The Disney stage musical Beauty and the Beast The Musical (music by Alan Menken, lyrics by Howard Ashman and Tim Rice, and book by Linda Woolverton) is a classic; the original Broadway production, adapted from Walt Disney Pictures’ Academy Award-winning 1991 animated feature musical film of the same name, ran for over 13 years on…
Dream$ong may not be Hillsong, but this sure feels like a parody of that church, founded in Sydney’s western suburbs in 1983. Everything is exaggerated for the sake of comic appeal … and it works. The pastor, Richard Sunday (Nelson Gardner), is a slime ball who saw his first wife off in a catastrophic sky…
Prince Hal (Timothee Chalamet) was never destined to become king of England. He was a playboy, drunkard and womaniser, and his tyrannical father Henry VI (Ben Mendelsohn) passed him over in the line of succession for his younger brother Thomas (Dean-Charles Chapman). But England at that time was a land in chaos, divided by years…
Farming and idealism. They hardly go hand in hand. And yet that is precisely what a young US couple – John and Molly Chester – was looking to create by getting back to traditional farming principles to coexist with nature. She was a foodie, who knew the value of good, wholesome, tasty produce. He was…
Ever since Sir Arthur Conan Doyle first created the fictitious character of Sherlock Holmes in 1887, he has become one of the most enduring and popular character in detective fiction. Holmes has become a staple of the big screen, where he has been played by the likes of Basil Rathbone (who gave us arguably the…
A compelling and dramatic storyline and evocative score are matched by a series of stellar performances in MTC’s musical Kiss of the Spider Woman. The plot concerns the extraction of information through brutalisation and humiliation of prisoners held in an Argentine jail. More specifically, it involves the relationship between window dresser Molina (Ainsley Melham) and Marxist…
For those of us who fondly remember shoving disc after disc into our car CD players for company on our long drives, the audio book has certainly come a long way. From the first days of single voice actors narrating entire novels, the audio book has evolved into an aural universe complete with full musical…
The bawdy meets the bizarre in the Australian premiere of the tragicomic musical The Grinning Man, which is based on the 1869 Victor Hugo novel The Man Who Laughs. He is, of course, best known for Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. With music by Tim Phillips and Marc Teitler, lyrics by that pair, Carl Grose…
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…
Polished performances, magnificent mashups, elegant and evocative sets, colourful and creative costumes, and charismatic choreography are the highlights of Moulin Rouge! The Musical. Set at the turn of the 20th century, Christian (Des Flanagan) is a young, penniless British singer songwriter who has just arrived in Paris and goes straight to Montemarte. There he chances upon two…
