It’s been a few years since I’ve done a year’s-best list. Everyone loves a list, including me, and it’s fun to see what others found memorable. But while I’m always happy to share my opinions about live performance it’s a bit of a mug’s game to say this thing was “better” than that thing when…
Tag: Opera Australia
Opera Australia and AD Jo Davies part company
Opera Australia chose an unusual day on which to announce it had parted ways with its artistic director, Jo Davies. Tomorrow – Saturday, August 31 – is the Sydney opening night for Sunset Boulevard. So you have a vitally important production for OA’s coffers and you decide that yes, today would be just the day for…
West Side Story. Opera Australia. Fleet Steps, Mrs Macquaries Point, Sydney, March 22, 2024.
Speaking in 1985 at a symposium about the creation of West Side Story, Jerome Robbins said he had wanted to see how far he, Leonard Bernstein and Arthur Laurents could go in bringing their “crafts and talents”, as he put it, to a musical. “Why did we have to do it separately and elsewhere? Why did…
My 2016 Artists of the Year …
Last year I decided to institute my personal Artist of the Year award. There’s no money attached, of course, and I think we’d have to say it confers only a modest amount of fame. I was rather thrilled , however, to see that my inaugural winner, the multi-faceted mezzo Jacqui Dark, was subsequently featured in…
The Australian Ballet in 2017
Next year the Sydney Opera House’s Joan Sutherland Theatre, home to both The Australian Ballet and Opera Australia when they are in Sydney, will close for seven months. It’s in a good cause, as theatre machinery that’s done sterling work but is now outdated will be replaced. It’s been there since the Opera House opened…
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…
Verdi to the Divinyls
See, they say ‘Get to your homes ASAP, stay inside, stay protected, don’t drive unless absolutely necessary and stay away from waterways’ and I hear ‘Hop in your Holden and get on down to sing an opera set in the desert on a floating pontoon with no sides or roof, on the biggest body of…
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…
deborah jones: FollowSpot 