The Australian Ballet’s glorious production of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a fitting tribute to the splendid State Theatre before it undergoes a three-year refurbishment. It is a colourful, highly creative, whimsical work – a sensory sensation. The winner of the 2018 Helpmann Award for Best Ballet, Christopher Wheeldon choreographs the translation of Lewis Carroll’s beloved book. The…
PIP Theatre’s first offering for 2024 is the hilarious Banging Denmark, written by Van Badham and directed by Heidi Gledhill. Badham wrote the play as a way to cope with the horrendous online trolling she faced as a journalist for The Guardian. Banging Denmark was shortlisted for the 2020 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Nick Enright…
A bravura showing from Andre De Vanny distinguishes the incendiary play Swansong by Conor McDermottroe. Set in the 1960s and ‘70s, it focuses on the thoughts and actions of a man whose head isn’t quite right. He attributes that to an incident during his childhood, the result of bullying. Austin ‘Occi’ Byrne (Andre De Vanny) is the…
Chaos and trauma are at play in Every Lovely Terrible Thing. A highly dysfunctional family implodes and picks apart its innards. They are the Colemans who live a rundown weatherboard house on the outskirts of a country town. Cooper, the unemployed, gay, clothing designer grandson in his early 20s, likes dressing in women’s attire and flouncing about. He…
An adaptation of acclaimed film director Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 movie The 39 Steps, Hearth Theatre’s production of the parody is riotously funny. Patrick Barlow’s work from the 1915 novel by Scottish author John Buchan, brings slapstick humour to the mystery crime thriller … and it works b-e-a-u-t-i-f-u-l-l-y. Single, handsome, 6 foot 1, 37-year-old Richard Hannay (Sorab…
We’re in the 19th century. Trusting Bella Manningham is fragile. Not long married, she met her now husband Jack in Switzerland and they connected instantly. They moved into an old house – complete with dark, wood panelled walls – in London, but this is a home with a nefarious history. Its previous owner was murdered in a…
The prequel to The Wizard of Oz is back to delight anew and delight it most certainly does in a dazzling display at Melbourne’s finest theatre – the grand Regent. This is top shelf entertainment in every way. I speak of the talent, the choreography, the staging, the lighting and the sound. We are in the…
A Premiership at what cost? Indeed, is snaring the feted trophy the be all and end all? The Cutting Cove Football Club, located in a small coastal town, has never won a flag, but it hired a coach known as The General (Syd Brisbane) who has. He took on the job three years ago and maintained that…
Mateship, isolation and mental health are on the line in the darkly comedic Milked. Paul Roberts (William McKenna) and Snowy (Laurence Boxhall) have been friends for years. Now in their early 20s, they live in rural Herefordshire, in the West Midlands of England. Paul has graduated from university and is busily looking for work. He has his…
We are in Poland in 1870. Yentl (Amy Hack) is driven by her desire to study … to learn and understand. Her father teaches at the local Yeshiva (a traditional Jewish educational institution focused on the study of Rabbinic literature). Being a girl, she is not allowed to attend the Yeshiva, nor to study the Torah (the…
