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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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Playwright Joanna Murray-Smith pays tribute to the gift of an actor. The actor is her uncle John Bluthal who died on November 15 north of Sydney, aged 89. Bluthal was born in Poland, raised and educated in Australia and worked as an actor for stage and screen for seven decades, mostly in London. His career included lead roles in West
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At the wake after his mother Mary’s death, Patrick sings. It’s dawn. The day after I travelled down (up? over?) to Melbourne to see Jane Bodie’s play Lamb. I’m tucked away in the attic by a window that looks out over my neighbour’s paddock. The sheep are huddled together against the rain. There’s a lot to
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Rock Bang, developed as part of Circus Oz’s 40th year, is a co-production with Otto and Astrid Rot (Daniel Tobias and Clare Bartholomew), the grunge-punk-wunderkinders and co-founders of the Die Roten Punkte (The Red Dots). If you haven’t come across the squabbling Rot siblings before, they’re sort of Hansel and Gretel meets Rocky Horror Show,
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It’s easy to assume that Twelfth Night is a piece of Christmas frippery, and it certainly sounds benign – as fairytales go I mean. You forget how sour it turns. You forget what an out and out thief is Toby Belch, how ruthless are the machinations visited on the hapless Andrew Aguecheek and even the
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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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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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