Sydney Festival Parramatta Program, January 23 PUNCTURE starts with “Hello” and ends with “I love you”. Has there been anything more life-affirming than this at the 2015 Sydney Festival? I doubt it. As I write, the 2pm show has recently finished at the Riverside Theatre at Parramatta and there will be just two more: tonight…
Author: Deborah
There will not be light
Next to Normal, Doorstep Arts in association with Hayes Theatre Co, Sydney, January 15. Sweet Charity, Sydney Opera House, January 16, 2015 IF there is a choice to be made between darkness and light, musical theatre will tend to go for the latter. It’s just how it is. Indeed, Next to Normal, a musical in…
Kusch joins the AB; Cubans come to Brisbane
AS I foreshadowed on December 15 on my Diary page, Queensland Ballet has lost one of its principal artists, Natasha Kusch, to The Australian Ballet. Kusch was with QB for less than 18 months after leaving the Vienna State Opera Ballet. She joins the AB as a senior artist. In a press statement released today…
Ancient rituals for new audiences
Dancing for the Gods, Chitrasena Dance Company for the Sydney Festival, January 8. IF there is a more immediately captivating dancer than Thaji Dias, I have yet to see her, or him. Dias is the leading dancer of Sri Lanka’s Chitrasena Dance Company, granddaughter of its founder and was clearly born to carry on his…
No such thing as a free lunch?
Volatile personalities, free speech, free tickets and the free language almost obligatory when publishing online – look at me, please!! – tangled at the weekend when a dispute between Opera Australia – always a lightning rod! – and two arts commentators became public. Of course it became public. It seems there are no quiet corners…
In which I fail to stop my list at 10
THIS year I saw more than 200 performances and, over the past week or so, have written about the people, plays, operas, dance works and musicals that spoke to me most strongly. Now I cull the list to 14 – just because that’s how it turned out – and a supplementary, the last being something…
Naming names: looking back on 2014
I’VE avoided making neat lists of 10 of this and 10 of that in my survey of 2014, which is good when it comes to the individuals who made the deepest impression on me. I decided not to divide the names by art form or vocation. There are dancers, opera singers, actors, actresses, directors and…
Top 10 in dance for 2014
DANCE is my great passion but this year there wasn’t a huge amount to bowl me over.Certainly I saw plenty of fine dancing – when does one not? – but in classical ballet there were few new works of substance. Well, none actually. There were pleasing new versions of existing ballets, although they didn’t quite…
Opera and musical theatre in 2014
MUSICAL theatre in Sydney got a boost in 2014 with the arrival of Hayes Theatre Co. When Darlinghurst Theatre Company won the residency at the lovely new Eternity Playhouse, a group of music-theatre producers collectively known as Independent Music Theatre took over the Darlinghurst’s former premises, a small theatre in Greenknowe Avenue, Potts Point. They…
Love and information: international theatre in 2014
TWO pieces of 2015 theatre programming in Melbourne would have interested me anyway, but having seen the shows in New York early this year makes them irresistible. Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information (Melbourne’s Malthouse, from June 12, Sydney Theatre Company from July 9) and Jonathan Tollins’s Buyer and Cellar (Melbourne Theatre Company, from October 30)…
