Christmas cheer is not all it’s cracked up to be for one “happy” couple in Clea DuVall’s holiday comedy Happiest Season. Abby (Kristen Stewart) and Harper (Mackenzie Davis) live together and are in love. It is the holiday season and during a night visiting suburban homes festooned with lights, Harper invites Abby to share the…
To bastardise a popular expression, those flying closest to the sun shine brightest before they burn up. That set of words could be the starting point for the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical (with book and lyrics by Don Black and Christopher Hampton) Sunset Boulevard. Set in Los Angeles in 1949 and 1950, the villain is Norma…
Australians love movies. And David Attenborough. And Eric Bana. Now all those things come together in the Australian concert tour of Planet Earth II Live in Concert. The show, narrated live by Bana, features breathtaking footage from the acclaimed BBC Earth series projected on a giant screen; with Australia’s leading orchestras performing live with conductor,…
Directed by Derek Cianfrance (The Place Beyond the Pines) and starring Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander, The Light Between Oceans is a beautiful looking, heartbreaking story about love and sacrifice. It is based upon the bestselling Australian book by M.L. Stedman, her first novel. Stedman’s novel became somewhat of a literary sensation upon its publication…
If you like a bit of weirdness in your reading, a bit of fable for fun, look no further than Undermajordomo Minor. It caught me by surprise, in a good way. Here’s the blurb: Lucien (Lucy) Minor is the resident odd duck in the bucolic hamlet of Bury. Friendless and loveless, young and aimless, he…
La Boite’s second mainstage offering for the year is the Queensland premiere of Blue, a one-man show co-produced by Belvoir St Theatre and written by Thomas Weatherall of Heartbreak High fame. It is a work of deeply personal fiction, which was inspired by Weatherall’s own experiences with depression as a young adult. Developed for the…
I’m not a believer of those New Year’s resolutions which are traditionally made during a drunk moment. Usually they are long forgotten after a few months. However, I have a new resolution after watching The 5th Wave. I’m never ever going to watch another post-apocalyptic, teen film based on a youth book, where there’s also…
Being a teenager … trying to make your way in the world can be challenging and scary. So it is for this group of seven Year 12 students at a high achieving Stockport (a town near Manchester, where playwright Simon Stephens grew up) grammar school, who are about to sit their end of year exams. A…
The tumultuous life of the world’s most awarded female vocalist is put under the spotlight in I Wanna Dance with Somebody. Whitney Houston (Naomi Ackie) was the greatest voice of a generation, who enjoyed the highest of highs and succumbed to excess, indulgence and heartache. Tragically she died at 48. The fact that she had…
A sea change turns into a tsunami of grief in Sixty Seconds by Jesse Blackadder. Here’s the blurb: The Brennans – parents, Finn and Bridget, and their sons, Jarrah and Toby – have made a sea change, from chilly Hobart to subtropical Murwillumbah. Feeling like foreigners in this land of sun and surf, they’re still…
