Keith (Kevin Hofbauer) is a single, black, gay mortgage broker and caretaker of a young foster daughter. Ryan (Darcy Kent) is an undereducated, recently divorced, white, factory worker with a daughter the same age as Keith’s. The two young’uns attend the same day care centre in Twin Falls in Idaho. Ryan is desperate to buy a parcel…
In his seventh year at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Michael Shafar is laid back and effortlessly funny. In short, the 33-year-old knows how to entertain a crowd, as howls of laughter ring out throughout his hour-long standup routine, where nothing is sacred. He is clever and ribald and risqué. Home base – formerly Melbourne – is…
Racism comes in many forms and from many quarters and can strike with the speed of a bullet train. That subject is explored in a dramatic and humorous way through a series of anecdotes from the coloured English daughter of West Indian parents. Her mother is an actress and her father a mathematician, who migrated to Australia….
A distressing story about intimidation and forced relocation, Aboriginal playwright and performer Brodie Murray dug into his own family history to bring it to life. The Whisper is a reimagining of his grandmother’s journey on horse and cart in the 1940s. When she was just a little girl, under cover of darkness she travelled with her family…
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…
Set a generation after the height of the AIDS crisis, The Inheritance looks at what it is like to be young and gay in New York. It explores love and legacy and what we owe to those that came before us. At the heart of the work is the decent and caring Eric Glass (Charles Purcell),…
Featuring 22 tracks from ABBA, Mamma Mia! The Musical is bright, breezy, energetic and heaps of good-natured fun. Whenever it returns, it always goes down a treat and I never tire of seeing it. The show premiered in Oz on the 9th June 2001 and played for four years to more than 2.2 million people in eight…
A blood curdling scream at 2:22am sets the scene for a ghost story with a twist. Eleven months ago Jenny (Gemma Ward) gave birth to daughter, Phoebe. She and her astronomer husband Sam (Remy Hii) have also moved into a large, old home, which they bought from an Italian widow. They are in the throes of painting the…
It’s all good, clean, innocent, engaging, adventurous and flirtatious fun, until it isn’t. It is 1939 and I speak of a pair of first year boarding school students at Cambridge in England. These young ladies get to know lads from the university who make it a habit to climb edifices across town at night. Rosalind (Meg Taranto)…
Navigating the vicissitudes in a relationship can be tricky at the best of times, but cross-cultural unions more often than not face additional difficulties. So it is with Ella (Eleanor Barkla) and Hasseb (Oz Malik). The pair meets at a performance workshop. They are from opposite sides of the Thames. He is a poet and she is…
