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Friendship’s the thing in Muriel’s Wedding. Friendship, and self respect. And credit card fraud… Though you know what they say: one girl’s fraud is another’s opportunity. How to explain our enduring affection for semi-delusional, slightly subversive, small-time criminal, Muriel Heslop? It’s misleading to use a word like ‘Loser’ to describe her, since it suggests she’s
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Like the No. 1 subway through the Upper West Side, a thin line bisects this alfresco West Side Story on Sydney Harbour. The difference between a great night out and a miserable one? Just add water, as us fancy-frocked freeloaders found on opening night when the heavens opened just as the orchestra struck up the
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Cinderella might be an age old fairy tale, but the sentiment rings true today. A young woman is trapped in slavery and treated abysmally. While the rich around her have power and mobility, she can only dream of a better life as she fights to survive. However, where the story veers from reality is that unlike
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With all the answers, all the proof of our lives and of others at our finger tips, memory is – most ironically – becoming a thing of the past. On the other hand we’re recording more of our lives than we ever have before – and to what end? These very millennial problems – the juggernaut of
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My thinking, for some years now, is that as one nears ‘the end’, a round of applause is owed. For getting through, if nothing else. I love that Stephanie Lake’s newest work, Skeleton Tree: 13 meditations on death and loss, begins with just such an ovation. What follows is a series of reflections we are
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While I may never have danced competitively, I have appeared resplendent in green satin tunic thing painstakingly stitched by my I-hate-sewing-mother (“you and your bloody ballet!”) and green and blue raffia arm things as a sea sprite: in the sort of seabed fantasy only inland Australia can contrive. We’re talking battement tendus and pas de
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Derived from a single image of a lion devouring a zebra, Moya McKenna’s suite of six paintings is an exploration of struggle and evocations of fierce, troubled states. As any analyst would say, the artist is both lion and zebra. The work drinks deep from the well of art culture. One might point to the
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This is the slum that faces the bay on the seaward side of Brooklyn Bridge. This is the gullet of New York swallowing the tonnage of the world. In 1947 Arthur Miller heard the story that was to become the basis for A View from The Bridge. Of the longshoreman who reported two ‘illegals’ to
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Yep, the show that played 11 years on Broadway, winning awards (Tonys, Grammys, Oliviers) and spawning multiple international productions, a so-so movie, and God knows how many tours and revivals is back in town. I’m not usually a big fan of jukebox musicals. My mother very nearly stopped speaking to me when I told her what I
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33 Comments and Observations on 33 Variations by Moisés Kaufman 1. From the first wave of applause as she enters Stage Right, one is aware that one is watching work of and by the crème de la crème of American stage and screen. Ellen Burstyn (Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, The Last Picture Show, Big
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