Beautiful: The Carole King Musical is a showcase of all that is great about musical theatre. The music is outstanding – hit after glorious hit – with superb voices to match. The story is beautifully crafted, with plenty of humour, heart and pathos. The staging is colourful, the set changes frequent and seamless, and the pacing…
Lip Service is a new Australian play that premiered in a separate production in London earlier this year with the title: Madame Rubenstein. That production featured the indomitable Miriam Margolyes, as Rubinstein and Frances Barber, as Elizabeth Arden. At the Ensemble we have Amanda Muggelton playing Madame Rubinstein, and it is a performance that I…
Kindertransport is an English play written in 1993, by Diane Samuels. Samuels has written: In early November 1938 an intensive series of ‘pogrom’ attacks on Jewish property and arrests of people were launched in Nazi Germany. This became known as ‘Kristallnacht’, The Night of Broken Glass, and has subsequently been called “pogromnacht’ or Novemberpogrome’. In…
The Plant, by Kit Brookman, is the winner of the Ensemble Theatre’s 2016 New Writing Commission. Sue (Sandy Gore) and her three children, Erin (Helen Dallimore), Daniel (Garth Holcombe) and Naomi (Briallen Clarke) are packing up the family home not long after the death of the husband/father from, what one of them describe as: ‘in-built…
Sarah Ruhl is an American writer and Sydney has seen In the Next Room or The Vibrator Play (2009) and her adaption of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (2003), both for the Sydney Theatre Company (STC). The Clean House introduces us to a household belonging to a married couple Lane (Mary-Anne Halpin) and Charles (James Bean), both successful doctors….
The Ham Funeral is a first play by Patrick White, written in 1947 in post war, blitzed-out London. Set in 1919 it was inspired by the painting by William Dobell known as ‘The Dead Landlord’ and on a story of Dobell’s experience in one of those great crumbling houses in Pimlico. This play begins with…
Doubt. A Parable, the play by John Patrick Shanley, won the Pulitzer prize and the Tony Award in 2005. All four of the actors were nominated for the Tony, too. The actors, Cherry Jones and Brian F. O’Bryne won. It was made into a film, directed by Mr Shanley, with Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman,…
Between the Streetlight and the Moon is a new Australian play by, Melita Rowston. It was shortlisted for both the STC Patrick White Award and The Silver Gull Award. Zadie (Lucy Miller) is an art academic/curator and PHD candidate, the Phd concerning the Impressionist artist Berthe Morisot (1841-1895) and her possible illicit relationship with her…
Do Something Else is a new work devised by two dancers Cloe Fournier and Ryuichi Fujimura and sculptor/theatre maker Bridget Vidler with director Michael Pigott. Says Mr Pigott: “I was interested in seeing if you could make theatre that emulates thought processes, the different ways that we deal with material within our own minds; dreams,…
Heathers – The Musical by Laurence O’Keefe and Kevin Murphy, based on the 1990 film, written by Daniel Waters, and starring 16 year old Winona Ryder and Christian Slater, was a complete surprise for me. I had never seen the cult film set in the grossness of 1980’s fashion with all the horrors of American…
