Characterised by soaring vocals, Jesus Christ Superstar is a bold and moving version of Jesus’ betrayal and crucifixion. With no spoken dialogue (it’s all sung), the show is set to wow audiences anew. That’s just what it did nearly 50 years ago when composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyricist Tim Rice got together. It debuted on Broadway in 1971,…
Highly creative and well orchestrated is this mystery fantasy about grief. Directed by J.A. Bayona (The Impossible), A Monster Calls is a visually stylish, emotional drama. Patrick Ness, who also wrote the screenplay, penned the award winning novel on which it’s based. Twelve year-old Conor O’Malley (Lewis MacDougall) is hardly your conventional kid. He is about to escape…
American playwright Kiki Zapata’s 25 and F***ed gets a world premiere at Melbourne’s Owl & Cat Theatre. This is a comedic drama about three art-school graduates struggling with their daily lives. Layabout Zach (Saxon Evans) is a 25-year-old man-child with mental health issues. He has just returned home after several months abroad and can only scowl at his two…
Terrence’s Malick’s The Tree of Life won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, but it drove me batty because I could not make head nor tail of it. So too David Lowery’s (Ain’t Them Bodies Saints) A Ghost Story, which I only understood in the most rudimentary way. It concerns an official ghost. You know the ones,…
Since premiering in 1995, Nick Enright’s Blackrock has found a place in both the Australian drama canon and on high school drama syllabuses nationwide. And, 20 years after its first presentation of the play, La Boite Theatre Company’s 2017 production shows just how sadly still relevant its social themes of mateship, misogyny and violence are….
This is the third and climactic chapter in the recent trilogy about apes versus humans. There was Rise of the Planet of the Apes in 2011, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes in 2014 and now War for the Planet of the Apes. But Planet of the Apes goes back to 1968, when Charlton Heston was…
A big voice with strong vocal range, a dynamic personality, good humour, reflections about the world and homespun philosophy greet those who venture into Chapel off Chapel in a tribute to two prodigious talents with Bowie & Mercury Rising. Couple that with a highly accomplished pianist/keyboard player, in the form of creator Warren Mills. The award-winning…
Is there really nobody else wondering why the female characters in a King Kong movie are so attracted to this giant ape? Honestly, I’m always asking myself the same question. Is it because Kong “King of all places he appears in” is such an impressive appearance, radiating power and protection? Or is it its primitive…
With a band like The Charlatans, where they have overcome overwhelming odds while continuing to record music after 28 years, the fact that they are still at it is something worthy of acknowledgement. Coming up in the Manchester music scene in the wake of the success of the Stone Roses and the Happy Mondays, The…
Superbly acted and directed, the theatrics and dramatics in the richly intelligent Australian premiere of Incognito are compelling. The experience begins as you walk through the narrow passageway into the theatre. That’s when you notice a thin, taut, crisscrossed black rope along one wall and then liberally strewn throughout the theatre itself, dropping down to a…
