Reviews Archive

Cinemagoers packed into Palace Cinema Norton Street on Thursday night for the opening of the 2025 HSBC Spanish Film Festival in Sydney. With the hum of acoustic guitar welcoming us into the cinema, along with the familiar smells of fresh popcorn and …

It’s hard to imagine Skank Sinatra (the alter persona  of Jens Redda) as anything other than a glamorous, over-the-top cabaret queen. In this show, which has a very short run at Qtopia in Darlinghurst, we are treated to a brief synopsis of …

Check into another world when you book yourself into L’Hotel. It’s a head-spinning mix of burlesque, cabaret and circus expertise with artists on stage, dancing around diners’ tables and performing jaw-dropping acrobatics overhead. Add to that live music and an atmosphere that …

  ‘This Is Our Happy Place’ declares the sign on the classroom where the school’s Executive Committee (all parent volunteers, of course) are gathered to discuss and pontificate on matters of importance. Anyone who has ever attended a committee or a strata …

This is an absolute gem of a play. The language is delightfully eloquent, full of humour and insights along with some wonderful turns of phrase, the subject matter universal and the two cast members play their parts beautifully. Fifty-somethings Mal and Mairead …

  Deliciously snarky, both in the performances and Harold Pinter’s precise dialogue, the first play in this double bill, The Lover, lays bare power dynamics in a bourgeois marriage. Set in the 1960s, the scene is a perfectly tidy living room, presided …

Big Girls Don’t Cry is a snapshot of Redfern in the 1960s, told from a First Nations perspective. Big things were on the horizon: the 1967 referendum, for one, but before that the upcoming 1966 Indigenous Debutante Ball to be held at …

This is a memory play says Tom at the beginning of The Glass Menagerie, as he promises to give ‘truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion’ and his soft-spoken recollections and the lyricism of Tennessee Williams’ words draw us into his story …

As director Neil Armfield notes in the program, to write and stage a play about the ‘inheritance of fascism in Spain might seem a massive reach’. And indeed, for those who know little or nothing of the Spanish Civil War, the Franco …

Monique is the mother-in-law from hell in David Williamson’s biting new comedy. She’s entitled, vain, manipulative, hypocritical, selfish and self-obsessed and who knows why her three adult sons have put up with her for his long, unless it’s just for the adoration …