A week of contrasts started on Tuesday at the Sydney Opera House with the marvellous Bernadette Robinson in Pennsylvania Avenue, her follow-up to Songs for Nobodies. Both were written by Joanna Murray-Smith to give a narrative framework for Robinson’s rare talent and if Songs for Nobodies strikes one as the much better work, Pennsylvania Avenue…
Category: Musical theatre
About last week … April 23-29
I could be wrong but I think the only Jonathan Dove opera to have made it to a professional stage so far in Australia is Flight, which I saw in 2006 when the Adelaide Festival presented the Glyndebourne production. The prolific Dove is something of a rarity, being a living opera composer whose more than…
About last week … April 2-8
In the week just gone I went again to The Australian Ballet’s Swan Lake, this time to see Lana Jones as O/O. I’ll wait until I’ve seen Natasha Kusch – coming up at the Saturday matinee – before I embark on a full discussion of Stephen Baynes’s production and the key exponents. In the meantime…
About last week … March 26-April 1
A CLASH of ballet opening nights saw Queensland Ballet’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Australian Ballet’s Swan Lake go head to head – well, from my perspective. They were in different cities at the time. For reasons both artistic and logistical, I went to the first performance of Dream in Brisbane on April 1…
About last week … March 18-25
British director Matthew Warchus had two musicals open within about four months of one another. One was Matilda the Musical, the Royal Shakespeare Company production that premiered in Stratford-upon-Avon in November 2010 before opening in the West End in October the following year; and Ghost the Musical, based on the popular 1990 film, which started…
Little Shop of Horrors
Luckiest Productions & Tinderbox Productions. Hayes Theatre Co, Sydney, February 23. RESISTANCE is useless Earthlings. Little Shop of Horrors is back and roaring for warm blood. Human blood. Your blood. I doubt it will be denied, at least in cult-musicals circles. The greatly cherished show has an almost mystical following and, with this production, should…
Theatre artists of the year (and my inaugural Artist of the Year)
One person’s best is another person’s “I can’t believe we saw the same show”. Which if course we never do or can. We each bring to the theatre our history, our personality, our experiences, our experience, our tastes and our bête noirs. So why these lists at year’s end? Well, they serve as reminders of…
The Sound of Music
Capitol Theatre, Sydney, December 17. A new production of Fiddler on the Roof has just opened in New York, directed by Broadway revival rainmaker Bartlett Sher. The musical, created in 1964, tells of the existential threat faced by a community of Jews in Imperial Russia, whom we see living their lives much as their ancestors…
Ladies in Black
Queensland Theatre Company, Playhouse, Queensland Performing Arts Centre, November 19 BY the end of Ladies in Black its sweet, gawky duckling of a heroine has been transformed into a soignée swan, and in just six weeks. Why, without her glasses and with her hair up, young Lisa Miles is quite a looker. Goodbye school, hello world….
Grey Gardens, with special reference to women in theatre
Squabbalogic Independent Music Theatre, Seymour Centre, Sydney, November 20. On Monday night I went to an inspiring meeting in Sydney organised by Women in Theatre and Screen – WITS – to discuss gender inequity in the arts and to plan a positive, sensible, achievable course of action. One of the greatest truths spoken was that…
deborah jones: FollowSpot 