Janet Anderson, as trans-woman Rosie in Overflow, struggles to confront and control the emotions overwhelming her as she seeks refuge from a threatening world in the women’s bathroom. A mesmerising performance!
Brain-child of Stephen Carnell, the popular DeadHouse: Tales of Sydney Morgue, returns for a third season featuring Razor Gang Wars: The Rise of Tilly Devine and Kate Leigh.
Tell Me I’m Here, at Belvoir Street Theatre, is based upon Anne Deveson’s personal and passionate account of her son’s battle with schizophrenia, her struggle to find help for him and the chaos his condition wrought on her own and her family’s lives.
Much Ado at the Flight Path Theatre in Marrickville is well-worth seeing for its quirky transplantation of Renaissance court conduct into the modern and equally demanding code of effortless cool.
In The One, Vanessa Bates takes the now familiar theme of cultural belonging and creates a potent mix of exuberant comedy and moving insight into the challenges of being Eurasian in contemporary Australia.
Ray Lawlor’s characterisation of the four doomed characters in Summer of the Seventeenth Doll is complex and their changing relationship nuanced, and the four actors in the Genesian Theatre's iteration fully meet the challenge.
Lachlan Philpott’s M. Rock has something important to say about our compulsively label-driven world and says it in a very funny and sweetly eccentric way.
Terrain can also be read as an affirmation of the survival, and the resurgence, of Aboriginal culture and the very real possibility that ancient ways may yet protect the land from the ravages of climate change.
While the proliferation of digital theatre during Covid had live theatre anxious over its future the technologically tuned-in Coil offers the theatrical equivalent to the hybrid car. Coil is a live-cinema event, that is, a mix of live performance and screen action, and while hilarious is, at the same time, elegiac in mood.
In Hercule Poirot’s First Case, be prepared for a new, pared-down, fast-paced adaptation of Agatha Christie’s first novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles under the vigorous direction of Tom Massey.
You may hesitate to leave your warm home on a very cold evening to go to the theatre but you will be well rewarded if the production is Belvoir Street’s Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes. Playwright Hannah Moscovitch’s engaging script charting one young woman’s reversal of the embedded gender power imbalance underlying our everyday transactions is superbly performed and stylishly staged.
Alana Valentine’s Wayside Bride, a warm tribute to the work of the Reverend Ted Noffs and the Wayside Chapel, is a moving affirmation of the power of acceptance to transform human lives.
In A is for Apple the battleground is the long-established Jewish patriarchal traditions that shape the behaviour, and the role in the Judaic community, of Jewish womanhood. It ends with a passionate, deeply moving appeal by the young Shoshana for new stories, new and inclusive imaginings.
Heroes of the Fourth Turning explores why individuals adhere to beliefs and ideologies and what that means for the future of humanity. As theatre it is totally engrossing.
It is a pity that Lily Hayman’s Fledgling is showing for such a short time as it offers its audience a deeply emotional, intellectually provocative, and aesthetically satisfying experience.
Carissa Licciardello’s clever adaption of Opening Night prompts the audience to realise the extent to which current perception has rejected an age or gender limitation on women’s self-development.
While Kirsty Marillier’s debut play Orange Thrower lights up the Stables’ small stage with the energy of its lovely young cast it also explores the dark side of the coming-of-age of two mixed-race South African immigrant sisters.
Darlinghurst Theatre Company’s dazzling production of all-time favourite musical A Chorus Line immediately engages the audience in an epic world of passionate hope and desperate self-doubt.
ArtsLab is Shopfront Arts Cooperative’s annual emerging artists’ festival, and each year offers a new, exciting and varied program. See it this year, writes Catherine Skipper, as your support will help to ensure a vibrant future for the arts in Australia.
In At What Cost? writer Nathan Maynard addresses hard truths from Tasmania’s past that must be told. It also tackles vexatious issues of the Australian post-colonial present.
Rich Kids: A History of Shopping Malls of Tehran explores how entitlement, conspicuous consumption and a life without meaning other than self-advertisement have usurped the values of modesty, charity and belief.
Wudjang: Not the Past mixes the world of the song cycle with the energy of dance. But it is through its use of the Mununjali language that we absorb a feeling, a reverence, for Country about which and through which Stephen Page is telling both his own story and our story.
Playwright Tom Holloway explores why people would queue to sit in a chair and lock eyes with an artist in a gallery and other meaty questions in the world premiere production of The Museum of Modern Love in January 2022.
The Boomkak Panto at Belvoir is a fairy tale, and the villains loudly booed by the willing audience meet a bad end and the queer AF love story triumphs – a great night on the town.
Filmed over five years, I’m Wanita is the story of Wanita Bahtiyar, flamboyant country singer from Tamworth, as she heads to the US to realise her lifelong dream of recording an album in Nashville, honkytonk capital of the world.
The World’s Best Film
Director: Joshua Belinfante
15th Annual Sydney Underground Film Festival
September 9-26, 2021
Joshua Belinfante was studying to be a solicitor when he was told...
SandSong: Stories from the Great Sandy Desert is Bangarra Dance Theatre’s first new full-length work for three years, and in keeping with their unique signature style it combines authentic storytelling, superb technique and a powerfully emotive performance.
The uppermost theme of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard is not merely large-scale change but how to adjust to a change that is already in the process of taking place. Consequently Eamon Flack’s up-dated, thought-provoking and up-beat adaptation and staging of Chekhov’s much-loved play has much of importance to offer to our present, uncertain times.
The declared mission of new company, Fuser Production, is “to stir the human spirit” and incite “awe, challenge and inspiration through original and compelling art” and Intact, its debut performance, is deeply engaging and awe-inspiring.
You could watch TV or Netflix, but if you really wanted a completely absorbing and dynamic 60 minutes of entertainment you could see Tiny Universe, co-presented by Milk Crate Theatre and Shopfront Art Co-Op. Showing for a very short season, Tiny Universe deserves a longer season and a more extensive audience.
Bringing Martin Sherman’s adaptation of E.M. Forster’s rich and sprawling novel A Passage to India to the compact stage of the Genesian would have posed many challenges. Apart from a large number of characters and costumes, a diversity of locations, the narrative is in no haste to reach its haunting conclusion.
David Ireland’s award-winning satire Ulster American takes as its target the current Western concern with constructing inclusive and equal cultural identities.
Dogged offers theatregoers a unique and startling theatre experience. Unflinchingly facing the problematic relationship between black and white people in Australia, it is a brilliantly conceived, powerfully realised and deeply confronting parable.
