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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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In recent years OzAsia has become one of the highlights of Adelaide’s festival calendar but never more so than in 2018. The hugely popular Moon Lantern Parade, cruelly thwarted by uncertain spring weather in recent years and cancelled several times, has benefited now that the festival begins in late October instead of a month earlier.
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The stakes are high in Hamlet Apocalypse: the end is nigh (Q.E.D.). Fortunately, there’s been enough of a heads-up for a group of seven actors to get together and ‘put on a shew’ to face the coming annihilation with a defiant production of Hamlet (Q.E.D., again). As you do. As they would. And for some
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School of Rock kicks ass. Right from the get-go, as power-chords blast through the speakers and morph into a pulsating bass line and pounding drums; as lights (Natasha Katz) slice through thick chugging haze and reveal ‘No Vacancy’ live on stage: you’ll feel a smirk coming on. These dudes may not have armadillos in their
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By Shane Murphy
The Melbourne City Council (MCC) has embarked on quite an ambitious program in using the Town Hall’s grand organ for new works it has commissioned for it. Thursday (November 8), showcased the work of JP Shiloh, the well-known multi-instrumentalist from a number of bands, most notably the Blackeyed Susans. Before JP, the MCC presented artists making
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Remade as a muscular, heroic underdog for our times, this new Spartacus is crisp and compelling storytelling. Despite Khachaturian’s glorious, ever-shifting melodies, Lucas Jervies’ choreography does veer to the repetitive and monosyllabic, but he’s a director well versed in the drama of theatre; and with dramaturg, fellow director Imara Savage, knows how to stage a good
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When we read true crime, we might think it’s about trying to work out why people commit murder, what leads to awful events, and how society deals with it. It may, at the same time, feel prurient to be peering into the windows of a house where someone was killed, or to hear in dramatic
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At the Q&A, held after the first of only two performances of Syrian playwright, Mohammad Al Attar’s While I Was Waiting, someone asked the director, Omar Abusaada what message he wanted audiences to take away from the play. His reply was that he did not want his theatre to be about messages, he wanted it
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I wasn’t sure whether to write about Song For a Weary Throat or not, since the show I saw was the final performance of its Melbourne Festival season, And if, somehow, you hadn’t read about this piece devised and performed by The Rawcus Ensemble and Invenio Singers, (unlikely, since it won rave reviews and a couple of Green
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Doncha just wish your granny was a Ghostbuster? (Hunter, Hunter, Ghost Hunter!!) I mean, wow!!! That’s how it is for 12 years old Celeste (‘half Chinese, half French but All Australian’), who travels to China to return her mother’s ashes to the place of her birth. There she meets her grandmother, Por Por, and Ting Ting,
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