Identity is the theme of a dramatic comedy about a 34-year-old who is trying to get a sense of self. Korean-born Lucy (Susanna Qian) was adopted by her quintessential Australian parents – Shirley (Maude Davey) and George (Syd Brisbane) – when she was four. She was brought up with much love in a small country town. Now, out…
After spending two years in a Chinese jail for organising a protest that never happened, Lin Bo (Louis Le) has given an exclusive interview to The New Yorker. The artist explains what led to his imprisonment and interrogation, which included beatings. He speaks about the abject conditions in prison – appalling food, cockroaches aplenty and not even a…
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…
Clever and melodic, The Dark Web is a delightful, rib tickling, original musical from the vivid imagination of its writer, composer and star Ariella Gordon. The 90-minute show without interval, with four principal performers and another four in the ensemble, concerns a dysfunctional family. June (Gordon) plays 15-year-old Andy’s (Eleanor Davey) aunt, to whom she is…
I have seen Come From Away three times now and on each occasion I exit the theatre in awe of what I have just witnessed. Simply put, it is a show I can’t get enough of … and with very good reason because it is such a brilliantly told, magnificently performed and most remarkable story. Behind it…
A cavalcade of song, movement and colour, Shake Rattle ‘N’ Roll breathes new life into the sounds of the ‘50s and ’60s with entertainment aplenty. A poised and polished cast of five singers and eight dancers light the fuse and keep it burning for more than two hours. The pretence is the re-creation of famous, gravelly voiced…
Soaring vocals and a bravura performance by Soprano Helena Dix are among the many highlights of Lucrezia Borgia, in which subterfuge and skulduggery abound. The melodramatic opera by Italian composer Gaetano Donizetti hasn’t been performed in Melbourne for more than 30 years. Director Gary Abrahams has chosen to set the story in a world of power,…
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…
In 2016, the footy world was stunned when good mates Billy Brownless and Garry Lyon became involved in scandal. It was all do with the fact that the Geelong champion’s wife – Nicky – from whom he separated a year earlier was now in a relationship with the former Melbourne captain. Brownless was blindsided. To make matters worse,…
Bullying and racism are not acceptable in any environment and yet the schoolyard can be a hotbed of discontent. So it is for 15-year-old Lucy Lam (Ngoc Phan), the daughter of hard working parents who emigrated from Vietnam. She is the recipient of the inaugural Equal Access Scholarship to a prestigious private school, where wealth is flaunted. It…
