Save articles for later
Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.
Blood! Sex! Stardom! Ennui! Two vampire survivors escape divine wrath on the Biblical Cities of the Plain, only to be locked in an immortal struggle for supremacy. Charles Busch’s epic satire Vampire Lesbians of Sodom has it all, and it should be a gloriously camp curtain call for Little Ones Theatre when it opens next week at fortyfivedownstairs.
Stephen Nicolazzo helped found Little Ones Theatre in 2012.Credit: Simon Schluter
For director and company founder Stephen Nicolazzo, “playing with genre scene to scene” is proving the most entertaining challenge. “The show starts as a swords-and-sandals epic, shifting to a 1920s murder mystery and the Golden Age of Hollywood. It’s wild and silly and great fun.”
Nicolazzo will soon leave Melbourne, having been recently appointed as artistic director of Adelaide’s Brink Productions. With Vampire Lesbians, he says, he wanted “to close the chapter and celebrate the body of work with something that’s joyful and … mad”.
And what a significant body of work it is. Little Ones has made an important contribution to a flourishing decade of queer theatre on Melbourne’s indie scene and its end will mark an inflection point and hopefully a changing of the guard.
The company burst onto the stage in 2012 with another flamboyant Busch comedy, Psycho Beach Party – an outrageously funny subversion of Gidget and the shiny wholesome repression of the 1960s mainstream.
Nicolazzo and Jennifer Vuletic are teaming up again for Vampire Lesbians of Sodom.Credit: Simon Schluter
But it soon distinguished itself, alongside theatre contemporaries such as Sisters Grimm and The Rabble, by envisioning a whole world of fresh theatrical possibilities, creating work that not only placed the marginalised in the spotlight but experimented, sometimes quite radically, with camp aesthetics and stylised performance.
Nowhere was the ambition more obvious than in the sumptuous and subversive reimagining of Dracula in 2015 as a full-length visual theatre piece performed entirely without text. Nicolazzo confesses to a fascination, not just with vampires, but a broader gothic sensibility that runs through his work.
Certainly, gothic shadows loom large among the pantheon of queer artists to whom Nicolazzo has paid homage. They haunt Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer, linger in the macabre and melancholy Oscar Wilde stories The Happy Prince and The Nightingale and the Rose, and seep into the cloistered, wickedly sapphic private lives of the Brontë sisters in Jen Silverman’s The Moors.
But, then, repressed sexuality and invisibility have long stalked the halls of the gothic imagination. For Nicolazzo, they speak directly to queer experience and Little Ones developed its distinctive style by always remaining exquisitely sensitive to how the lure of the darkness can also be a way out of the closet.
It’s no coincidence that the creative flowering of companies like Little Ones has run in lockstep with a progressive decade for LGBTQIA+ rights. For all the artifice and outré humour embroidered into its performance style, the liberating potential of the stage forms a poignant emotional core.
Yuchen Wang and Jennifer Vuletic in Little Ones Theatre’s production of The Nightingale and the Rose.Credit: Pia Johnson
Poignant is probably not the first word that leaps to mind when you think of an immortal lesbian bloodsucker known as The Succubus, but if anyone can inspire sympathy without deflating comedy, it’s Jennifer Vuletic.
She first collaborated with Nicolazzo on the brilliant 2017 stage adaptation of Christos Tsiolkas’ short fiction collection Merciless Gods, for which she won a Green Room Award for best performance.
Her roles have ranged from extreme poignancy – most recently as a vulnerable middle-aged lesbian who rediscovers her sexuality on the BDSM scene in Jane Montgomery Griffiths’ The MILF and Mistress – to cartoonish supervillainy. No one who saw her hilarious turn as the child-hating Baroness of Vulgaria in the musical Chitty Chitty Bang Bang could doubt for a moment that she has the chops for a vampire queen.
Vuletic admits both roles will be a help here, and as an actor she relishes the aspect of Vampire Lesbians that satirises the world of showbiz.
“These two creatures will live forever … In one incarnation, they’re stars with a highly competitive streak, pitted against one another for the limelight. It gets brutal.” Vuletic sounds like she’s speaking from experience, but our performers only bare fangs and claws behind each other’s backs, surely? “Oh, no,” she says matter-of-factly. “Some actors will tell you to your face if they think you’re shit.”
Will this really be curtains for Little Ones Theatre or will there be a string of comebacks to rival gay icon Cher? “Everyone keeps asking us that,” Nicolazzo says, before admitting there are no plans at this stage, although he does mention a side project – the tantalising prospect of another collaboration with Tsiolkas is in the works.
Meanwhile, this time-travelling camp epic will be a last hurrah theatregoers won’t want to miss.
Vampire Lesbians of Sodom is on at fortyfivedownstairs from November 21 to December 3.
The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from books editor Jason Steger. Get it every Friday.
Most Viewed in Culture
From our partners
Source: Read Full Article
