Beneath the kids' stuff

The ukulele, aka the bonsai guitar or Pacific jumping flea, is set to serenade the young 'uns when lo-fi and high-tech come together in two shows in the upcoming Awesome Festival.

The "beaut-uke" perfect storm is whipped up by David Megarrity, the Queensland writer, musician, academic and actor behind The Empty City and Bear With Me.

The Empty City, the 2007 children's book Megarrity wrote with illustrator Jonathon Oxlade, follows the escapades of a boy alone in a city suddenly bereft of other people, with all the fears and temptations that entails.

Megarrity's and Oxlade's stage adaption, opening at the State Theatre Centre next month, deploys the latest technical wizardry to bring the picture book to life as young protagonist Tom explores the empty city between two projection screens that give the animated metropolis a 3-D effect.

At the heart of the show, though, will be the "bright and lonely sound" of the ukulele, says Megarrity, whose other shows for children include Backseat Drivers, Ukulele Mekulele and Show.

Megarrity also appears at Awesome as the wacky buck- toothed troubadour Tyrone who brings along his uke-playing sidekick Lesley (Sam Vincent) for Bear With Me, an intimate concert aimed at little bears under five.

As Tyrone and Lesley, the duo make seriously infectious music (see their Stare Bear clip on YouTube) and have two albums to their name.

Megarrity is a veteran of ukulele festivals around Australasia and is happy the poignant and playful instrument is overtaking the recorder as the school beginners' instrument of choice.

"The ukulele is the least harmful thing you can make out of a piece of wood," he says, quoting uke exponent Azo Bell.

Megarrity describes The Empty City as a mix of cinema and theatre with just one live performer. "The world of the performer is largely animated around him on two screens," he says. "It has been less about experimenting with what's achievable and opening our minds to what's possible to do in that world."

Dragged into a city department store by his mum, Tom (Tom Oliver) is bored and stuck in the do-not-touch crockery displays when suddenly everybody disappears, leaving just their shoes. Alone but liberated, he faces the moral question of what to do in an empty city.

"There is not only the sense of adventure but of the rules being taken away," says Megarrity, who admits to being inspired by dark, doomsday tales such as The Day of the Triffids and The Omega Man (later remade as I Am Legend). "In many ways kids are not very welcome in cities. To take a kid into the CBD is a really tough thing for both the kid and the parent. It is a show for anybody who has been into the city on a trip with their parents and wished that it was different.

"Cities can be exciting places to visit but they can be filled with temptation as well. We are taught that we are nothing without cities but in fact cities are nothing without the people who are in them."

Aimed at children over five, The Empty City is directed by David Fenton and premiered a few months ago at the Powerkids Festival in Brisbane.

Awesome, the annual arts festival for children, features 35 events, most of them free, in the Perth Cultural Centre from October 5-18. The Empty City and Bear With Me are two of the few paid shows.

Megarrity says he moved into creating his own shows for children because he found himself acting in too many bad ones made by other people. That is less likely to be the case today, with Terrapin, Barking Gecko, Spare Parts, Windmill, Polyglot and other Australian companies making first-rate shows with international appeal.

"People have low expectations of children's theatre," Megarrity says. "They don't expect it to be very good or they expect it to be simplistic."

But artists can innovate in shows for children in a way they never could in adult theatre. "You can experiment with form and content and tell stories in different ways for child audiences. They are very sophisticated and haven't formed the habits of expectation that adults have about what they define theatre to be."

Bear With Me is at the State Theatre Centre from October 5-11. The Empty City is at the State Theatre Centre from October 10-12. Details: awesomearts.com/festival.