How can you stand up to a bully? That’s the question at the centre of the crime drama Dogman. Timid dog groomer Marcello is separated from the mother of his young daughter, whom he adores … and vice versa. He lives in a barren, downtrodden Italian neighbourhood and gets on well with everyone. To make…
If provocative theatre and the art of confrontation are your thing, then have I got a play for you! Ulster American is wildly funny, but not for the feint-hearted. Playwright David Ireland takes aim at politics and the treatment of women. Jay Conway (Steve Bastoni) is an arrogant – but Oscar-winning – actor. The American…
Caroline, or Change is a work, an autobiographical work from Tony Kushner. He is famous for Angels in America (1993). Born in Manhattan, his family moved to Lake Charles, Louisiana, when he was a young boy. He wanted to write about race relations, the civil rights movement, and African Americans and southern Jews in the…
If you don’t know the names Betty Burstall and Buzz Goodbody, I’m not sure you’ll be all that much wiser after seeing the play The Other Place. In Carlton in 1967 schoolteacher Burstall begins sketching plans for what will eventually become the iconic La Mama Theatre, the pre-eminent, independent home of new, experimental unseen Australian…
West Side Story debuted in 1957 on Broadway. Four genius artists somehow subdued their egos to collaborate as an ensemble to produce one of the great works in the musical theatre canon: Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Laurents and Jerome Robbins. A motion picture version arrived in 1961 winning 10 Academy Awards – it created…
You’ve next seen a family Christmas quite like this before. Australian Realness has each cast member playing dual roles – one bourgeois and the other uncouth. The time frame is Australia in the late ‘90s. The posh and haughty meet the rough and ready. And for one heavily pregnant family member, a dream quickly turns…
Rainbow’s End is a play by Jane Harrison, author of Stolen (1998). Both of these plays have become part of the school HSC syllabus. Rainbow’s End, written in 2005, is an evocation of the lives of three generations of First Nation’s women: the Yorta Yorta nation, in the 1950’s, in the northern Victoria region of…
A Midnight Visit is an immersive theatrical experience that combines dreams and whimsy with performance art. I spent a thoroughly enjoyable couple of hours visiting three dozen specially decked out rooms inside an abandoned North Melbourne warehouse, dubbed the House of Usher. In the anteroom (representing a funeral home) an undertaker expresses his condolences for…
Golden Shield is a new play by Anchuli Felicia King, having its world premiere production from the Melbourne Theatre Company. It’s set against a background of antipathy between the US and China. Their animosity has reached deeply worrying levels and Australia is caught in the middle. The play deals with “Big Brother”, mistranslated words and…
For virtually as long as humans have existed, men have felt entitled. They’ve subjugated women by dictating what they can and can’t do. Let Me Tremble addresses the disparity and calls out the bad behavior for what it is – inappropriate, anachronistic and inexcusable. Front and centre is the church, but the play has to…
