The Cremorne Theatre stage is packed with nooks and crannies to become the Yeppoon settings of shake and stir theatre company’s latest page-to-stage adaptation, the world premiere of Fourteen (part of this year’s Brisbane Festival). The show is fast moving from the outset, propelled by a dynamic soundscape, which places us firmly into the time…
Eighteen-year-old Anna (Melissa Kahraman) has been on medication for so long she can’t remember who she is without it. Whereas once, as a little girl, she was a prodigious writing talent, able to fill hundreds of notebooks with imaginative stories, now her creativity appears lost to years of pills and prescriptions. She ponders if her…
Opera Australia’s production of Rodgers + Hammerstein’s Cinderella is glorious from the get go. Though there is no real standout number, the musical’s soundtrack is glorious and easy-on-the-ear, filled as it is with recognisable Rogers and Hammerstein melodies and lyrics. Anna Louizos’ set design is superb, featuring slick transitions through scenes the sometimes include animal hand…
A pre-show soundtrack featuring “Barbie Girl” and “Ice Ice Baby” immediately acquaints the audience at La Boite Theatre’s re-imagining of Oscar Wilde’s social satire An Ideal Husband. It is set around 1996, in the lead up to the federal election. Arthur “Artie” Whig (Will Carseldine) has been invited to the national capital for his father to…
The Sunshine Club opens in the summer of 1946. Ambitious Aboriginal solider, former boxing champion Frank Doyle (Marcus Corowa) has spent years fighting for freedom shoulder-to-shoulder with troops from all over Australia. Despite its opening number “Lest We Forget”, the war does not set the narrative tone of Queensland Theatre’s bright revival of Wesley Enoch…
With clam-shell surrounded footlights bordering its stage within a stage, Bernhardt/Hamlet immediately urges its audience to step back to the world of 19th century Parisian theatre. Theresa Rebeck’s backstage comedy, which is loosely based on reality, follows the life of its titular heroine Sarah Bernhardt (Angie Milliken), now in her mid-50s. She upends the status-quo…
Based on the original 1980 film of the same name starring Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, 9 to 5 The Musical is a workplace revenge comedy that follows the story of three women, each subjected to sexual discrimination and inequality in the workplace. Their takedown of male chauvinism appropriately begins, via pre-recorded video…
With a band dressed in tropical holiday garb, behind a XXXX-can perimeter, Brisbane Powerhouse’s Underground Theatre has an immediately relaxed feel. It’s time to pack a rashie and some Reef coconut oil to head off from Brissie to Bali as, after a sell-out season at the 2021 Sydney Comedy Festival, the smash-hit Schapelle, Schapelle –…
Based on the 1988 film, Heathers: The Musical is a slick show about dark issues, including bullying, teen suicide, sexual assault and school violence. What makes this realisation of the rock musical such a success is the way that it leans into the irony built into Laurence O’Keefe and Kevin Murphy’s book. It does not shy from the…
Award-winning British playwright Jasmine Lee-Jones’ provocatively-titled Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner appropriately begins in iPhone lighting. Newly-single student Cleo (Moreblessing Maturure) is lying in bed scrolling through Twitter when she comes across Forbes Magazine’s problematic AF celebration of Kylie Jenner as a ‘self-made billionaire”. Under the username @incognegro, she sets about getting Jenner cancelled…
