Talking to Harriet Gordon-Anderson as she walks to rehearsals at 8.30am for Belfast-born David Ireland’s hard-hitting play Ulster American is an invigorating experience.
Monologues work well in an intimate space, and the small King Street Theatre Popupsairs venue works well for Sylvia Marie Keays in Paul Gilchrist’s Live a Little. As Tilly, a young woman who has an uneasy relationship with herself, with others and with the truth, Keays is by turns insouciant, witty and distraught.
In Stop Girl award-winning journalist and foreign correspondent Sally Sara offer us a semi-autobiographical story of grief and guilt, trusting that we will respond with understanding and compassion. Directed with integrity by Anna-Louise Sarks, the play offers a moving validation of the concept of moral injury.
Gratefully, we welcome back Monkey Baa Children’s Theatre to the stage after a year’s absence. Their first 2021 production, an hilarious and imaginative musical adaption of Pete the Sheep, based on a whimsical tale by Jackie French and Bruce Whatly, adapted by Eva Di Cesare, Sandra Eldridge and Tim McGarry, with lyrics by Phil Scott, is dynamic and absorbing entertainment for the 4 to 84 year olds.
The Secret of Chimneys is lovely fun. There’s a body, a stolen letter, a secret code, a hidden black diamond necklace and a missing person along with a gallery of wonderfully exaggerated and beautifully performed characters under the strong direction of Molly Haddon.
Jeremy Goldstein is the creative force behind Truth to Power Café, a cathartic theatrical experience in which people of all ages, beliefs and backgrounds...
ArtsLab: Unreliable Witness is the youth-led Shopfront Arts Co-op’s annual emerging artists’ festival featuring a program of five works exploring the theme of perception and misperception. Each of these diverse works including two outstanding theatre performances is the outcome of a six-month residency at Shopfront in which young artists, selected from many applicants, are given the opportunity to work with an industrial mentor.
John Donnelly’s gripping The Pass asks us to consider the age-old question: how best to live both an authentic and fulfilling life. Recontextualised in the world of 21st-century elite professional football, the question becomes how much the central character, Jason, is prepared to sacrifice for success and more importantly, how is success defined.
Funny, fast-paced and extravagantly joyful, the exuberant and inventive musical Fangirls lovingly celebrates the millions of teenager girls for whom a crush on a pop idol is a real and transformative experience.
This year’s biennial and fifth Yellamundie Festival, a unique platform for the identification, development and presentation of First Peoples stories, opened up submissions to composers and choreographers.
Deng Deng plays the role of Nigerian Ade alongside Ben Chapple’s Jason, both caught up in the demands of the world of elite sport with its still toxic codes of masculinity and racism.
The award-winning documentary Firestarter – The Story of Bangarra celebrates the impressive rise of the Bangarra Dance Theatre Company over 30 years from humble beginnings to international fame.
The joyous hilarity of the Genesian’s William Shakespeare’s Long Lost First Play (Abridged) makes it a worthy rival to its very popular predecessor The Complete Shakespeare.
In her illuminating and dynamic stage adaptation of Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career writer Kendall Feaver has included material from further afield than the original, drawing on My Career Goes Bung, Franklin’s childhood memoirs and biographical studies. Consequently, we have a fuller and deeper impression of Sybylla Penelope Melvyn, an appealingly provocative character, created by the 19-year-old Stella Franklin, and which, while located in personal experience, far transcends it.
Liesel Badorrek, director of CDP Kids’ Summer Spectacular, says that there is something for every child as Australia’s favourite books come to life with three shows and five seasons in January.
Ostensibly, Kodie Bedford’s comedy is about the reunion of a dysfunctional family drawn back to Geraldton by their grandmother’s imminent death. However, on the well-tried principle that comedy makes unpalatable truths acceptable, it is an ultimately hopeful interrogation of post-colonial Australia.
Wicked Sisters is an excellent piece of theatrical entertainment. While it encompasses many themes relevant to our times, the dynamics between the four middle-aged women, former friends reunited after several decades, is completely engrossing.
This dynamic production of The Silver Tunnel, advertised as “a hell of a play in a holy place”, marks the repurposing of the Ashfield Uniting Church as a new Inner West performance space. A brainchild of the Rev. Bill Crews, who has been an advocate for the poor and homeless for over 50 years, this new entertainment space aims at raising awareness and funds for the disadvantaged.
The Genesian Theatre is excited to be reopening on November 6 with Sherlock Holmes and the Death on Thor Bridge. The show was preparing to go into production when the theatre was forced to close owing to Covid-19, but the virus has had a positive side for the Genesian, central Sydney’s oldest operating community theatre.
An important condition of the Archibald Prize is that the portrait of an individual “distinguished in the arts, letters, science or politics” has to...
A delightfully middle-aged Di Adams plays the role of Hester in the Griffin production Wicked Sisters and she is delighted to be back on the stage, and delighted to be in a play by feminist Alma de Groen that feels “even more relevant than ever”.
Producer Luke Holmes is fully conscious that audiences may have become accustomed to watching theatre from the best seat in their own home. Consequently, he and director Davey Seagles are promising theatregoers 70 minutes of escapist fun in Hotel Bella Luna which opens at the Marrickville’s Flight Path Theatre on October 22.
To say that Tenet is a time-travel sci-fi film really doesn’t do it justice. Time isn’t travelled so much as it is scrunched up and folded over multiple times.
Streamed once and once only, but capable of reaching a global audience, Welcome to the Masque is a welcome relief from the constant barrage of Covid-19 media coverage. The title’s play upon “masque”, a form amateur theatricals and a popular court entertainment in the eighteenth century, wittily references the current command or recommendation to wear a mask.
It is difficult at any time for our small not-for-profit local organisations working to support vulnerable people to find sufficient funding. So, imagine the...
The Sydney Theatre Company is plugging the large “theatre-shaped” hole left by the forced closure of public venues to prevent the spreading of Covid-19....
In 2019 the Sydney Fringe Festival featured more than 1,600 performances by over 2,000 artists presented across 25 postcode areas. In May 2020 Kerri...
According to Tony Briggs, writer of much-loved and multi-award-winning musical play The Sapphires, Durumbal woman Lorinda Merrypor is “very talented” and “someone every theatre producer should look out for”.
Murder in the Garden, presented by Sydney’s Royal Botanic Garden in association with Théâtre Excentrique and Alliance Francaise, offers the mystery-loving public the opportunity to become detectives.
Does Jim Cartwright’s repertory staple The Rise and Fall of Little Voice suggest to our celebrity obsessed age that it is the meek who will inherit the world?
According to Indigenous actor Rarriwuy Hicks the spectacular new production Counting and Cracking “will look as lovely and amazing as it’s going to feel to be in it”.
Dubboo reflects upon the complex life of Nunukul/Munaldjali man, David Page, while celebrating his creativity as composer, musician, actor, singer and drag queen.
Le Petit Theatre’s production of an innovative version of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata cleverly underlines the relevance of the original play to our own times.
PACT held their second Salon for 2018, entitled Apactalyptic, a one-night mini-festival of performance, music and art, examining, exploring and reflecting on the ends of the world.
