Dear Brother is a joyous celebration of young Aboriginal masculinity and a theatre experience that’s memorable and uplifting. Any preconceptions that the subject matter of young First Nations men grappling with what it means to be a man might be rather grim, should be thrown out because this work, presented by Queensland Theatre, is far…
Tina: The Tina Turner Musical takes audiences on an emotional rollercoaster, showcasing the extreme ups and even more extreme downs of her legendary career. She was in the music industry for many decades, from her glory Ike and Tina Turner days in the 1960s and ‘70s (at least performance-wise) to her being a ‘has been’…
Discard any preconceived notions of an ancient Greek play by Euripides about a woman who kills her children. Adaptations of Medea usually have the titular character front and centre, but this unique take on the story by Kate Mulvany and Anne-Louise Sarks has her two sons as the focal point. In fact, the two young…
With ‘gaslighting’ being the word of the year in 2022 and mentioned across social media and in real life countless times, it won’t be a surprise to contemporary audiences what the essence of this play is about. It’s interesting to note that Patrick Hamilton wrote the original back in 1938 when its revelations about a…
The movie musical of the Broadway musical of the movie of the book. That’s what we’ve got in 2024, with a film adaptation of the successful 2018 Mean Girls musical being released twenty years after the original hit movie penned by the wonderful Tina Fey. It made a household name out of Lindsay Lohan, and…
K-dramas (from South Korea), have been making a huge impact on Netflix in the past few years (e.g. Squid Game), with one of them, The Glory, making it into the top 10 for 2023. Gyeongseong Creature arrived with much hype, with the irresistible pairing of a couple of well-loved actors – Park Seo-Jun and Han…
This exhilarating hip-hop musical from Queensland Theatre is a huge crowd-pleaser, ending the year of productions on a high note. Set immediately post-Vietnam predominantly in a refugee camp in Arkansas, U.S.A., with flashbacks to Saigon, Vietgone is written by Qui Nguyen (who’s since gone on to write for Disney animation projects since penning this in…
This uplifting Queensland Theatre production of Melanie Tait’s successful play-turned film is a very entertaining and fun trip to the theatre. It manages to evoke lots of laughs while also pressing a few salient buttons regarding Australians’ stubbornness about, and suspicion of change. At one point, one of the older women says, ‘We don’t even…
An equally amusing and moving theatre work, Tiny Beautiful Things from Queensland Theatre grips the audience from the first minute to the last. A sparse domestic set design of kitchen, living room and stairs leading up to an unseen upper floor (courtesy of Simone Romaniuk) shows us the home of Sugar – a woman who’s…
Moving and at times confronting, At What Cost? leaves the audience in a stunned silence for a moment, until the thunderous applause and standing ovation inevitably follow. It’s a powerful piece of theatre in which the one hour and forty-five minutes without interval seem to fly by. Indigenous playwright, Nathan Maynard, has crafted a compelling,…
