Every now and then, you encounter a show whose appeal comes from the audible joy of the audience more than the stuff that’s happening on stage.
The Ensemble Theatre’s latest revival of David Williamson’s 2010 play, “Rhinestone Rex & Miss Monica” is one such play.
Not that the stuff happening on stage is bad — far from it.
In this updated version — Georgie Parker is polished and still immensely watchable — playing a former professional violinist, Monica, who is forced into an early retirement due to RSI (repetitive strain injury).
Glenn Hazeldine is buoyant and brusque, playing Gary, a tradie who’s been employed by Parker’s character to renovate her kitchen in her apartment in Glebe.
There’s barely any client / provider professionalism between them — within the first few moments of the play, they’re arguing over what constitutes “good music”.
He’s a country-music savant. She’s a classical music snob. Here, Williamson’s characters remain formulaic outlines of what these tastes signify.
He loves Dolly Parton and Casey Chambers, so of course he is hardworking, conventional, outgoing, and conservative.
She is into Stravinsky and Mahler, so of course she is uptight, cold, reserved and friendless.
This is a classic, cheese and tomato-toastie kind of opposites attract rom-com for the boomer generation.
But it’s also a play about class, and how our artistic tastes are a seemingly harmless signifier (and designator) of maintaining a certain social pride.
When the two characters take turns playing their favourite tunes to one another, it feels like a sequence usually played out by 13-year old kids in the corridors of a high school. It’s an exchange we’ve all conducted with peers in our younger years, transferring our musical tastes onto another human being as a way of ear-marking our identity.
This is who I am. Let me show you this song, coz it’ll change your life.
The first half of the play has the tenor of an American sitcom circa 2000s, which pins the target audience alongside the age of our main characters. Monica and Gary are “middle-aged” (whatever that means, though probably, that’s anywhere between 38 to 65) — and they’ve been batted by disappointing relationships.
We’re asked to sympathise with them. Gary’s former lover has betrayed him. He has a child with “special needs”. Monica’s injury prevents her from playing the violin. She chose her career over everything else.
In the moments when the script slides into self-pity, the characters reach out and find one another. (Though in this case, Gary’s arms extend further than Monica’s).
Hazeldine and Parker have just enough believable ju-ju to keep us entertained for two hours. And, well, Parker is just beautiful to gaze at. I could watch her chew scenery for hours, especially when she embodies the disaffected, yet weirdly sultry charisma of a classical musician so effortlessly.
The play had its moments of cringe, though — the most shivering being a scene where Monica sits Gary down and demands he listen to a slow movement from a Mahler symphony. (No classical musician actually does this.)
Sandra Bates’s production from thirteen years ago has been reimagined by Mark Kilmurry this time round — and some contextual touchstones have been aligned to our current times; instead of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Monica is reading Bonnie Garmus’ wildly popular “Lessons in Chemistry”.
Instead of perusing Limelight Magazine, she’s dishing out her favourite streaming series like “The White Lotus”. Meanwhile, Gary’s boasting about his love of “Survivor”.
Do they have anything in common to make this romance work?
Before this bartering adjudication of what’s good and what’s not (also another attempt to place taste as a signifier of class and ’sophistication’) — they finally find a shared relish — chicken masala. Funny that the only point of unity these two white characters settle on is something as superficially non-white as this Indian dish.
The show doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a rom-com for the pre-internet age. And for that alone, I found it endearing, delightful, and absolutely enjoyable.