Athenaeum Theatre

Athenaeum Theatre

  • Theatre
  • Melbourne
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Time Out says

One of the oldest institutions in Victoria, the Athenaeum opened in 1839 under many guises. It's housed an art gallery, museum, cinema, theatre and is now home to the Last Laugh Comedy Club and Melbourne Opera.

Comedy every Friday and Saturday night at 7pm:
The Last Laugh - With almost four decades of laughter behind it, the Last Laugh is inarguably the city's most famous comedy club. It’s played host to a veritable who’s-who of international comedy, not to mention providing a training ground for generations of locals. There are dinner-and-who packages available for those planning on making a night of it.

Details

Address
188 Collins St
Melbourne
3000

What’s on

Hedwig and the Angry Inch

5 out of 5 stars
Imagine The Rocky Horror Picture Show’s Frank-N-Furter raised in the American Midwest by Vivienne Westwood. Or Debbie Harry, if she grew up in a queer bathhouse in East Berlin. That’s Hedwig Schmidt: the glam-rock heart of Stephen Trask and John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch, brought to spectacular life in the first Aussie revival since 2006. You have to picture this show as it began – in a sweaty basement club called the SqueezeBox during New York’s punk scene in 1994. This was a place where a house band performed rock tunes called “the music of gay bashers”, and punters put on messy drag to kick, scream and vamp on stage beside them. Hedwig was born out of this energy; a combination of cigarette ash, anarchism and smut inspired by Cameron Mitchell’s life in Berlin and Kansas and soundtracked by Trask’s work with the SqueezeBox band. It’s the closest I’ve come to calling a musical ‘punk’ without rolling my eyes. With its taboo-flouting lead and the unbridled chaos of its style, it is still as genuinely transgressive as it was thirty years ago.  This production succeeds by replicating the intimacy and anger that created the show in the first place. We’re somewhere in the Midwest waiting for Hedwig to start a 90-minute cabaret performance accompanied by her band, the Inch. The set (by Jeremy Allen) evokes an industrial warehouse and a dive-bar in one: think a simple circular rise centre stage with a staircase at the back furnished with cooly metallic...
  • Musicals
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