What a grand show and a great experience Kurios is. Artistic excellence, ingenuity and reinvention are the keys to the ongoing success of the world’s preeminent circus, Cirque du Soleil (Circus of the Sun). Kurios continues a fine tradition and as the title suggests, it features a cabinet of curiosities – the forerunner to museums containing artefacts…
Noni Hazlehurst is unrecognisable as dishevelled vagrant Christie, wandering about the rubbish that litters the Cremorne Theatre’s ramshackle staging in Mother. Christie is a homeless alcoholic, sorrowful but resolute in her attempts to survive on the suburban fringe of Melbourne. And Hazlehurst inhabits her just as Christie inhabits the littered debris of Kat Chan’s set design….
Promiscuity to hide the pain. That – in a nutshell – is the short life and times of Lolita, as evocatively captured by Patricia Cornelius in Slut. We chart her childhood, mainly through three frenemies (Michaela Bedel, Lauren Mass and Jessica Tanner) – girls who grew up with her, befriended her and then dissed her. They excitedly…
A cleverly conceived and executed piece that purports to be one thing and turns out to be something else entirely, I am loathe to go into detail about the narrative arc for fear of spoiling the surprise. Suffice to say, the story concerns a couple of old mates – a straight girl and a gay…
A darkly comedic, sick and twisted story concerning an extreme job interview to find a perfect hit man or woman, you are highly unlikely to forget this one in a hurry. Six candidates enter a premises without any idea of what they are in for. The agency looking to recruit a new employee is KOC – which…
A slow moving, wordy piece about loneliness, fragility and connection, I can’t say The Curtain lit up my life. Set in a small country town, Ada Munroe (Milijana Čančar) is a widow. She lost her husband John some time ago and on the anniversary of his passing each year she visits his grave and then…
The 1947 play A Streetcar Named Desire is the most celebrated of Tennessee Williams’ works. The classic drama is poetically symbolic but also grimly naturalistic, as represented by the detached but detailed staging of Brisbane Arts Theatre’s production. The staging emphasises the play’s symbolism through its use of glassless mirrors and also aesthetically. The lighting…
Billy Elliot The Musical remains as moving and evocative as when I first saw it in Melbourne more than a decade ago … and what a magnificent show it is. For me this is up there with the best musicals brought to the stage. It is based on the successful 2000 film, which starred Jamie Bell…
Pre-show music and mingling sets the tone of The Neighbourhood, as the show’s performers (Cieavash Arean, Nima Doostkhah, Aurora Liddle-Christie, Dr Matt Hsu, Naavi Karan, Anisa Nandula and Amer Thabet) converse with the audience to prompt conversation around consideration of our neighbourhoods. Clearly, the concept of home is a complicated and abstract one and it…
The creator of and actors in Italian American Reconciliation, which premiered off Broadway in 1988, seem to have forgotten the adage “less is more”. Aldo (Josh Massarotti) is a larger than life character – a single Italian American – who hasn’t seen his best mate Huey (Dean Gunera) for a while, so he calls around…
