NEWTOWN: More than 350 mesmerised audience members, swayed, clapped in time and sang along with internationally-acclaimed Greek singer and musician, Dimitris Basis in his...
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.
On Sunday, May 2, Carly Findlay, editor of Growing Up Disabled in Australia, spoke to an attentive audience at the 2021 Sydney Writers’ Festival (SWF). Our reviewer, Melinda Kearns, offers insights here about the session and the book.
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.
Two years after his widely acclaimed One Hundred Years of Dirt, journalist Rick Morton has produced another gritty but inspiring work, My Year of Living Vulnerably.
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.
Sydney-based artist Bettina Kaiser’s Natura Morta exhibition challenges viewers to recognise the climate crisis and to act on it in several ways, including collecting rubbish off their local streets in return for one of her artworks.
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.
The Courier is “based on a true story”. Benedict Cumberbatch’s Greville Wynne really was a businessman recruited by MI6 during the Cold War to undertake Soviet Union intelligence gathering activities.
In many of Ishiguro’s novels, his protagonists are not quite telling us the truth, or are perhaps, telling us only their perspective on what occurs around them.
Western Australian of the Year, Dr Helen Milroy, has written and illustrated The Emu Who Ran Through the Sky, released in April, an exciting story for 5-10 year-olds about working together and finding the courage to be different.
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.
Founded in 2019 with a mission to create opera to inspire social change, The Cooperative believes passionately in increasing opera’s accessibility, through pay-as-you-feel entry and by taking the art form out of a traditional context and into the world around us.
In the crucible of Australia’s Black Summer Danielle Celermajer pondered the personal and broader implications of the climate catastrophe. Her book Summertime: Reflections on a Vanishing Future offers new language and concepts to help us tackle it.
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.
NRMA Insurance and Lifeline have partnered with Australian music icon Julia Stone to highlight the continued need for mental health support for people affected by the devastating fires throughout the 2019-2020 season.
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.
The Breaking by award-winning author and editor, Irma Gold, was released on March 1. In this Q&A she offers insights into her debut novel’s central love story and how we can stop the harm done to elephants through tourism.
All Our Shimmering Skies, like Trent Dalton's first novel and runaway best seller Boy Swallows Universe, is often gritty, violent and harrowing – but his luminous prose makes it a compelling read.
My fear about Another Round was that it would get all preachy about the dangers of drinking to excess and chart the inevitable descent of all involved ...
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.
