Journeys with the Lord

Angela Bennie

Journeys with the Lord

THEATRE

By Angela Bennie,

SMH, Friday, 12 January 1996, Page 12

ARTS

Miracle City (book by Nick Enright, music by Max Lambert), Wharf 2, January 10

THIS is the beginning of a journey, says Miracle Citys director, Gale Edwards, rather than the completion of one. It is a work-in-progress, and must be seen that way.

If so, then it is a spectacular beginning; and if the completed journey fulfils this promise, then we have on our hands a major new work. Miracle City is the first work to emerge from entrepreneur Cameron Mackintoshs generous donation of $500,000 to the Sydney Theatre Companys developmental arm, New Stages.

At first sight, a musical set in the American Deep South about a family of TV evangelists, Ricky and Lora Lee Treswell, hardly seems the subject matter for an Australian musical.

Here they are with their two toothy children, Bonnie Mae and Ricky-Bob, so American as to be almost archetypal. Sporting spangled cowboy hats and dripping gold jewellery, they do the Lords work with pentecostal zeal as they call for donations to build Miracle City, a great citadel to the Lord in the shape of a biblical theme park.

And here is the charismatic Reverend Millard Sizemore, played with such a frightening, controlled intensity by Peter Carroll that the character, beneath its avuncular banality, shimmers with a pathology too corrupt and decayed even to imagine. He is mesmerising.

And here is the music of the South, great gospel climaxes and twanging, tingling guitar, music to make reason banish and dissolve. But on second glance, it is the use to which Enright and Lambert put these characters, their situation and that gospel-country music that matters here. For the work is designed around another kind of archetype - the journey. In this case, it is that of Lora Lee, who begins frocked and wigged, and ends defrocked, stripped bare and bereft of everything she loves and believes in.

Genevieve Lemon, as Lora Lee, is in full command of the material, especially the demanding transition she has to make: her final moments are filled with such strength and pathos, that Lora Lee becomes tragic. Yet there is a further dimension to Miracle City: under Gale Edwardss sustained, steady use of tableau and tension, enhanced by set designer Michael Wilkinsons sweeping pathways of light, with the music climaxing on the goosestepping, spinechilling rhythms of To Arms, and with Carrolls tiny, tight, ordinary but transfiguring figure at its centre, then it is possible to see how close this brand of Christianity is to fascism. It is a revelation; apt, when you think about it. Miracle City is wonderful.