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Trishna is a film that took nearly a decade to make, for an almost unbelievable reason: British director Michael Winterbottom's casting director went to India in 2004 but couldn't find an actor to play the central role that updates Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles from 19th-century English Wessex to modern Rajasthan and Mumbai.
Finally, in Freida Pinto as Trishna (Hardy's Tess) and Riz Ahmed as the wealthy Jay (Hardy's Angel and Alec characters rolled into one), he found his leads to make the film last year. Was there no potential Trishna in India in 2004? Winterbottom laughs. ''I'm always nervous about saying that, but it's true.''
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IT’S 12.30PM Tuesday and Amber Scott, brunette reed-thin Australian Ballet dancer, is rehearsing as Tatiana, a naïve Russian girl about to waste her adoration on the cad aristocrat Onegin, played by Scott’s tall, curly-blond regular dance partner Adam Bull, to whom she shows a frivolous romance novel she has been reading.
“That was way too close,” says a stentorious voice at the side of the Sydney Opera House rehearsal room. Dance notator Jane Bourne is bespectacled, compact and wears a black T-shirt that reads Flaming Saddles Saloon. Bourne has been staging the late choreographer John Cranko’s ballets, including this famed one, Onegin, for three decades.
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FUNNY girl, Amelia Farrugia. The soprano sings in a polished, refined voice, but in the spoken words between can inject a blunt, amusing working class accent. In 2010, Melbourne saw her decked out and partying in 1930s New York under Lindy Hume’s direction in Johann Strauss’s operetta Die Fledermaus. Hume wanted a Brooklyn accent, so Farrugia borrowed from Fran Drescher’s nasally TV nanny.
Occasionally, Farrugia would let that twang into song. Not so for her title role soon to be seen in Melbourne, as Hanna in Lehar’s The Merry Widow. Yes, she employs a northern English accent this time for the widow with lower-class farming origins who has come into money.
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All Sorts: a love letter to Sydney, books and social media; all they are, all they could be ...
On sale at Amazon and iTunes.
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