Patrick Marber’s searing psychological dramedy Closer is La Boite’s first offering for 2024. Directed by CEO and Artistic Director Courtney Stewart, the play packs a hefty punch. Larry and Alice both work in the skin trade: Larry is a dermatologist and Alice is a stripper. Larry is a ‘clinical observer of the human carnival’ and…
Off-the-wall … wacky and wild, this whodunnit is so much fun. Hark back to the middle of last century. Corpus Delicti! concerns a filthy rich divorced man who is about to turn 40. John Brady (Chris Saxton) has bought himself a private tropical island – Werewolf Island – on which he has built a mansion. He has inherited a…
In his seventh year at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Michael Shafar is laid back and effortlessly funny. In short, the 33-year-old knows how to entertain a crowd, as howls of laughter ring out throughout his hour-long standup routine, where nothing is sacred. He is clever and ribald and risqué. Home base – formerly Melbourne – is…
Scintillating and sensational. Riverdance is back and how! It has been more than a decade since this Irish originated troupe last visited Australia (they toured five times between 1997 and 2012) and this is their 25th anniversary show. First coming together for a seven-minute performance at the Eurovision Song Contest in Dublin in 1984, the following year…
Set in Galway, Ireland between May 2016 and March 2019, Duck Duck Goose explores sexual assault and its impact. I refer to the effect on the accuser and the accused, along with friends and family. Jane Scully (Rachel Nutchey) meets Chris Quinn (Mitchell Holland) in the aftermath of a house party, where Chris got wasted. Jane alleges she…
Prepare to be mesmerised. Cirque du Soleil continues to lift the bar with its latest show – its 38th original production – LUZIA. The name LUZIA is a combination of the Spanish words for light and rain. Mind you, there is no raining on this parade of the extraordinary. LUZIA, the show, marks the first time in Cirque…
A superb production breathes new life into the multi award-winning story of vice that is Bob Fosse’s Chicago. We’re in the roaring Twenties. Married to the dim-witted Amos, chorus girl Roxie Hart is enraged when Fred Casely breaks off an affair and shoots him dead. She tries to pin the murder on her hapless husband, although that backfires. Sent…
Australia’s most prolific playwright has come out of retirement and has his finger on the pulse, addressing the cost-of-living crisis. The title of his play refers to the haves and have nots in society. When David Williamson was a boy in the 1950s, the difference in salary between a worker and a managing director rarely exceeded fivefold. Now…
It is 1999 and the clock is ticking down to the opening of a new production for a community theatre company. The pompous, misogynistic director fawns over the only paid member of the troupe, the leading man … and derides everyone else. The leading lady longs for a different role. An understudy who sees the good in everyone…
An immigrant family business that grew and grew to become the fourth largest investment bank in the United States before it disintegrated. That is the story of the Lehman Brothers, as told with remarkable insight and stagecraft in The Lehman Trilogy. Born on September 29th, 1822, Hayum Lehmann, the son of a cattle merchant, emigrated from…
