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And now, a change of pace. After three brooding operas this cold Sydney winter – a staid Lucia Di Lammermoor, a sombre Rigoletto and a dazzlingly dark Aida – levity arrives in the form of one of Gioachino Rossini’s least remembered operas. The Turk In Italy is little performed for some good reasons. But this
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Finger clicks to Sydney’s newest jazz club, the Eternity Playhouse, which is gently swaying to some very smooth sounds. The American songbook – Gershwin, Porter, Holliday and the like – is in the capable hands of top-rate crooners channelling love and loss in the smoky, dimly lit confines. Which would be a great night out
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Blood-red clouds swirl apocalyptically overhead. A black panther with piercing green eyes stands warily close by. A gold-plated serpent is charmed to coil around the crowd and bare its fangs. Or is it all a dazzling mirage? No surprise in an opera set in the deserts of ancient Egypt, especially one as tricked out as
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There is, as we’ve come to expect in the globalised market of principal opera talent, some world-class voices quaking the tiles of the Sydney Opera House this winter. Starry seasons of two mid-19th century Italian works, Lucia di Lammermoor and Rigoletto don’t excavate anything opera lovers didn’t know about these works, or indeed these well-worn adaptations of contrasting
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The hangover from seeing a really great piece of theatre, a work of the moment that speaks to the moment, can be particularly cruel. Saint Joan, at the Sydney Theatre Company, captured so powerfully the isolation and subjection of women. The Hypochondriac, which opened at the Darlinghurst Theatre on Wednesday, is a portrait of an
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Joan of Arc is so hot right now. Inappropriate pun intended. She’s just finished on Broadway, she was on the West End not that long ago, and is rarely absent the stage for long. There’ve been 40-odd films, the most recent just last year. She’s been inhabited by some of the greats: Plowright, Redgrave, Dench,
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Why revive a decades-old piece of musical theatre in 2018? It’s a question I, a sucker for a show tune, think about a lot. It’s a question some producers don’t ask enough. I’ve narrowed it down to two good reasons. Three if you count profit, obviously, but let’s put that ugliness aside. Four based on
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The Sugar House is about gentrification. Of suburbs, and particularly of families. Alana Valentine’s cross-generational epic is close to the heart of this theatre. It’s set in harbourside Pyrmont, which could just as well be on the other side of the city in Surry Hills, where Belvoir’s de-industrialised suburban home sits, or any inner-city suburb
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Andy Morton has been directing traffic harbourside for the last six Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour spectaculars: from Gale Edwards’ infectious Carmen in 2013, to La Fura dels Baus’ contemporary Madame Butterfly in 2014, Edwards’ brash Aida in 2015, Chen Shi-Zheng’s thoughtful Turandot in 2016 and a Carmen remount in 2017. But in each production
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It’s summer in the city. Positively stultifying way up above 180th street, where nobody has air-conditioning and the A train is the only way out. Donald Trump is spitting on immigrants on a crackly radio, but the Dominicans and Puerto Ricans and Haitians and the rest of the foreign-blooded underclass of Washington Heights have bigger
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