Arts and Entertainment Archive

  The white night festival in Melbourne on Saturday 23 was extraordinary! Flinders Street turned into living musical light work as the buildings surrounding the Melbourne Exhibition Centre and Flinders Street Station were converted into masterpieces. The patterns projected in the light …

Any cinemagoer from the 1980s would know what to expect from action legends and bad-asses like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, and Jean-Claude Van Damme. We expect no mentally draining mind-twisting plots and no revoltingly scary fountains of blood— ahem, Mr Nolan and …

It is a challenge to the non-Aboriginal Australian to consider that inanimate material objects can hold cultural memory. Even though we seem to spend the majority of our time chasing material possessions, we rarely, if ever, look beyond an object’s practical use …

Some things take a very long time to change. If that were not so, Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy – which opened at the Darlinghurst Theatre on February 5 – would not continue to be so relevant. This very funny but deeply dark play …

Metropolitan Opera in HD, Cremorne, Orpheum Theatre Hector Berlioz, the remarkable revealer of mysteries, reveries and epic tales, draws for inspiration on Virgil’s account of the ancient civilizations of Troy, Carthage and their aggressors. This opera may not be for the attention-challenged …

If you like literary allusions, poetry, pop culture and word play you will enjoy Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, which opened at the Sydney Opera House on February 12. This erudite comedy has a large smattering of Auden, plenty of laughs and …

Most Sydneysiders have fond memories of visiting the Australian Museum on school excursions, exploring the wonders of nature and the ancient world. Now many of them are coming back for a totally new experience. For the fifth year now the Museum has …

  Cinema audiences were transported from Dendy Quays to the austerity of the American Civil War earlier this month with a re-screening of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln.  This much-anticipated major release, timed to bring revenue from the theatres and accolades in the awards season, promises …

After attending Rachel Collis’s debut of her album Ever After, going for a Brazilian wax will not be as frightening as it used to be. Collis’s uninhibited stage presence, powerful voice and great keyboard talent convinced me that the painful process of …

After a 45-minute ride into the suburban heart of Melbourne city, we finally arrived at the Footscray Community Art Centre. As we walked out of the station with the crowds, the atmosphere and energy was absolutely brilliant. The sun was out and …