Charlotte Smee

Opera Australia’s new world-first outdoor production of Carmen is thoroughly ambitious in more ways than one – it aims to give the artform of opera a modern, feminist, punk-rock makeover. The scene is set on a huge industrial stage on Cockatoo Island (a 15-minute ferry ride from the city), complete with dazzling fireworks, motorcycle stunts and pop-up bars. Director Liesel Badorrek places the action in a timeless “rock’n’roll space” that encapsulates rebellion and anti-establishment sentiment. This new production aims to rebel against its problematic past, bringing a new, strong, independent Carmen to the stage – as sung alternately by Opera Australia’s principal mezzo soprano Sian Sharp and Carmen Topciu. As self-professed theatre and opera nerds, Time Out was excited to speak to Badorrek and Sharp about how they’re looking to change the opera game, one rock’n’roll Carmen at a time. First, we had a chat about our mutual love of opera, and theatre, those wonderful, live participatory art forms... What is it that you love about opera?  Sian: When people experience operatic singing unamplified it is a very powerful experience that can really cut you to the quick. There's a connection there that is sometimes not achieved [with other art forms]... the power of the voice to reach out across an orchestra and hit the back wall of a 2,000-seat theatre is quite a feat. Liesel: That combination of the orchestral music and the vocals is so beautiful, it's incredibly powerful emotionally

Josh Cake could be a couple of things: a man, a brown person, an Australian. Too bad all those labels are scams. But Big Josh (who’ll take any pronoun you give them) loves to win – and they’re definitely onto a winner with her tight 50-minute musical comedy about just how scammy the world really is. First, Cake gaslights you into believing there are magical mountains and wind, with the help of their tinkling electric piano. Then, he delightfully sets out the rules for the show: you’ve paid for her to make jokes for an hour, so it’s not your turn to talk. This clarity is a nice touch for those of us who forget the rules sometimes (whether we mean to or not). Cake makes accessibility a priority, and incorporates it into the show without drawing too much attention to it: a visual tour of the space becomes a delightful interlude between songs, and warnings are calmly, clearly given before a potentially traumatic story is told. Cake is a warm, inclusive storyteller, with a great sense of pacing that makes the 50 minutes fly by. They have a gentle, encouraging, demeanour that made a small audience interact and giggle like they were in a room full of people. It’s no mean feat to bring this much warmth into a tiny room – and Josh’s sometimes dark but always appropriate sense of humour, and ability to read people, makes it seem like a breeze. I won’t spoil the conclusion for you, but the well-drawn arc from gender, nationality, race and violence is also particularly satisfying in Gen

Darby James had an interesting lockdown. Like most of us, he scrolled to the ends of the internet and what he found there was an ad… for a sperm donation clinic. The ad took hold in his brain and led him down the path of giving away his baby batter, which previously hadn’t had much use – given he’s a cis gay man. So of course, he’s written a cabaret about the process of donation, and the moral quandaries that come with it, that’s now running the full duration of this year’s Melbourne International Comedy Festival. James’s writing and songs are full of puns and quaint rhyming schemes, turning the clinical process of filling out online forms, going to various appointments and meditating on the ethical dilemma presented by having children into a musical adventure – complete with sea shanties and vulnerable ballads. The music is very much steeped in the musical theatre tradition, with elements of modern pop mixed in (particularly in the donation clinic that plays nothing but ’80s hits). There are plenty of opportunities for cleverness and James attempts to squeeze as much as he can out of the source material. The highlights of the show include ‘If I Were A Dad’, a delightful song about the kind of parent a gay man might become, and the final number in which he writes a letter to his potential future child. These songs are written with a concrete tenderness that imagines what the future of the sperm might look like, and crucially how complicated the feelings about this future can

This year, I am learning to be less. It might sound counterintuitive, but I promise this is a positive thing. Instead of being responsible for everything and everyone around me, on my own, because “no one else can do it”, it helps to remember that I am made up of all the people I have ever met. With the outrageous amount of plays, books, essays, etcetera, penned by him, Louis Nowra seems like he could be one of the bigger personalities in the world. But after watching his theatrical alter-ego “Lewis”, of The Lewis Trilogy, it seems even he aspires to be less – to be part of a whole, rather than one big thing on his own. A fittingly extravagant goodbye to the SBW Stables Theatre – home of Griffin Theatre Company, in its current form – The Lewis Trilogy is a loaded triple-bill (five hours of theatre in total!) that spotlights the work of a legendary Australian playwright and his beloved adopted home city of Sydney. This nostalgic and immense production is as much a love letter to the writing of Louis Nowra as it is to the spirit of Kings Cross, to Aussie theatre, and to community, wherever we may find it.  ...the magic of The Lewis Trilogy is that there’s a way to find yourself somewhere in the expanse of it all. The Trilogy is a collaboration between Griffin’s Artistic Director Declan Greene and Louis Nowra himself, associate directed by Daley Rangi (Takatāpui). It brings together Nowra’s two hit 1992 works Summer of the Aliens and Così, and his 2017 return to writing for the

Remember those books of short stories you’d pull off a library shelf as a kid, filled with scary tales of beating hearts under floors, loves that never grew old, and murder weapons that got baked in the oven and eaten by the police? What if those scary stories happened right now – in the era of smartphones, Airbnbs and gay clubs – and splattered at your feet? Presented by essential workers, Shitty is an anthology of three tales that nail that particular gothic niche. A collection of increasingly eerie tales for those of us who are nearing 20-(plus ten)-years-old, reminding us that there are, in fact, things much more terrifying than turning 30. Directed by Zoë Hollyoak (Collapsible) and written by Chris Edwards, and staged with an expert layering of tension and a twisted sense of humour, this is theatre for the sicko in all of us. ...this is theatre for the sicko in all of us. Hailley Hunt’s set is a mostly bare, black stage with a looming metal staircase leading up to nowhere, backed by a black brick wall. Making the most of Belvoir’s small downstairs theatre, it’s something like a basement out of a horror movie, where no surface is perfectly flat and there is just enough evidence of someone or something, but not their whereabouts. Hunt also designs the litany of props hidden in this seemingly bare stage, which make their dramatic entrances to delighted and terrified squeals from the audience. Morgan Moroney lights the stage with three fluorescent strips that change colours

Zombies are everywhere in our collective bra(aaa)ins. There are the original mindless brain-eaters of Dawn of the Dead, dancing Michael Jackson zombies in ‘Thriller’, speedy zombies in 28 Days Later, silly zombies in Shaun of the Dead, rom-com zombies in Warm Bodies, family sitcom zombies in Santa Clarita Diet, and for the employment law nerds, there are even zombie agreements reaching from beyond their pre-2010 grave.  Known for their pulpy gruesomeness and strange social satire, zombie films also have a reputation for being made on shoestring budgets and garnering devoted cult followings – just like a lot of live theatre. So it only makes sense that the next musical from writer/composer Laura Murphy (The Lovers, and “Australia’s Hamilton” The Dismissal) features singing, dancing, and manipulative zombies. Zombie! isn’t all silliness. Murphy brings the leading ladies together in their pursuit of something more – meatier parts for women in musicals... Much like its predecessors, this musical is veritably stuffed with meta-musical-theatre references, camp (gory) goodness, and genre-bending tunes that crawl right into your heart. Murphy’s triple-threat zombies also have something to say about “girl power” in musicals, and the never-ending fight to see three dimensional women on Broadway stages. While we would like to see these arguments for dealing with sexism more fully fleshed out, Zombie! The Musical is host to an exciting premise (healing viruses through the magic of music

Before Martin McDonagh penned and directed the award-winning films In Bruges or The Banshees of Inisherin, he wrote for the stage. He also once said that he prefers writing films to plays because he has a “respect for the whole history of films and a slight disrespect for theatre”. Perhaps this is what makes his plays so exciting and form-challenging – after all, who else would write a scene in which an electric stove gets blown up by a shotgun? In brilliant news for dark comedy lovers in Sydney, Empress Theatre brings McDonagh’s The Lonesome West to the Old Fitz Theatre (in the basement of the Old Fitz Hotel), the first in a whole season of exciting indie theatre programmed by their new artistic director Lucy Clements (founder of New Ghosts Theatre Company) and executive producer Emma Wright. The play follows two constantly bickering brothers in the tiny village of Leenane, on the west coast of Ireland, and the constantly peace-making and crisis-having Father Welsh who cannot reconcile his faith with the deaths that keep happening in his parish. Girleen the hooch-seller pops in every now and then, and pines after Father Welsh. Anna Houston directs a fantastic cast of Ruby Henaway as Girleen, Abe Mitchell as Father Welsh, Lee Beckhurst as Coleman, and Andre de Vanny as Valene. De Vanny’s tiny, snivelling, miserly Valene is a hilarious foil to Beckhurst’s boofhead Coleman, always stealing Tayto crisps and starting quibbles that quickly turn physical. Mitchell’s Father is misty

There actually aren’t a lot of palindromes in the English language. The only one I can ever think of, when pressed, is “race car”. Belgian theatre company Ontroerend Goed has thought of a few more than this one, and created an entirely palindromic piece of theatre (the same backwards as it is forwards), which lands at the 2024 Sydney Festival backed by critical acclaim and multiple awards. It’s a real puzzle, much like the problem of the global destruction and crisis that is its subject matter. At first, there is only a tree bearing a single apple (the Garden of Eden?), and a woman (Eve?) curled up in the corner of the large black Roslyn Packer Theatre stage. At the end, they’ll come back here – but how? The rest of the production slowly unfurls, propelled by a hope that the awkward nonsense that the actors are speaking and doing will reveal itself when we start to go forwards (or backwards?) again. It’s a quaint metaphor for the impossible “way forward” after the damage we’ve done to our world (climate change, colonisation and capitalism, to name a few), and gives a very simple answer about what we do next: something, and one step at a time. This production’s dense layering of scenography, light, video, sound, and lighting design (by Philip Aguirre, Jeroen Wuyts, Seppe Brouckaert, and Babette Poncelet) comes together to create a garden bed of rainbow plastic bags, a huge effigy of a young man in a t-shirt, only to then hide it in smoke and run it magically backwards (I won’t

A dick-swinging, beret-wearing American playwright and an Irish journalist with a plasticky brown perm walk into an interview. In feminist comedian Adrienne Truscott’s hands, what comes next is a meta-theatrical examination of gender, theatre, and that never-ending conversation with no answers about “separating the art from the artist”. This interview marks the beginning of Masterclass, the Edinburgh Fringe hit from Dublin-based company Brokentalkers, which has landed at the Sydney Opera House care of Sydney Festival. Truscott plays the playwright (of the same name) alongside Feidlim Cannon (also bearing his own name) and they do it with an effervescent playfulness that lights up the stage. Incisive jokes written by the pair and third co-creator Gary Keeegan about the male artist type range from broad physical humour (filling every face hole with a cigarette) to quips about privilege, making up a fast-paced ride that quickly turns sinister. Prop humour is a particular highlight in Masterclass, with a well-worn copy of the playwright’s latest (titled Fat Cunt), a gun, and some wigs bringing snort-laughter of various kinds. Unfortunately, Masterclass loses some of its impact in its anemic set design and accompanying lighting transitions, and in its over-earnest and underplayed middle parts. A huge white curtain backdrop drowns the actors in their small rectangle of the stage, absorbing some of their larger-than-life comedy and muting their more serious scenes together. Lighting

Making art can be a painful process. We know this from the many, many stories, films, poems, portraits and other things that tell us this. In a world that insists we donate all of our energy and waking hours to productivity, art becomes this way because sometimes, it doesn’t make a profitable product. It makes a feeling, or a happening, or a scream into the dark. Sometimes, the “utility” of art is just in continuing to make it, see it and love it, despite everything else. Bananaland, the latest musical from the writing team behind the five-star hit Muriel’s Wedding: the Musical, (Australia’s Eurovision darling Kate Miller-Heidke and her partner/collaborator Keir Nuttall) follows Kitty Litter, a punk rock protest band (or, “onstage conceptual art slash music-oriented happening”) who’s been making their art for four years without any identifiable “success”. Frontwoman Ruby Semblance (played by Max McKenna, the original onstage Muriel and a stand-out star of Jagged Little Pill the Musical) lives and breathes this “happening” and refuses to compromise any of her values for the eight-ticket-per-gig audiences that just don’t “get” her songs. The rest of the band is made up of her big sister Karen (Georgina Hopson), her lover Seb (Joe Kalou), “X” (Maxwell Simon – not her ex, just “X”), and the brooding silent Terry/s (times two, played as blankly as possible by Steve Pope and Amanda Jenkins). They have exactly one devoted fan, who they’ve affectionately nicknamed Stephen King (Chris

After a sell-out season in 2023 and due to astronomical audience demand, Suzie Miller’s Jailbaby is returning to the Sydney stage to kick off Griffin Theatre Company's 2024 season. This strictly limited run is playing off-Kings Cross from January 4 to 21. Read on for our review from the previous season. *** After the runaway international success of Prima Facie (which recently completed critically acclaimed runs on the West End and Broadway starring Jodie Comer), lawyer-turned-playwright Suzie Miller has returned to the stage where it all began: Griffin’s SBW Stables Theatre. Jailbaby, a “spiritual sequel” to Prima Facie, follows the literal trials and tribulations of AJ, a young man who makes a series of (innocent and not-so-innocent) mistakes that lead him to jail. Sequels are notoriously tricky territory, and unfortunately, for some, this one doesn’t quite measure up to its predecessor. Miller’s knack for building tension is undeniable... We open on AJ (Anthony Yangoyan), narrating the events of a break-in. Sound design by Phil Downing is a relentless loud banging that escalates the stakes. We hear, through a punchy, rhythmic monologue, that AJ is frightened, that he is only supposed to be on lookout for a simple robbery. Then, he sees the big smart TV, two iPhones, some expensive things on shelves – into an IKEA bag they go. The middle-class woman of the house (Lucia Mastrantone) catches AJ and his two accomplices for long enough to see AJ’s face, and it all goes downhill

I’ve been thinking about collectivism a lot lately; about what happens when we reframe the way we think and work. What if, instead of attempting to step over others, we were to fall in step with our friends instead? Sometimes this is tricky, because capitalism and neoliberalism are very good at teaching us to value ourselves over everyone else, and that achievement looks like being the richest, the prettiest or the smartest person in the room. But what does a world based on caring about each other look like? How can we imagine something so impossibly different? The Master and Margarita, an epic novel penned by Soviet writer Mikhail Bulgakov under Stalin’s regime – and now a work of collective insanity adapted and directed by Eamon Flack at Belvoir St Theatre – is a lesson in imagining. On paper, the story is ridiculous: the Devil turns up in a park in Moscow, meets a couple of writers, and tells them about a novelist called “the Master” and his great love, Margarita, who becomes a (naked) witch to protect the Master’s manuscript (but also just, because?). The Master’s manuscript is told in pieces between the Devil and his entourage (including a giant black cat and a very thin man wearing pince-nez glasses) as they wreak havoc on Moscow, and draws parallels between the power structures in ancient Galilee and Stalin’s Russia.  So much theatrical beauty and recklessness happens in this show... and Sydney’s stages are better for it. The Master and Margarita, the novel, was writte

There are many conspiracy theories about who “really” wrote Shakespeare’s works. It’s almost always suggested that an uneducated, modest man from Stratford surely couldn’t have had enough “genius” to produce the hugely influential body of work he is credited with. Leading contenders for the authentic author include Sir Francis Bacon, Edward de Vere and Christopher Marlowe. But with enough time stretching between Shakespeare’s heyday and today, who “really” wrote the works might be the wrong question altogether. Venus and Adonis, from Sport for Jove Theatre Company’s artistic director Damien Ryan, suggests that “who was Shakespeare really?” is indeed the wrong question. The play instead posits that Shakespeare was a “merciless magpie” stealing from the books, artworks and people around him. One of those people was Aemilia Lanyer, the first female poet ever published in the English language (in her own name!) and believed to be one of Shakespeare’s many lovers. Venus and Adonis is a poem, within a play, within a play – and it’s a magnificent adventure through the delights, tragedies and passions of making art from life (Shakespearean or otherwise). The play, written and directed by Ryan, is based on a similar film released by Sport for Jove in 2020, which is in turn based on Shakespeare’s erotic poem of the same name. In the central storyline, Shakespeare is asked to present a performance of Venus and Adonis as the opener for Elizabeth I’s own masque performance. Shakespeare as