35mm: A Musical Exhibition
Music & Lyrics: Ryan Scott Oliver
Co-Directors: Sabine Anais, Billee Paige Harris
Tom Mann Theatre, Surry Hills
Halloween Weekend, 2026
New company Two Dogs Theatre presented 35mm: A Musical Exhibition across the Halloween weekend. You may have missed it, and if you did, that is a pity. Unlike the Matthew Murphy’s photographs on which the score is based, the company’s passionate, high-energy presentation of Ryan Scott Oliver’s song cycle cannot be preserved in time.
The complete work has no narrative arc, as song is self-contained. Two Dogs’ 35mm ingeniously creates cohesion by deploying “frames” as both object and trope. As objects they are useful, becoming anything from table-tops to doors; as a visual reference they are like windows into other people’s realities or surrealities, or thresholds through which you are invited to enter the world of the stage. In any case, heed the warning offered against interpretation in the song “Why Must We Tell Them Why?”
Generally, the cycle explores the darker side of the human condition, and when it touches on a lighter note there is often a sardonic sub-text which the actors convey through movement or gesture. Observation of the displayed photos suggests that the darkness is most often prompted by Murphy’s layered imagery. Emotional anxiety runs high, from young adult horror at the traitorous deceptiveness of childhood fantasy lands to the harrowing story of a woman trapped in a violent relationship to the decline into insanity of a young girl obsessed with becoming Prom Queen. Vigorous anxiety is the keynote and sustained by the musical score.
The five young actors, Sabine Anais, Caleb Hamwood, Benjamin Olivera, Molly Owen and Kit Whiter, are exceptionally talented and hugely committed. Performing as a “company” in its original sense of sharing an experience, their teamwork and dedication are exemplary, most obvious in the group’s almost faultless movement and dance sequences. Some complex stage action, such as the use of a rope to represent an emotional boxing ring or the clever representation of working at a laptop, required almost superhuman timing.
The genre-spanning, demanding songs were well matched by the vocal versatility of the group and by the musical ensemble, who were (thankfully) visible and on the stage. While each song was strongly carried, perhaps the most moving were “The Party Goes with You”, sung with soul-searching longing by Anais, and Hamwood’s quietly sincere “The Seraph”.
Anais and Hamwood combined to provide the truly chilling vampiric “Twisted Teeth”, and by contrast Olivera and Owen presented a charmingly ironic performance of the up-beat, smiley-faced “Make Me Happy”. The half-amused frustration of a lover’s impatience is well captured by Owen in “On Monday”, while Olivera gets bemused attention as a man preferring to live a chivalrous lie. Managing very deft movements with a dress and a coat hanger, Kit Whiter is a winner relating the up-tempo tale of a demon toddler.
Fiercely dark and bitingly comic, Two Dogs’ staging of 35mm is as it should be: loud, insistent, raw and touching. The production owes its impact to the stylish choreography by Billee Paige Harris, to the understanding dictation of excellent musicians, and to the drive of Anais, who clearly loves the show. Above all, the mutual supportiveness of the five actors was palpable and gave the performance a buoyancy despite the angst-ridden content.
