Twenty new shows feature in the 9th annual Melbourne Cabaret Festival. Under the artistic direction of Dolly Diamond (for the second consecutive year), the festival is on right now at Chapel off Chapel, and runs until 1 July. Note that each show has only a small number of performances. The festival includes musical acts straddling…
George Bernard Shaw wrote Saint Joan, in 1923, six scenes and an epilogue. Imara Savage, the Director of this production, has ambitiously taken many liberties with the original text. This Sydney Theatre Company production of Saint Joan occupies the stage for one hour and forty-five minutes, straight through, without an interval. A great deal of…
Most of us would have played “tag” at school. Well, imagine if you never grew up, and continued to play that game well into adulthood. That is the harebrained premise of TAG. Loosely on fact, this comedy is something like a cross between The Hangover and Game Night. For one month every year, five highly…
The triumphant triple bill 4 Seasons won rapturous applause at its opening in Brisbane. A mix of dancers and choreographers from Hong Kong and Brisbane combine to create three performances intertwined by the title and yet so totally different in delivery. There were 20 dancers, six from Expressions Dance Company and 14 from Hong Kong…
The seniors’ road trip The Leisure Seeker is, if you can believe this, a lighthearted take on dementia. The heavily concocted drama however stretches beyond acceptance. John and Ella Spencer (Donald Sutherland and Helen Mirren) have almost reached the end of the road. Ella is frail, while John’s memory is failing. Instead of going quietly into that…
Big Brother is watching in Upgrade, a futuristic horror-thriller from Leigh Whannell (Insidious: Chapter 3). Grey Trace (Logan Marshall-Green) barely makes a living fixing old cars. His attractive wife Asha (Melanie Vallejo) works in IT. The pair have a good relationship. All that changes though after Grey delivers a vehicle to Eron (Harrison Gilbertson). Eron is…
Featuring a series of powerful performances, Disobedience packs a punch. At stake is the future of three people – a London-based husband and wife; and their childhood friend, a photographer living in New York. At an Orthodox synagogue in London, the chief rabbi collapses and dies. As funeral rites commence, the rabbi’s photographer daughter Ronit Khruska (Rachel…
Darwin is sweltering and it’s raining cats and dogs. Ruben’s (Dion Williams) life is in the toilet. A court has sentenced him to attend counselling after he hit a cop, but he isn’t willing to play ball and he makes his situation worse. He’s full of resentment, struggling to cope with his brother Joe’s death, for which…
Hard to believe Brad Bird’s groundbreaking The Incredibles came out 14 years ago. He already had a solid reputation from his beloved The Iron Giant, but The Incredibles shot him to another level. Now Bird and an expanded team are back with Incredibles 2 – and they’ve done it again. The Incredibles 2 picks up – literally – where The Incredibles…
If you’re going to ask me what Marauders was about, I’ll owe you the answer. Because to be honest, this was such a complicated story that I couldn’t understand what was happening while watching. Let alone that I could still retell it now. The big jumble of storylines is just as inextricable as a fisherman…
