Menu
Humphrey Bower reviews the following shows from Dance Massive held at various venues in Melbourne, March 12-24: Luke George and Collaborators, Public Actions Atlanta Eke, The Tennis Piece Stephanie Lake, The Skeleton Tree Marrugeku, Le Dernier Appel/The Last Cry Joel Bray, Biladurang Russell Dumas, Cultural Residues 2020 * How can dance intervene in the world? And
Read More
How did a precociously young British woman become one of the most performed contemporary playwrights in the English language theatre? Almost exclusively through merit, it must be said, so you can’t blame the Sydney Theatre Company for serving up a third Lucy Kirkwood play in as many years, following Chimerica in 2017 and The Children
Read More
There are two ways to go with this: bite back a sob of nostalgia for an imagined past where teen hoodlums played hard (“Set ‘em up Doc. Cokes all around”) and danced hard, where two gangs could be quelled by one policeman; or rejoice in the ecstasy of sight, sound and movement, that is West Side
Read More
By Shane Murphy
Flo and Joan are sisters who don’t look anything alike from the UK. They do musical comedy – which as they say is not super cool – but they’re funny and very good at it. They came to notice via their 2016 Song and their show is more of the same, and sillier. With just a piano and a beautifully
Read More
By Shane Murphy
Maria Bamford comes highly recommended. As an actor in the recent Arrested Development season she’s one of the cast of that effortlessly funny and weird show, so I was certain she could do no wrong. I was also excited to see her as she was the sole American comic I was seeing this MICF and and a break
Read More
When Michelle Law’s semi-autobiographical play Single Asian Female debuted in 2017, it was celebrated as a potential game-changer, remarkable in that its three main female characters were all Chinese-Australian. It was an acknowledgement of the fact that seeing yourself reflected on film, on TV, on stage, isn’t just some vanity exercise. It’s powerful, it’s validation,
Read More
It was mid-February in Athens and cold and sunny as we sat on the balcony of an apartment sipping cloudy ouzo and eating salty olives. Vallejo Gantner and I did this almost every afternoon to celebrate another day’s end of Athens Burns Bright; Creative Ecology Tour. “Mate, I signed the contract, it’s real, it’s happening,” Gantner said, breathing out a big
Read More
Ninety minutes. Forteen numbers. Two actors. One love story. Sounds easy enough, right? The Last Five Years, like successful relationships, is harder than it looks. Jason Robert Brown’s 2001 song cycle of love won and lost is a precocious early-career project fiendishly difficult to perform (and revered by musical theatre heads as a result). The
Read More
By Shane Murphy
After last year’s show, I was keen to see where David O’Doherty was at; one year older, wiser, maybe even funnier. Like last year, O’Doherty begins low-key. He wanders on stage as people are still finding seats and starts speaking almost before anyone has noticed this slightly disheveled guy is, in fact, the main act. The disarming charm and cruisy
Read More
You know that Simpsons episode where Mr Burns and Smithers drug Tom Jones and chain him to a stage to perform at gunpoint for Marge and Homer? “Get help, love,” Tom whispers to Marge between verses of It’s Not Unusual. “Call Interpol, get me a hacksaw, anything.” It came to me as I watched Marcia
Read More
