Wednesday, March 9, 2016
Musical theatre is so often about spectacle, it’s always a pleasure to see a small musical that focuses on people and their troubles. Based on a short story, The Ugliest Pilgrim by Doris …
SOURCE: AussieTheatre at 10:24PMThursday, March 3, 2016
“Everything begins and ends at exactly the right time.” – Joan Lindsey, Picnic at Hanging Rock Five women appear on stage, dressed in the uniforms of private school girls we might …
SOURCE: AussieTheatre at 06:21AMThursday, February 18, 2016
Tuesday’s audience at Melbourne’s Recital Centre were noisy, but with mumblings of “wonderful” and interjections of “brava”, there’s nothing to complai…
SOURCE: AussieTheatre at 11:39PMFriday, February 12, 2016
Duncan Macmillan’s 2011 Lungs opens with a young woman–man couple in Ikea talking about having a baby, and a feeling of safe, well-made-play-for-those-who-live in Windsor/Yarraville/Nort…
SOURCE: AussieTheatre at 01:03AMWednesday, January 20, 2016
Cole Porter’s life was, if you’ll excuse the gross understatement, interesting. It feels a little unfair to try to cram it into a one-hour show, especially taking breaks to include some …
SOURCE: AussieTheatre at 11:16PMWednesday, January 6, 2016
Fiddler on the Roof is one of “those shows”. It’s frequently mentioned as people’s favourite musical, and one they were brought up on. For those people, this is a fine, if workmanlik…
SOURCE: AussieTheatre at 11:33PMWednesday, December 30, 2015
The most moving part of Georgy Girl –The Seekers musical is a film of the audience watching The Seekers at Melbourne’s Myer Music Bowl in 1967. There were about 200 000 people, around a …
SOURCE: AussieTheatre at 12:00AMTuesday, December 1, 2015
Tennessee Mynott-Rudland spent her second weekend at the Big West Festival. 7412 Kilometres of Relations Felix Ching Ching Ho & Big West Festival 28 November 2015 VU at Metro West Felix …
SOURCE: AussieTheatre at 01:32AMWednesday, November 25, 2015
If you just went to arts festivals in Melbourne, you’d still miss far too much. 2015 is the tenth Big West Festival. This biennial multi-artform, multicultural festival runs for nine days …
SOURCE: AussieTheatre at 10:32PMMonday, November 23, 2015
If there’s been one trend in the last decade or so of musical theatre, it’s metatheatrical references. That’s where a show is very consciously a show. It can be seen in the self-refere…
SOURCE: AussieTheatre at 03:33AMWednesday, November 18, 2015
Opera Australia’s absolutely splendid The Marriage of Figaro is in Melbourne until the end of November. Premiering in 1786, Mozart’s comic opera about infidelity and forgivenes…
SOURCE: AussieTheatre at 12:03AMTuesday, November 10, 2015
Barbra Streisand has a replica of a shopping mall in the basement of her super mansion in Malibu. She uses it to keep her collection of dolls, clothes and pretty stuff. This is true. I didn�…
SOURCE: AussieTheatre at 04:59AMSunday, November 8, 2015
Victorian Opera commissioned four young Australian composers to write Seven Deadly Sins, with a sin for each of seven Australian cities. They were inspired by Bertolt Brecht’s assignin…
SOURCE: AussieTheatre at 04:19PMSunday, October 25, 2015
It’s been 48 hours since my last Melbourne Festival show… Although Melbourne’s festival lovers are looking forward to being in bed by midnight, food made at home and a couple of days t…
SOURCE: AussieTheatre at 11:41PMSaturday, October 24, 2015
Kate Mulvany’s gorgeous adaption of Kit Williams’s picture book Masquerade celebrates why picture books and stories are so important to children and why whenever a child asks …
SOURCE: AussieTheatre at 08:51AMTuesday, October 20, 2015
The Melbourne Festival production of Peter Sellars Desdemona sold out. With reactions ranging from “tedious” – there were walk outs and some impressive snoring – to geniu…
SOURCE: AussieTheatre at 01:33AMFriday, October 16, 2015
I didn’t take my eyes off the stage and am still trying to fully understand the astonishingly beautiful, often disturbing and totally unapologetic adaption of The Bacchae created by�…
SOURCE: AussieTheatre at 09:26AMSunday, October 11, 2015
The Rabbits is an hour-long opera based on a 1998 children’s picture book. Its Melbourne Festival season is sold out and as the Playhouse exploded with joy at the end of last night…
SOURCE: AussieTheatre at 02:51AMTuesday, October 6, 2015
The winners of the 2015 Melbourne Fringe festival awards were announced on Saturday 3 October at the Fringe Club at the North Melbourne Town Hall. Ten awards across the Fringe categories o…
SOURCE: AussieTheatre at 02:04AMSaturday, October 3, 2015
Rowena Hutson has two dog tags; one that says feminist and one that says scoundrel. Strong Female Character looks at the action heroes that shaped Hutson’s character but, fair warning, the…
SOURCE: AussieTheatre at 01:54AMEveryone knows that Rob Lloyd is a fan of Doctor Who, but his long-term relationship with that show is pre-dated by his first love, Star Wars. The Heart Awakens is a love letter to that rela…
SOURCE: AussieTheatre at 01:47AMFriday, October 2, 2015
Melita Rowston’s paternal grandfather told the story of how he nicked Ned Kelly’s bones from the Old Melbourne Gaol in 1929. Her maternal great great great grandmother ran a pub …
SOURCE: AussieTheatre at 07:54AMNo Punchline is a circus show about female boxers that celebrates athleticism while also looking at the roles of women in society. I think there’s an inherent disconnect in a circus…
SOURCE: AussieTheatre at 07:03AMThe subject of mental illness is tackled head on in the ladies bathroom in this funny two-hander downstairs at the Butterfly Club. Jo and Sam have issues and they are going through t…
SOURCE: AussieTheatre at 06:53AMTuesday, September 29, 2015
The Lowdown Hokum Orchestra have been around long enough to know exactly what they’re doing. If only they’d have the confidence to leave it at that. The setup for That’s Showbiz is t…
SOURCE: AussieTheatre at 08:37PMWelcome to Little V’s nightmare: a place where time is irrelevant and nobody is safe. Virginia, the eponymous Little V, has a surprise for us, but we must wait. Meanwhile, we are subjected…
SOURCE: AussieTheatre at 10:32AMIt’s not for nothing that Church of Wonders is on at 10:15 at night. It’s the sort of filthy pleasure best enjoyed in the very late evening. Melbourne-based women’s performing troupe C…
SOURCE: AussieTheatre at 10:24AMAfter seeing Gender Spanner, the show directly following it at Scratch Warehouse, F*#king with Gender, all seemed a bit too safe – if beautiful to look at. Taking its inspirations from Str…
SOURCE: AussieTheatre at 10:19AMThe fear sets in when the pre-show music is Enya. What if it’s a feminist performance-art trigger-warning sacred-vagina dance? If is. With cloaks, poetry and a sperm mime performed by …
SOURCE: AussieTheatre at 02:32AMMonday, September 28, 2015
Minnie and Mona like to play. Minnie wants to play first date, to play ants, to be a unicorn with a cheeky secret. Mona just wants to play dead. To be dead. Suicide is a tough subject and Th…
SOURCE: AussieTheatre at 10:25AMSunday, September 27, 2015
Experiencing Steppe at 707 Operations, it struck me that, for the people of Poland during the Second World War, there was no least worst option. The Nazis had come from the west, and then th…
SOURCE: AussieTheatre at 11:01PM 
