Arts and Entertainment Archive

  Acknowledging the inevitability of death seems to be all the rage at the moment, what with the TV series Swedish Death Cleaning and Ray Martin considering his burial/funeral options on his three-part doco on the ABC, but British playwright Laura Wade’s …

Music is the language of us all The Cat Empire’s latest show at the Sydney Opera House was an electrifying display of the band’s capacity to escape all limits of genre. Performing for the first time alongside the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, the …

Melanie Tait’s new play is a comedy drama centred on Marion ‘Crawfie’ Crawford, the dedicated nanny/governess to the two little girls who would become better known to the world as Queen Elizabeth II and Princess Margaret. Those who have an inkling of …

This production of Gaslight is a beautifully polished work that keeps audiences guessing – no mean feat for period drama. In their clever adaptation of Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play, Johnna Wright and Patty Jamieson have kept the nuances of Victorian Gothic but …

What a lively and sparkling adaptation of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya this is. Joanna Murray-Smith has brought out the comedy in this tale of lives blighted by disillusionment and ennui without losing the melancholy underlying the tale. Her contemporary dialogue is so easy …

Neil Simon wrote this wonderful comedy in 1965, and if it were a novel that would make it ‘historical’ fiction. As a play perhaps it is a period piece? Whatever, because it is about human idiosyncrasy it remains, under the direction of …

  An epic play and an epic performance from Robert Menzies as the cantankerous, incredulous and increasingly befuddled old monarch who loses his grip on his mind as he gives away his kingdom. The play was first performed in 1606, in the …

Billed as an ‘explosive homage to legendary opera singer Maria Callas’, Terrence McNally’s 1995 opera play opens with Lucia Mastrontone (in the principal role) conducting a masterclass in New York’s Juillard School of the Arts. Her Callas, now past her prime as …

All that jazz, indeed, and so much more besides. This Chicago delivers on every level – singing, dancing, choreography, characterisation, music. It’s all fabulous and top notch. The opening number – with a gloriously sultry Zöe Ventura as Velma heading the female …

Strut & Fret’s Blanc de Blanc shows, which sold out at the Grand Electric, prove hard acts to follow but Limbo – The Return has its moments.  In this global ensemble, headed by New York acoustic musician Sxip Shirley,  the South African/NZ/Aussie …