By Ernest Kearney — At the 2017 Hollywood Fringe Festival, The Girl Who Jumped Off the Hollywood Sign —written and performed by Joanne Hartstone— earned a number of honors, including the Tvolution Award for Best Solo Show (female,) and left no doubts about her acting “chops.”
In The Reichstag is Burning, one of the international “virtual performances” to participate in the 2021 Hollywood Fringe, Hartstone reveals herself as a solid entertainer with an appreciable set of pipes.
Due to COVID restrictions imposed by the Australian Government, The Reichstag is Burning was limited to one and only one performance before a live audience which they could film for inclusion in HFF21.
In other words, no second chances, no retakes, it was one shot only, like back in the Golden Age of Television again.
With that in mind, what Performer and Creator Hartstone and Director/Designer Tom Kitney accomplished with Reichstag is nothing short of amazing. I’m not talking jaw-dropping amazing here, I’m talking 300-pound fat guy belly flopping in a kiddy pool amazing!
Taking Bob Fosse’s film Cabaret as her starting point, Hartstone retells the fall of Germany under the rise of the Nazis as witnessed from the stage of a popular Kabarett performer.
But Hartstone also undertakes to carve those visions into a parallax view (*) displacing Berlin, August 1934 to Washington D.C., January 2021.
Applying dimmers and Gobos rotator from his switchboard palette Kitney creates a noir canvas for Hartstone that is as ingenious as it is elaborate.
The only weakness of the show, I found, was the music, though not Hartstone’s exceptional performance. However, her repertory was, mostly, covers of contemporary music.
Which is an unfortunate choice, as there are countless songs from the cabaret period that could serve this show well; Werner Finck Der brave Soldat schweigt (“The Good Soldier Shuts Up,” Raus mit den Männern (“Chuck Out the Men”) and many more.
It’s possible the choice to use such familiar songs was a device to have audiences recognize how dangerously close we are today of seeing history repeated. Still, the musical selection was very repetitious.
Otherwise, lovely work —
A SILVER Medal.
You can see a repeat of the virtual performance:
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Thursday September 16 2021, 8:30 PM | 70 mins
Pacific Time (US & Canada) virtual performance
For Tickets and Updated Information Go To:
Hollywood Fringe Festival
and
Learn More at blackboxlive.com.au
(* No not the 1974 thriller starring Warren Beatty)