What a hoot! Featured performer Jay James-Moody, the artistic director of Squabbalogic Independent Music Theatre, has adapted (to the present day) and directs the musical play by Alan Jay Lerner to great effect. Dr Mark Bruckner (Blake Bowden) is a strictly evidence-based psychiatrist who has recently lost his wife. Returning to practice, he has a chance meeting…
Opera Australia’s Handa Opera Madama Butterfly sears with emotion. It is a splendid and spectacular offering, with surprises, against the backdrop of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Opera House. The story concerns a US navy lieutenant named Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton who takes advantage of a beguiling former Japanese geisha, Cio-Cio-San, in Nagasaki. While she – nicknamed…
Intelligent couple Stevie (Claudia Karvan) and Martin Gray (Nathan Page) have been happily married for 22 years. They have a 17-year-old gay son, Billy (Yazeed Daher) and all live a good life. Martin, who has just turned 50, has had, arguably, the finest week of his professional life. He has just been awarded the premiere prize for architecture,…
Based on a memoir by the late Timothy Conigrave, playwright Tommy Murphy has given us an up close and personal look at a 15-year gay relationship. It starts in the teen years and works its way through to the HIV/AIDS crisis of the ‘80s and ‘90s. Tim (Declan Clifford) has his eyes on the school football…
Currently in limited release, Of an Age is a sensitive coming-of-age drama told in two time frames. The film opens in 1999 and Kol (Elias Anton) is three weeks off turning 19. He is friends with hyperactive Ebony (Hattie Hook), who wakes by the water’s edge at a beach in Altona dazed and confused. Using…
The movie Living contemplates the rhetorical question “You call that living?”. We’re in London in the 1950s and the respect Mr Williams (Bill Nighy) heads up Public Works at County Hall. He and his staff travel to work each day by train – although not in the same carriage – dressed to the nines (bowler…
In Ti West’s prequel to X (2022), Pearl (Mia Goth) is a star in the making – at least in her own head. It’s 1918, and the combination of WWI and the Spanish flu has many on tenterhooks. Pearl’s husband Howard (Alistair Sewell) – a good man – is off fighting. She lives on a…
Rosie is a 20-something year old florist shop owner and party girl for whom life has its challenges. She and her Irish best friend Cara are inseparable. They have been ever since they met in Year 8. But, of late, it has been all work and little play for Cara, due to a job upgrade. Rosie has just…
Succinctly put, intriguing. “What if I said I am not what you think you see? I am the wolf.” These are among the first words spoken in this remarkable drama by South Korean playwright Hansol Jung. She was inspired to write Wolf Play after reading a news article about Facebook and Yahoo groups used by some parents…
Three disaffected young men are at the centre of punk rock band Green Day’s rock opera American Idiot. The story is expanded from its album of the same name, (released in 2004) and also features music from its 2009 album 21st Century Breakdown. The band – formed in 1986 by lead vocalist and guitarist Billie Joe Armstrong and…
