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I am a white (if not straight) man. And I didn’t much like Nakkiah Lui’s blunt, irregularly funny new Sydney Theatre Company play How To Rule The World. My cultural confession is Lui’s idea, one I’m happy enough to make. As she writes on Twitter: “My gender and racial identity are mentioned in every review,
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Bitchy queens and their unruly courts are quite the flavour of the month, aren’t they? There’s big screen Oscars pick The Favourite with Queen Anne and her scheming same-sex suitors. Princess Margaret is proving quite the handful on Netflix’s The Crown. Meghan (Markle) and Kate (Middleton) are at each other’s throats, if you believe the
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Here is a good play with a contradictorily bad title, in a starry production by Darlinghurst Theatre that approaches very good. Little Voice, of course, is nothing of the sort. It’s the name her muzzling mum Mari has enforced upon her. In the privacy of her room it’s a very big voice indeed. Possessed by
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From opera to musical theatre and drama classic and contemporary, I’m genre agnostic when it comes to picking the best theatrical experiences of 2018. The standout Sydney stage shows spoke to the moment in distinctive ways, from #metoo to race relations, mental health, environmentalism … and the pitfalls of bricking yourself into a pyramid. In
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“Love,” so the song pile-driven deep into your brain goes, “will never let you be the same.” Which goes for the show, too. You can’t unsee Aspects Of Love, the sweepingly silly Andrew Lloyd Webber musical extravagantly revived at the Hayes Theatre. You certainly can’t unhear Love Changes Everything, its saccharine strains injected into every
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Things are grim in the Surry Hills home of Belvoir St Theatre. In the upstairs theatre, a bitterly married couple are waiting for each other to die in an isolated hut in Sweden (The Dance Of Death). Downstairs, a lonely bureaucrat is freezing to death in the depths of a bitterly cold Russian winter. In
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Art isn’t easy, a composer wrote once. Especially art about art. At least Stephen Sondheim wrote about a real artist and a real masterpiece. If the audience is supposed to believe the art in your story is great, you have to produce art that is, well, genuinely great. Take A Star Is Born. No, not
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Sydney is currently presenting a study in feminist theatre in two parts. In two theatres. At Belvoir St, an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy Of The People, from an all-female creative team, taps into the #MeToo movement through a contemporary rewrite and canny gender swap, turning the whistleblowing protagonist into a target of male
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To contemporise a great classic of the stage is one thing. To turn it into a state-of-the-current-nation play is quite another. Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy Of The People has always been about power, truth and morality. Which is why indolent directors have long reached for it on the shelf in times of heightened anxiety. But
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Have you heard the one about the entertainer turned populist demigod who won over a nation yearning for a new start? No, not him – Eva Perón, the actress and first lady of Argentina in the 1940s who made her own political play for power decades before Hillary Clinton’s similarly failed bid. Though the parallels
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