Dry Land has much to say about abortion, female friendships and being a teenager, but it takes a long time to say it. It is the brainchild of American playwright Ruby Rae Spiegel. In 2014, Dry Land – her first full length play – premiered Off-Broadway. Spiegel was 21 years old and still a playwriting student at Yale…
Racism comes in many forms and from many quarters and can strike with the speed of a bullet train. That subject is explored in a dramatic and humorous way through a series of anecdotes from the coloured English daughter of West Indian parents. Her mother is an actress and her father a mathematician, who migrated to Australia….
Set in rural Victoria, The Rooster marks a highly imaginative and impactful feature film debut for writer and director Mark Leonard Winter. The double Helpmann Award-winning actor, who featured in Elvis, Balibo and The Dressmaker, drew on personal experience to create something special. The film deals with masculinity, isolation and crisis; and features an introverted…
What is in a word? Everything … for the person around whom the sweeping tale The Dictionary of Lost Words focuses. I speak of Esme Nicoll (Brenna Harding), to whom we are introduced in the year 1886. At the time, she is four years of age and being brought up by her intelligent, decent and caring father,…
A rich array of talent is on display, as love and loss take centre stage in Jonathan Larson’s passion filled musical Rent. Based on Puccini’s opera La boheme, written in 1895 it tells the story of a year in the life of Bohemian friends living in New York City in the late 1980s. In the group…
A distressing story about intimidation and forced relocation, Aboriginal playwright and performer Brodie Murray dug into his own family history to bring it to life. The Whisper is a reimagining of his grandmother’s journey on horse and cart in the 1940s. When she was just a little girl, under cover of darkness she travelled with her family…
Imagine if you had the ability to see into the future and change the outcome. That idea is at the centre of Marvel’s latest superhero movie, which the studio would like to turn into a franchise. Brought up in foster homes, Cassandra Webb (Dakota Johnson) is a paramedic. All she knows is that her mother…
Grief. How to deal with it. How to cope when you have lost a beloved one. That difficult subject has been turned on its head in the MTC production of Meet Me at Dawn. British playwright Zinnie Harris has written an intriguing mystery, in which clarity is sought, but not readily provided … deliberately. Even though the truth…
The satirical virtuosity in this show is in both the writing and execution. A small, talented troupe of entertainers that has been at it annually since 2000 just keeps delivering. The only pity is that because they are based in Sydney, we rarely get to see them further south. Their material is cultural and political. They skewer noteworthy figures…
Fifty years on, it remains just as wacky, bold, sexy, energetic and as much fun as when Tim Curry first took to the London stage in 1973. Rocky Horror Show is, of course, a loving tribute to the science fiction and B-grade horror movies of the late 1940s through to the early 1970s. It’s the story of…
