Hotel Bella Luna - Sydney Arts Guide review
Below is the Sydney Arts Guide review of Hotel Bella Luna, currently playing at Flight Path Theatre in Marrickville.
Keep an eye out for a dancing German robot!
There’s no gravity here and the setting and story gives rise to the notion that the surface of the moon is made of cheese, but HOTEL BELLA LUNA might just be the ticket to attend the theatre for a bit of unsophisticated interactive silliness.
Devised by the free flowing free falling improvists, Ponydog, in association with Jetpack Theatre, HOTEL BELLA LUNA is a non terra firma Fawlty Towers, an intergallactic guest house apparently run by a pair of bell hops, Chaz and Lucy.
Chaz is a laid back slacker stoner into extreme sports, an American who may well be a love clone product of the bromance between Bill and Ted.
Lucy is English and daughter of the hotel’s owner, a Brit brat Brexiter whose daddy does her wrong.
Their version of Manuel is a German robot, a tin man programmed to dance.
There’s a permanent guest in the hotel, a female with a Southern American drawl. So it looks and sounds like the moon has been colonised by the great colonisers of yore.
The premise is that you, the audience, are the latest guests to check in to the Hotel Bella Luna, just as all heavens break out. Supplies, staff, and life support systems have all been sucked off into space.
The surviving skeleton crew with prompting by or of the audience must figure out how to curtail calamity and detour disaster.
For those who don’t like audience participation, don’t despair. You can nominate to have a VIP (Very Introverted Person) badge so you won’t be badgered by the cast. For those who don’t mind a bit of hands on interactive at 1.5 meters apart, it all a bit of a lark.
On the moon, there is no atmosphere, but the cast work hard to create enough hot air to keep the fun in orbit. HOTEL BELLA LUNA is a swell six o’clock swill into silliness, seventy minutes that takes us out of this world of worry and into a naive never never land.
HOTEL BELLA LUNA plays Flightpath Theatre, Marrickville till
Saturday, November 7, at 6:00 PM