Fun with Imelda in a 10-minute musical
Sydney Morning Herald
Tuesday October 13, 2009
WHEN Pete Greenaway wrote his first entry for Short Sweet + Song, a festival of 10-minute musicals, he neglected to follow the art form's basic rule: find a composer who has a pulse.Despite the handicap of a dead collaborator, Greenaway's Alpha Females, inspired by Sex and the City, made it into the festival's inaugural program in 2007. He followed up last year with Rats, a spoof of Cats. This year he has hit the trifecta, in part by putting the boot into Imelda Marcos.Not only is he in the festival for the third consecutive year the only writer to do this the festival has also included two of his musicals among its nine pieces. The second week of the festival opens tonight.The director of Short Sweet + Song, Andrew Threlfall, says the festival attracted nearly 50 entries internationally this year, up almost 20 per cent on last year. It is not a big number, but its parent organisation, Short + Sweet, grew from similar beginnings to become "the biggest 10-minute theatre festival in the world".Greenaway's first entry with the dead co-creator came after he and the composer Clyde Carnegie began (but never finished) a full-length musical. When Greenaway decided to enter the first SS+S competition, he took three of their songs and crafted another story around them.Since then, Greenaway, who works at the Sydney office of the Australian Bureau of Statistics, has teamed up with the composer David Church, a colleague. Their festival pieces this year are Aviation, a love story set in a hot-air balloon, and Imelda, a retelling of Imelda Marcos's 1990 US court case on charges of racketeering and fraud.She was acquitted in the trial, but Greenaway does not let her off so easily. All of Imelda's spoken dialogue is actual quotes from her, he says of the piece, which took a weekend to write and four months to research.Gems include: "People say I'm extravagant because I want to be surrounded by beauty. But tell me, who wants to be surrounded by garbage?" and "God is love. I have loved. Therefore, I will go to heaven."Greenaway imagined the piece as a humorous courtroom drama but the director Matt Young has interpreted the trial's media-circus atmosphere literally, delivering a stage with a clown, a ringmaster and Marcos singing the musical's show-stopper tune, I Did it for the Shoes.Short Sweet + Song runs from today until Saturday at 8pm in the Pilgrim Theatre, 62 Pitt Street, Sydney.
Β© 2009 Sydney Morning Herald