WORD of advice. If your colleague is performing in a MITS production never warn them ahead of time that you will be attending their debut.
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I’m sure many of us have done this in some form or another. As I did last Friday afternoon hours before journalist Samantha Walton made her debut performance as a singing telegram girl in The Umpire Strikes Back.
The reason I give this warning is because The Umpire Strikes Back is a parody which occasionally singles out audience members for the others’ entertainment. It was opportunity for the singing telegram girl to have her revenge. And the Thunderbirds (Rob Glanville and Bryan Heuir) also wanted to target fellow audience member Bazza Rodgers and I as well.
How a singing telegram girl or the Thunderbirds fit into The Umpire Strikes Back might leave you wondering, but it’s a parody with a tribute to space opera in general. It’s the core characters and the name that reminds you that you’re watching a version of Star Wars except they are exaggerated or twisted to suit, sometimes to rally the crowd.
And it’s their interactions with the minor characters who consistently add in a fresh take to some sort of universe – even if it isn’t quite the one that George Lucas introduced us to.
The red herring plot of the Thunderbirds, Inspector Gadget (Ryan Telford) and the Enterprise crew’s engagement with the exaggerated based characters works well the most. Bluey and Blowy the Fly (Priscilla McCrindle and Dianne Stuart) were inspired. I didn’t know there were flies in space but as a duo they could weave in the puns while adjusting the stage to fit the next scene. Their style worked, and they were gutsy enough to be the only ones to truly stand up to Darth Vader (Jeffrey Rodgers). His bad guy image is enough to intimidate wimpy Luke Streetwalker (Davo Howe) and impress the power hungry Princess Lai (Jenelle Robartson). Lai is no innocent. Actually, she’s a cow. But it’s Rodgers’ portrayal of Vader that threw a shadow on the stage even when he had left it. His deadpanned and black eye shadowed face shows little trace of personality, especially when Lai shamelessly throws herself at him. Yet then he shows the moments where he seems to really want to prove that he is bad. His newspaper gag expressing his opinions from crime to local Mount Isa politics is great because it’s a way to prove to the audience that he is not going to be intimidated into changing his opinion to fit the generic view of the populace. That’s real power.
The Umpire Strikes Back will be performed at the MITS theatre until March 19.
