Forty years on, the winner of 11 Tony Awards remains so much rambunctious fun. This all-new Australian production stars five-time Helpmann Award winner Paul Capsis in the lead role of Albin. By his side is renowned singer and actor Michael Cormick (Beauty and The Beast, The Phantom of The Opera) as husband Georges. Georges and the flamboyant,…
This exhilarating hip-hop musical from Queensland Theatre is a huge crowd-pleaser, ending the year of productions on a high note. Set immediately post-Vietnam predominantly in a refugee camp in Arkansas, U.S.A., with flashbacks to Saigon, Vietgone is written by Qui Nguyen (who’s since gone on to write for Disney animation projects since penning this in…
The lavish Italian/French co-production Caravaggio’s Shadow by actor-director Michele Placido looks at the final years in the life of Caravaggio (born Michelangelo Merisi). This is something of a passion project for Placido, who had been fascinated with the artist for over half a century and had long wanted to explore his life and legacy on…
Where did it all go so wrong? After several era-defining movies, the Marvel franchise seems to be sputtering. Judging by the ill-conceived and frankly illogical The Marvels, it seems to have run out of ideas for these characters. The Marvels draws together Captain Marvel (2019), the Disney + mini-series Ms Marvel and a few scattered…
There is something wicked and subversive about storybook villains rising and trying to rewrite their fate. That’s the premise of the world premiere musical Villainy. Druzilla (Olivia Charalambous), one of Cinderella’s ugly stepsisters, who bemoans the fact that she is always walked over, is hosting a party. Mind you, the atmosphere is hardly festive. In the house are several…
Five young women at the pearly gates, or are they at the gates of hell? Taken far too young, they are called upon – one by one – to enunciate their deepest, darkest sins to determine just where they will end up. And make no mistake, judgment will be passed. Unfolding as five monologues, with the occasional input…
You have to wonder if anyone thought about the possibility that they might be wearing the band name Teenage Fanclub still, over thirty years later, while the principal members were getting close to 60? Whether they were expecting to be a flash in the pan, or were in it for the long haul, long gone…
After the success of his comic golden age of crime thriller Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone and the continuing resurgence of golden age crime narratives (including Kenneth Branagh’s Hercule Poirot movies and the Knives Out series) it is no surprise that Benjamin Stevenson has returned to the well for Everyone on this Train…
Another formulaic survival story, The Dive is a remake of the little-seen 2020 Norwegian drama Breaking Surface, and it adds little that is new or surprising. Sisters Drew (Australian actress Sophie Lowe) and May (Louisa Krause) share a love of deep-sea diving, instilled in them from a young age by their father. Every year the…
Daniel Defoe (born Daniel Foe) may well have been the first English novelist. At least that is the contention in the play Defoe’s Plague, which starts with a man in a thin, eerie, long nosed mask performing an incense cleansing. The head covering looks like that worn by doctors in bygone days and intended to protect them…
