Intimate revue.
Described as 'Parodies and burlesques against a background of neatly turned melodies', Hit and Run combined imported sketches 'from the Globe and Lyric revues, London' (Sydney Morning Herald 28 August 1954, p.18) and original material from the in-house creative team of McKellar, Donovan, and Mulcahy.
Intimate revue
The Phillip Street Theatre revue company's debut production, Top of the Bill comprised a varied collection of sketches, songs, and dance, including spoofs and takes on Shakespeare, a family at breakfast time, Kinsey's report on sex, and some well-known musicals.
The Sydney Morning Herald theatre critic's review notes:
'Mr Chater, in Shakepearean mood, hotted up Othello for the jitterbug public and swung Hamlet around to the Roberta Cowell theme: "To be he, or not to be he...". The audience had its most boisterous response for the more elaborate group skits, most of all for the pinafored members of the High Falutin' Girls' Choir, who religiously stuck to the idea that any singer touching the right pitch would be defiled therewith... The sketch in which a family of breakfasters acted their way through the stilted detail of a movie advertisement brought the house down... Lola Brooks acted with saucy vivacity in various numbers, and John Fleming with sauce - but clever as they were, their "Kidsey Report" on sexual behaviour in children was distasteful... One sketch was a stew of The Consul, South Pacific and Call Me Madam, but it could have been funnier with keener writing, and so could the "Seven Deadly Scenes". Too often in shows like this, ideas are left in their first slapdash form' (8 May 1954, p.6).
Intimate revue.
The first Phillip Street Theatre show not devised by the company's original creative team of McKellar, Donovan, and Mulcahy, Two for One is said to have been written by upwards of twenty people. Comprising six women and three men, the revue took aim at numerous local and international topics, including snob talk from the Randwick lawns; a couple of jaded octogenarian/ex-J. C. Williamson singers; a bunch of Borgias comparing notes on the effectiveness of thallium and sitting on circular saws; the Leaning Tower of Pisa; a city store proudly selling Eskimodes for Eskimodels; and Tasmanian actor Max Oldaker singing a song about his mania to go back to that state.
One of the highlights of the show was siad to have been a skit in which the foundations of the drama trust and Medea were discussed. The scene also involved a Greek chorus of damsels advertising a well-known brand of girdle with the manner of Euripedes, the language of a radio copy-writer, and complaints about the 'fittin'.'
Intimate review.
For this revue celebrating Phillip Street Theatre's first birthday, most of the sketches and songs were sourced from the three previous productions. The Sydney Morning Herald critic, A. A., writes that as
'an attempt to re-present the wittier items from past shows... it does not quite succeed. Why? Is this critic just a churlish pedant likely to be bored by humour below the standard of Aristophenes and Moliere? Or has some of the material gone stale with repetition? Or are there no fresh personalities coming along to interpret it with the necessary lean and high spirits?' (14 May 1955, p.18).
According the Herald's review, the highlight was John Meillon 'jerking and throbbing with tremulous frenzy, [providing] an extraordinarily clever comment on Johnnie Ray's brand of exhibitionism; it was more than mere mimicry; it was true and telling caricature'. Special mention is also made of Lyle O'Hara, 'bizarre and grotesque', wailing about the mysteries of Baghdad; Gordon Chater in bib and golden curls, analysing an infant's psychology; and Ray Barrett going into a soft shoe routine on the theme of the Elizabethan Theatre being situated in Newtown.
Intimate revue.
Compèred by Max Oldaker, this third and final installment of the Phillip Street Theatre revues by McKellar, Donovan, and Mulcahy (prior to their departure for England) was favourably reviewed in the Sydney Morning Herald. 'Last night was hearty fun from start to finish', writes the paper's theatre critic, L. B., 'and quite excelled all its predecessors in matters of pace, variety, well-placed surprise, and consistent sparkle of wit' (20 January 1995, p.4).
The sketches included 'Twelve Shopping Days to Christmas', 'Cinderfella on Ice', and two skits by Lyle O'Hara: one in which she, as a daisy-munching centaur, urged all the underpaid animals of Hollywood to unite behind her leadership and one in which she was married to herself before a congregation of herselves ('all piercingly clever, and the house was in uproar!' writes L. B.).
A Phillip Street revue comprising original material from Australian writers and 'spots' imported from London. Highlights from the production, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, included Eric Rasdell's contribution, 'Maypole', which the paper's critic describes as 'delightful... with snappy modern wit [written in] ye olde worlde style'; 'Man in the Raincoat' (sung by June Salter); and Barry Humphries's 'gawkily funny portrait of a suburbanite keen on maroon in colour schemes' (3 August 1957, p.4).
Musical revue.
Loosely set in Sydney's King's Cross, but occasionally going further afield (including Scotland and southern USA), Cross Section followed on from the very successful Phillip Street Theatre revue Around The Loop, which ran for over a year. The King's Cross flavour, which one critic viewed as being far 'from strong', involved scenes of Crucians exchanging hauteur and abuse from assorted apartment windows; a sentimental ballad about some hospitable old lady of Palmer Street (performed by Noel Brophy); a skit on the espresso craze ('You Can't Keep a Good Cup Down'); and a bit of hoyden autobiography from a Rushcutter's Bay conductress (Sydney Morning Herald 12 September 1957, p.14). Other sketches included 'Truth in Advertising' (performed by Peter Batey), Dolore Whiteman's 'Frankie and Johnnie', Rhonny Gabriel's 'Not Negotiable', and a dance number, 'Caribbean Bazaar', performed by Yolanda and Antonio Rodrigues.
The musical aspects of the revue are said to have included an 'Auld Lang Syne' finale and a song about a girl-ruined Bank of New South Wales teller. The original musical numbers were composed by the Phillip Street house composer Dot Mendoza and moonlighting classical composer Peter Sculthorpe. The latter's contributions (set to words by John McKellar) were 'Truth in Advertising', 'Manic Espresso' (scored as a send-up samba rhythm and included in the 'coffee bar cult' sketch), 'Redleaf Revelations', 'Shooting a Lion', 'I Knew a Fella', and 'Something You Can't Pin Down'.
Intimate review.
In a Sydney Morning Herald review theatre critic L. B. writes:
'Bats? The five performers certainly were. They variously pretended to be Metro-Goldwyn's lion, the sphinx, a cuckoo cucking more than it cooed, an eaves-dropping palm from the pot plant in the foyer, ballerinas from 'Swan Bog', an elephant with a lost memory, and Noel Coward [played by Ronald Frazer] summing up La Peruse with rhymes like 'lubra' and 'Maroubra' to keep him in character'.
Other sketches included an expose on social climbing, a slapstick tooth-drilling scene and a brawl with a one-armed bandit (Lyle O'Hara), Jill Perryman as both a honky tonk siren and a sophisticate singing the praises of igloo-life in Alaska, and Alton Harvey as both a paranoiac lout from the Deep South and a frightfully pukka Governor Phillips at Sydney Cove in 1788 (2 October 1958, p.7).
