On the night of 18 July 1969, a car driven by the last remaining scion of the famous Kennedy family careened off a bridge on Chappaquiddick, a small island just off Martha’s Vineyard. The political cost to Senator Ted Kennedy was great, but nothing like the devastation suffered by the family of Mary Jo Kopechne,…
Scott Cooper, who directed Jeff Bridges to an Oscar with Crazy Heart, returns with Antlers. This eerie and deeply unsettling horror film set in a small and forgotten mining town in Oregon that has been devastated by the opioid epidemic. The film has been produced under the auspices of horror/fantasy veteran Guillermo del Toro, whose…
Australian journalist Paul Daley takes on his country’s past in his new novel Jesustown. Set mainly in a remote Aboriginal community in Australia’s far north, Jesustown attempts to tackle not only Australia’s history but the way in which we remember and record history. Patrick Renmark is in disgrace. The reasons for this become slowly apparent…
Mouthpiece … it is the name of an artwork by Declan Swan (Jayden Popik in an impressive Queensland Theatre debut), but it also has multiple other meanings within Kieran Hurley’s very clever and often ironic award-winning play of the same name. ‘I wanna live like common people, I wanna do whatever common people do’, Pulp’s…
As a pre-show soundtrack reminds us, love is a drug, a crazy little thing and the thing of which sweet dreams are made. It is also very much all around courtesy of Trent Dalton’s Love Stories, appearing in its world premiere as part of the 2024 Brisbane Festival. The stage adaption of popular author Trent…
Hailed as a remarkable, ground-breaking work during two sell-out runs at London’s National Theatre, the feature film adaptation of the musical London Road reunites that award winning team. The script is by Alecky Blythe, music from Adam Cork and direction from Rufus Norris (Broken). London Road documents the events that shook Suffolk in 2006, when…
Intersperse opera with musical theatre and add in melodrama together with the story of a developmentally impaired young woman and you have the makings of a most unusual Tony Award winner. The Light in the Piazza is based upon a 1959 novella by Mississippi writer Elizabeth Spencer, first published in The New Yorker magazine. Set…
Succinctly put, intriguing. “What if I said I am not what you think you see? I am the wolf.” These are among the first words spoken in this remarkable drama by South Korean playwright Hansol Jung. She was inspired to write Wolf Play after reading a news article about Facebook and Yahoo groups used by some parents…
As the program told us, when Endgame was first performed in 1957 it polarized audiences and critics alike. People saw Beckett as either a genius or a babbling fraud. I’m one of the latter. I put Beckett alongside of Picasso as a successful deceiver of people in an Emperor’s new clothes sort of way. But…
Although billed in some quarters as “Hamilton: The Movie”, the Hamilton now streaming on Disney + is more of a filmed version of the stage production. Director Thomas Kail (Fosse/Verdon) captures a 2016 performance of the groundbreaking musical at the Richard Rodgers Theater in New York. The performance features the original Broadway cast, including Lin…
