Va-va-voom! What a talent Chris Burgess is. The young man studying honours in musical theatre at the Victorian College of the Arts is a star in the making if Lennox: Legend in my Living Room is anything to go by. He is an entertainer extraordinaire with a strong and powerful voice and a confident persona, combining Annie Lennox (of…
Australian actress, director and former head of the Queensland Theatre Company and the Sydney Theatre Company, Robyn Nevin, AO, is the type of figure who deserves applause upon her every stage entrance. That is what deservedly happens at the start of Christopher Hampton’s powerful play A German Life. Nevin plays Brunhilde Pomsel and shares the…
Maxine Mellor’s Horizon is an intense experience … not the type of show to be enjoyed so much as to provoked by. It is a sensibility that is conveyed from before its start thanks to an ominous pre-show soundscape and the gothic shadows of a darkened stage featuring a single white line as video backdrop…
Circus arts performed in a most unlikely setting. Statera puts the supermarket or grocery store front and centre. It is imaginative, clever, funny and upbeat. It enables four performers – Karina Schiller, Aleshanee Kelso, Dylan Singh and Tomas Correia – to showcase their considerable skills. Above all, balance is required, not to overlook dexterity and strength. Tumbles, jumps and acrobatics…
E M Forster’s A Passage to India is a mighty epic tale set in the politically turbulent British colonial India of the 1920s. To adapt it to the stage is an equally mighty undertaking. To its credit, Genesian Theatre has delivered an engrossing production of Martin Sherman’s adaptation of the classic novel. Much of the…
Their mother has deteriorated sharply and her three children have gathered to determine which facility to send her to. She has Alzheimer’s and has been looked after at home by one of her two daughters, Vicky (Tottie Goldsmith), but it is time to put her into full time care. Vicky has visited several places and assessed each…
A 16-year-old by the name of Levi Presley plunges to his death after leaping off the ledge of a tall casino hotel in Las Vegas, so an American voiceover tells us. That may appear to be the start of a horror story, but while the act and its repercussions most certainly are, The Lifespan of a…
One of the joys of experiencing a Shakespearean play on stage rather than page is hearing the poetic beauty of the Bard’s language and expressions nuanced with articulations of human truth. It is initially startling, therefore, that Queensland Theatre’s Taming of the Shrew starts without words. In its opening scene, we are left long in their…
It was such a delight to welcome back to the stage musical theatre royalty in Debra Byrne. It was the mid ‘80s when she appeared in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats and a decade later she followed that up with another star turn in the maestro’s Sunset Boulevard. So, it seems only fitting that she should reprise solo…
Honour is at stake in Verdi’s powerful opera Ernani, which features a surfeit of rich, rounded and redolent performances. The music is superb, rousing from the magnificent opening chorus number (with many more to follow), not to overlook a series of emotional arias. The first half, in particular, I found strikingly impactful. The action takes place…
