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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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I see dead people. This time in the flesh, live on stage. The real trick of Horror, a theatrical homage to silver screen scares, is that there aren’t really any tricks at all. At least of the Hollywood kind. Everything you see is real, thanks to some elastic humans and eye-popping stagecraft. It comes from
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She Loves Me doesn’t get the respect it deserves. I’ll forgive the 1964 Tony Awards snub for best musical; Funny Girl and Hello Dolly! (the eventual winner) had some form. But ever since the late great Barbara Cook belted Vanilla Ice Cream in the Broadway original, a patter aria which has become a strange standard
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What more to say about Calamity Jane, the darn-tootin’ musical hit that rode into Belvoir St Theatre last week after its much-loved (and previously reviewed) Hayes Theatre run last year? The same all-singing, all-dancing, all-winking production that restores a beloved film into multi-dimensional technicolour. Corralled quite brilliantly by Richard Carroll, with terrific choreography by Cameron Mitchell.
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