This March a brand new event will be bringing folk music to the inner western suburbs of Sydney and it looks pretty exciting. The brand new Summer Hill Folk Festival is set to take place at the Summer Hill Church on Saturday 5th March. The line-up for the festival is impressive, bringing together some of…
Contemporary dance mixes with ancient ritual in Chunky Move’s double-header Next Move 11. The first work, titled “Nether”, is directed, choreographed and performed by Lauren Langlois. She shares the stage with James Vu Ahn Pham, who collaborated on the choreography. “Nether” has an otherworldly feel. It’s a fusion of light, music and movements that are on…
Turning Agatha Christie murder mysteries into popular cinema is proving quite lucrative. So it’s not surprising that for the third time Kenneth Branagh has teamed with writer Michael Green to adapt Christie’s late (1969) novel Hallowe’en Party for A Haunting in Venice. The unsettling supernatural thriller follows the success of Murder on the Orient Express…
Shake & Stir’s adaption of Mary Shelly’s classic gothic horror novel Frankenstein is thrilling in both pace and spectacle. From its beginning, the company leans into the scale and theatrical potential of the epic story of young scientist Victor Frankenstein’s creation of a sentient creature in an unorthodox scientific experiment. The colossal storytelling starts aboard…
There is a dark heart to American playwright Samantha Cooper’s world premiere work, Dawn, being staged at The Owl and Cat Theatre. It starts out with Laura’s parents wanting to have a family dinner with her, but things quickly turn sour … and it is soon clear why. Laura has told her mother, Jo, that her…
Well, the last Mary Rachel Brown play I saw in Sydney was Silent Night for the Darlinghurst Theatre Company late last year. It was a disaster. Approaching another evening with Ms Brown was a tentative commitment. However, I can say, it was worth taking a punt, for the experience was a better one. Permission to…
The world is confusing. Events happen – and are reported – at breakneck speed thanks to digital technology. But that same technology can be manipulated by unscrupulous people. So how do we know what’s real and what’s fake? That’s tough to work out. But the surprising thing is that the latest Marvel movie, Spider-Man: Far…
The restlessness and angst of millennials is on show in Disparate Scenes for Millennial Dreams. The show consists of three one-act plays in three rooms at the same venue, held together by a couple apparently arguing over performance art. I say apparently because frankly much of it was so obtuse I had no idea what…
From high octane pop and rock to soulful melodies and operatic arias, this is a rampant, raucous, defiant, unabashed and provocative celebration of cabaret. These divas and deviants know how to party and ensure all of us are along for a particularly wild ride. They’ve been upending the art form for 20 years, doing things…
I was a fan of the UK television series Cold Feet, so when I received this book written by the creator of that series, I was intrigued. Here’s the blurb: ‘Trust wasn’t something you could have in degrees; it was all or nothing…’ When one bad decision sends a happy couple into turmoil and turns…
