You know how siblings can be. When one gets to do something, the other just has to do it too. So when Joel Coen stepped out of the Coen Brothers cocoon in 2021 to direct the brooding, highly stylised The Tragedy of Macbeth, it was only a matter of time before younger brother Ethan Coen…
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…
The latest film from Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismaki is Fallen Leaves, a deceptively simple and quirky rom-com about two-star crossed lovers in Helsinki. Two lonely down-on-their-luck, working class people meet at a karaoke bar. But they find the path to making a connection and maybe finding happiness is not smooth sailing. Holappa (Jussi Vatanen) is…
Grief. How to deal with it. How to cope when you have lost a beloved one. That difficult subject has been turned on its head in the MTC production of Meet Me at Dawn. British playwright Zinnie Harris has written an intriguing mystery, in which clarity is sought, but not readily provided … deliberately. Even though the truth…
Fifty years on, it remains just as wacky, bold, sexy, energetic and as much fun as when Tim Curry first took to the London stage in 1973. Rocky Horror Show is, of course, a loving tribute to the science fiction and B-grade horror movies of the late 1940s through to the early 1970s. It’s the story of…
It’s a case of feathers meeting fluro when performers in Polytoxic’s new work, Dangerous Goods, initially ensemble in movement of feathered fans to ‘light our fire’. Continuing with theme of the collective’s 2021 Brisfest show, Demolition, the fluro comes from the hi-vis tradie uniform costumes… and also the more revealing hints from beneath them. It’s…
Do you remember what your last day of school was like? You’d just finished your final exams and freedom was there for the taking. The future was uncertain, but it was one of possibilities. Regardless, now was party time. These are the thoughts in the minds of the 17-year-olds at the centre of Matthew Whittet’s heartfelt play. The twist is…
The movie musical of the Broadway musical of the movie of the book. That’s what we’ve got in 2024, with a film adaptation of the successful 2018 Mean Girls musical being released twenty years after the original hit movie penned by the wonderful Tina Fey. It made a household name out of Lindsay Lohan, and…
Alexander Payne doesn’t make movies all that regularly – only five full features between 2000 and 2020. But when he does, everyone takes notice. And while his previous film, Downsizing (2017) might have been a little underwhelming, there’s nothing disappointing about The Holdovers. Payne’s best-known film is probably Sideways (2004), and here he teams with…
After something of a misstep with the uneven Thor: Love and Thunder, director Taika Waititi returns to the kind of gentle humour that has marked his career with Next Goal Wins. If you like early Taika – Eagle vs Shark, or Flight of the Conchords, for example – you’ll likely warm to this rollicking underdog…
