Front page Archive

Who holds the power in Baby Doll? When the film (directed by Elia Kazan) was released in 1956, it was controversial because of its overt sexuality (the Catholic Legion of Decency gave it a ‘Condemned’ rating and labelled it ‘grievously offensive to …

This is a wonderfully refreshing and enacting imagination of what life could have been like nearly five hundred years ago if one was unfortunate enough to be married to that most Christian King and Defender of the Faith, Henry VIII. Canadian playwright …

Alinta Chidzey’s mesmerizing opening number All That Jazz sets the bar high for this return season of the longest running American musical in Broadway and West End history, and it’s great to be able to say it stays high. The Kander/Ebb and Fosse …

With its high-octane energy and first-rate balletic dancing this Opera Australia production of West Side Story draws the audience in straight away. The cast is youthful, as befits a couple of warring street gangs in 1950s New York, too young and too …

In William Golding’s 1954 novel, a group of British schoolboys, aged from about six years to pre-adolescence, crash-land onto a tropical island. There are no adult survivors, no other inhabitants and the boys have to learn to to fend for themselves. Ralph …

Science versus reason. Dogmatism versus the church. Innovative thinking versus big business. Science versus big business. Time moves on, but doesn’t change things that much as Tom Wright’s fresh and contemporised adaptation of Brecht’s Life of Galileo shows. The play follows the …

Angry. Impassioned. Raw. Intense. Meyne Wyatt’s part-autobiographical City of Gold is all of these things, and more. Barely disguised as the play’s main character, 20-something actor and Wongi man Breythe, this is Wyatt’s  yell of rage and pain about what it is …

It is rare and wonderful to find theatre as powerful and engrossing as this pared-down and passionate production of Arthur Miller’s classic. It is mesmerising from start to finish. Set in the 1950s in Brooklyn’s docklands, it is an explosive family drama that …

The Torrents is a vignette of an Australia of yesteryear, even the sepia-coloured tones of Renee Mulder’s wonderful and detailed set seem redolent of an old photograph. It has an interesting history. Director Clare Watson describes it as the “one that got …

25 August 1944. Only a handful of people knew it, but Paris was about to be razed, its nearly 2 million inhabitants annihilated. Hitler was out for yet more vengeance; if he couldn’t have Paris – and the Allied troops were at …