Reviews Archive

  ‘Bomb away!’ said Major Thomas Ferebee aboard his B-29 aircraft on 6 August 1945, as the atomic bomb dropped into Hiroshima and destroyed the city and killed up to 140,000 people. Hisashi Inoue’s The Face of Jizo opens three years after …

The Liberals and Nationals coalition was restored on May 28 – just a week after the Coalition’s dramatic ‘’breakdown”. The reunification came when Nationals leader David Littleproud and Liberal leader Sussan Ley announced that they renewed the coalition agreement. Liberal leader Sussan …

  Musical chemistry is difficult to explain in words. It is a mysterious communication between two players that is felt only in the music itself. Musica Viva’s Northern Lights at the City Recital Hall certainly emphasised the power of musical chemistry, moving …

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 …