Melbourne theatre, musical and dance reviews

Wagner was never one for brevity, and he certainly didn’t think it was the soul of wit; Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg was his only comedy and it goes for roughly four and a half hours – more than six if you factor in intervals. To some people that may sound like hell, but it’s a surprisingly accessible and entertaining piece, so stuffed with glorious singing and arresting set pieces that it seems to go past in a flash of colour and pageantry. This co-production with London’s Royal Opera House is also visually explosive – a spectacle so massive it literally can’t fit on a Sydney stage – so for the uninitiated it makes for the perfect introduction to Wagner, and for fans an unmissable treat. The story is actually pretty simple, even as it allows Wagner room for his signature philosophical debates on the nature of art and reason. The Guild of Mastersingers, made up of local artisans, is a club much like the Freemasons, only it admits new members through a singing audition. Technically open to all-comers, its complex and narrow set of rules and regulations means that newly arrived Walther von Stolzing (Stefan Vinke) – whose singing technique derives from birdsong and forest sounds – doesn’t stand a chance. The reason Walther is so keen to join is because he’s fallen in love with Eva (Natalie Aroyan), whose father Veit Pogner (Daniel Sumegi) has offered her up as the prize in a singing competition that is only open to guild members. Local poet and cobbler, Hans Sachs (Michael K

Read about School of Rock's $25 ticket lottery. The Rock Musical is a subset with a very chequered past. For every Hair there’s a Rent; for every Hedwig and the Angry Inch there’s an American Idiot. Andrew Lloyd Webber might have seemed an odd choice to adapt the 2003 Jack Black film School of Rock for the stage, but then the man was synonymous with the rock musical when Jesus Christ Superstar ruled the world back in 1970. Some people think that show had as much to do with rock as Phantom of the Opera has to do with opera, but that’s kind of beside the point. It worked as a musical, more or less, and its songs entered the musical theatre canon almost instantly. School of Rock does seem now like a fairly obvious vehicle for a fully realised musical, but that’s hindsight talking. A lot could have gone wrong on the way to actualisation: the source material has a painfully thin plot, with really only one central gag; the music needs to be a pastiche but also has to convince as a completely integrated score; and the kids really have to be as talented as the story promises they will be. Any one of those could have brought this project to its knees, and not in that rock-god, slide-across-the-stage kind of way. While that plot might be thin, thankfully it’s still pretty good. Dewey (Brent Hill) is a man baby who mooches off his friend Ned (Zachary Pidd) so shamelessly that when posh private school Horace Green calls to offer Ned a substitute teaching job, Dewey takes it for himsel

The first thing to know about The Miss Behave Gameshow is that it does exactly what it says on the tin: it is an actual game show with competitors, points, winners and losers. As the audience enters the theatre they’re divided into two teams – iPhone users on the right and everybody else on the left – who pit their wits, spirit, tenacity and bodies against each other in a series of simple games for the next hour and a bit. Some of the games involve your phone – be prepared to take a selfie and text in an answer – but most are analogue and simply require you to shout out, stand up in your seat, dance, get up onto the stage or “do anything for a point” (a lusty onstage pash or flashing your particularly funny underwear might get you over the line). And make sure you pay attention to the cardboard-covered set if you’re looking for a bonus point. Overseeing the competition and guiding the audience through the pumping music and fierce competition is hostess and games mistress Miss Behave, a glittery human mirror ball and the alter-ego of London cabaret artist Amy Saunders. Saunders has spent several years touring with La Clique and La Soirée, swallowing swords and acting as a host. This is a totally lo-fi show by comparison, with a much smaller cast (it’s mostly just Miss Behave and her glamorous assistant Tiffany), but it manages to be more explicitly fun, from beginning to end. Miss Behave is a commanding presence but flexible enough to respond to whatever might be happening

What constitutes an authentic voice? Can Indigenous experience be transposed within a country, let alone between countries? And what exactly is a period piece – what relationship should it have with the actual past it’s depicting? These are some of the questions that arise while watching MTC’s penultimate production for the year, Albert Belz’s Astroman. They’re possibly irrelevant, given this is supposed to be a feel-good knockabout slice of nostalgia with its heart in the right place; but the questions linger, niggle at the edges, well after the “Game Over” graphic has faded to black. It’s 1984, which we know because it flashes across the 22” TV screens that adorn Jonathon Oxlade’s reverential set. We’re also told we are in Geelong, augmented by the kind of facts you’d find from a visiting international comedian or in a junior encyclopaedia: the Barwon River flows through town, Ford is the primary employer and the Cats are the local footy team. Jiembra “Jimmy” Djalu (Kamil Ellis) and his twin brother Sonny (Calen Tassone) have moved here with their mum Michelle (Elaine Crombie) and sister Natalie (Tahlee Fereday) from Townsville. Jimmy is bright but troubled; the bike he shows off in the opening scene, which is stolen by the local bully Mick Jones (Nicholas Denton), turns out to have been stolen by Jimmy in the first place. The plot revolves around the local video game parlour, the Astrocade. This is owned by the gruff but kind-hearted Greek widower Mr. Pavlis (Tony Nikola

Australia takes its circus very seriously – and we mean that quite literally. In recent months, Brisbane outfit Crica’s En Masse featured the first ever circus iteration of Igor Stravinsky’s savagely charged 1913 ballet The Rite Of Spring, and The Man With The Iron Neck, by aerialist theatre troupe Legs On The Wall, offered a deeply affecting window on the epidemic of suicides amongst young Indigenous men. Works like these have shown what profound depth of feeling can be summoned through acrobatic virtuosity and circus craft. More than mere throwaway spectacle, its physical extremes can deliver storytelling of immense expressive sophistication. But circus is also rooted in a tradition of light entertainment. It has the potential to channel emotional power, but it’s just as legitimate when it simply thrills and delights. Melbourne’s Circus Oz, which has been celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, has most often erred on the less challenging end of the theatrical spectrum, and has done so very successfully. So the premise for its latest production, Rock Bang – a “rock opera” biopic in collaboration with comic duo Astrid and Otto Rot, aka fictitious post-punk, art-pop, brother-sister Berliner band Die Roten Punkte (or “The Red Dots” for those of you whose deutsch ist nicht so gut) – seems perfectly on brand.  And true to form, the circus elements of the show are excellent. Tumbling, juggling, aerials, fire-work and strength feats; there’s very little to fault in the execu