Upstairs Theatre, Belvoir
Gay’s Calamity is deeply uncomfortable with femininity in a show in which the men are adequate and the women shine
On July 15, 1876, the Black Hills Pioneer reported that Martha Jane Canary – army scout, frontier gal, and Wild West cowboy – had come to town. Or, as the headlines ran, “Calamity Jane has arrived!”
Fast forward a century and a half and Calamity Jane retains her allure, cemented by the 1953 Doris Day movie and, more recently, the HBO series Deadwood. In Australia, too, One Eyed Man Productions, together with Neglected Musicals and Hayes Theatre Co, has tackled the larger-than-life-character. They have taken an old-fashioned, unpopular musical and turned it into a lovingly chaotic cabaret-cum-rom-com, while also drawing out nuances around gender and queer desire. To say that Calamity Jane has arrived, then, is somewhat of an understatement.
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