Critics' choice theatre shows in Melbourne

Hey Melbourne, the Mormons are back! After wowing audiences in Sydney with plenty of "did they really just say that?” humour, The Book of Mormon is heading to the Princess Theatre from February 6. This somewhat unconventional musical comedy cleaned up at the Tony Awards after it debuted on Broadway in 2011, going on to break box office records and garner near-unanimous critical acclaim when it opened on London’s West End. When tickets for the show’s Australian debut in Melbourne were released in 2015 – nearly a year in advance of opening night – the Princess Theatre recorded its highest pre-sale period of any production in its 159-year history, also going on to win the Helpmann Award for Best Musical. For the uninitiated, The Book of Mormon follows two inept Mormon missionaries from Salt Lake City on their journey to save mortal souls in a corner of Uganda ruled by a one-eyed warlord. It’s the brainchild of South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone – hence, you can expect a lot of explicit language – along with Avenue Q and Frozen co-creator Robert Lopez.  So what’s the secret of the show’s success? As Time Out London’s Theatre and Dance Editor Andrzej Lukowski wrote, Mormon was always going to be a hit, but what made it into the Mormania phenomenon is the fact that non-South Park fans love it too. The songs are excellent. Filthy, witty and outrageous, but also sumptuous and note-perfect, they nod to the golden age of the American musical.  As for how the show has...

Memory is a tricksy companion at the best of times. Even more so when tragedy strikes and lives are shattered or erased.  Grief swirls in unexpected directions, consuming us all of a sudden. In pushing us further forward or pulling us back to where we started, the details get lost, washed away like sand on a beach, then reformed all too painfully clear. So it is with Australian playwright Tom Holloway’s confronting puzzle of a memory play, Beyond the Neck. Subtitled ‘A Quartet on Loss and Violence,’ it was written as a collective trauma response to the Port Arthur massacre and the indiscriminate slaughter of 35 lives, horrendously injuring 23 more.  Drawing on survivor stories using some of the techniques of verbatim-style, the work is a reckoning with how well-meaning media gags on reporting the aftermath and the court case stunted the recovery process for many survivors and opened the door for rampant conspiracy theories. Ooft, this sounds heavy. Should I brace myself?  Look, there’s heavy stuff in here, undoubtedly. But Beyond the Neck is also a hopeful and occasionally hilarious play that reminds us that, even when we are lost in the labyrinth, we can find our way back by following those memory threads. Who's involved? First performed at Hobart’s Peacock Theatre in 2007, nearly a decade after the disaster that reshaped Australia’s gun laws, Holloway’s bracing work still holds sway. This Theatre Works restaging, coming so soon after the atrocity at Bondi Beach, is...