Melinda Oliver, Author at Daily Review: Film, stage and music reviews, interviews and more.

Are jokes funnier when told in an Irish accent? Or are they just damn funny?

Bertie Blackman music review (NGV, Melbourne)

Bertie Blackman transitions from playing electric guitar to drums to keyboard while singing with the ease of a life-long musician. …

Moving slowly but purposefully towards a dramatically depicted seascape to the sound of howling wind and menacing drumbeats, the opening …

Swaggering across the stage, checking out the chicks but bemoaning his lack of lovemaking (prostate problems), Uncle Vasili threatened to steal …

Spinning like a whirling dervish, singer Lauren Mayberry of Scottish band Chvrches was perhaps channeling a higher power that gifted …

With no mud like Splendour, nudie-runs like Meredith, the grit of Laneway or idealism of Golden Plains, it was a …

A man faces away from the audience, seated, hunched over, and frantically moving his right arm up and down.

It’s a spectacle of shameless showbiz, with singers in sequinned gowns, glitzy holographics, a love-versus-desire storyline, and Irish dancers that …

The cast of 20:21 deserve an Olympic medal for sheer endurance, power and magnificence.

Most of us dream of being rescued at some stage in our lives — from a mundane job, a fading …