife, Soon-Yi Previn, combined with his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow’s insistence that he sexually molested her as a child might reasonably lead us to the conclusion that the revered little filmmaker is a bit of a grub. And they should certainly throw some light on the portrayal of women in his movies. In this, Ginny (Kate Winslet – a fantastic performance) and her step-daughter Carolina (Juno Temple) come to grief through their love for a man – a playwright (Justin Timberlake) – with whom Allen clearly identifies. Ginny and her husband Humpty (Jim Belushi) are battlers who live and work on Coney Island in the 1950s. Humpty’s daughter turns up on their doorstep after walking out of her marriage to a Florida gangster. Mickey the lifeguard (Timberlake) seduces Ginny before embarking on his conquest of Carolina, who is being hunted down by a couple of guys from the Mob. There is something pathetic about Ginny and Carolina’s neediness, something irritating in Mickey’s high opinion of himself, and Humpty’s oafishness is cruelly overdone. But the plot is tight and compelling, notwithstanding the bad guys’ ineffectual attempts to track down Carolina. It feels more like a play that has been adapted for the screen and, as such, its most successful scenes are those shot in Humpty and Ginny’s home, with long takes and a slowly moving, intimate camera. References to Eugene O’Neill are clunky and self-congratulatory (Allen obviously has a high opinion of himself), but the sensual cinematography of veteran Vittorio Storaro (Apocalypse Now) is a joy throughout. Allen, whose output in his later years has lurched from the awful (Vicky Cristina Barcelona) to the sublime (Midnight In Paris), has ventured once more into the dark territory that he explored in Match Point, with a not dissimilar outcome. The characters are types rather than real people (Ginny excepted), but the drama that unfolds and the morality that it exposes are unnerving for their honesty.
It’s all about the suspension of disbelief when you’re watching a movie about a talking bear living with a family of humans in Notting Hill. Fortunately, this sequel to 2014’s adorable Paddington has that essential element in spades. Directed and co-written once more by Paul King, with the same cast in the central roles (Hugh Bonneville, the lovely Sally Hawkins, Samuel Joslin and Madeleine Harris), as well as Ben Whishaw voicing the bear, I had no compunction in choosing to see it instead of the eighth instalment of Star Wars (yawn). Paddington, who has brightened the lives of everybody at the Brown household as well as their neighbours in the cutesy Enid Blyton-like street, finds himself in a spot of bother when he is wrongly arrested and charged with breaking into an antique dealer’s shop. Sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment, things look grim for the hairy little bloke with the red hat, but his cheeriness and positivity soon rub off on the hardened lags in jail and he forms friendships with Knuckles, Spoon and Phibs (Brendan Gleeson, Aaron Neil, Noah Taylor), with whom he escapes and sets about clearing his name. The intricately plotted story, with a number of witty asides, is perhaps more demanding than your average kids’ flick but it is visually stunning throughout. Hugh Grant as Phoenix Buchanan, the vain West End actor past his prime, very nearly steals the show with a fabulously over-the-top performance, but nothing can detract from Paddington and his sweet naivety. Which is where the suspension of disbelief comes into play… near the end, he is trapped in a life-threatening situation, with Mrs Brown (Hawkins) trying to save him. All sound is dropped and for a heart-stopping minute you fear the worst. It is incredibly moving (and was too much for a little girl and her mother behind me). Go see it, and don’t leave when the credits start, otherwise you will miss a terrifically camp song and dance by Grant and the prison inmates. I loved it to bits.
MAN WITH DOLL International comedy star David Strassman’s brand-new show iTED E uproariously parodies our technology-laden lives. The sharp-tongued Chuck Wood and loveable Ted E Bare are constantly on their screens. With everyone connected to social media and the internet 24/7, will Strassman get them back under control? And, in a world-first, Strassman simultaneously operates five characters in a 6-way conversation. Once again, he revolutionises ventriloquism. This will sell out for sure. Grab your tickets now. The show is at The Byron Community Centre on 16 March. Tickets at byroncentre.com.au.
North Coast news daily: www.echonetdaily.net.au
The Byron Shire Echo December 20, 2017 81