Sydney theatre latest reviews

This is a review of the May 2019 Melbourne season of Il Viaggio a Reims. Most of the cast will be performing the Sydney Opera House season. Surtitles don’t function uniformly in opera: sometimes, like in Mozart, you can afford to glance at them occasionally to get the drift; other times, like in Wagner, you really need to read every line. And then there are times when the action on stage has so little correlation to the words popping up above, you find yourself reading them as an exercise in perversity. Rossini’s Il Viaggio a Reims – at least as it appears in Damiano Michieletto’s extraordinary co-production between Opera Australia, the Dutch National Opera and Royal Danish Opera – is so wacky, the action on stage so divorced from the libretto, that you wonder if they’re referring to an entirely different opera. It should be frustrating but it’s not; it’s thrilling, and strangely liberating. If we’re not going to follow the script, then anything can happen. Which is probably just as well in an opera where almost nothing of any real consequence does happen. Rossini’s story revolves around a group of VIPs who are intending to get to Reims in time for the coronation of Charles X, but only make it as far as the village of Plombières-les-Bains. Stranded by a lack of transport, they decide to chuck a party instead, where they perform little national ditties from their respective countries. One commentator referred to the work as “Godot for the 1820s”, but this is inaccurate: Beck

This is a five-star review of the Melbourne Festival season of Grand Finale, by the London-based Hofesh Schechter Company. It's playing a brief season at the Sydney Opera House in January and February 2020. Like all great art, Hofesh Schechter's Grand Finale is a work up for interpretation. Certainly, it’s about youth and the power inherent in the young; they’re enraged, armed (even if only with their own bravado) and almost preternaturally responsive to the pressures bearing in on them. It constantly bristles and shakes with the vitalising and destructive energy of the young, and it chimes so completely with the Extinction Rebellion movement outside the theatre doors, that the piece seems to echo beyond its own ambit. It’s also a distinctly urban work, concerned with the constraints and the thrills of metropolitan confinement. In this sense, it’s about all cities, and being young in them. It opens on a man standing with his back to us in front of a portal or grand opening space, staring up into a spotlight. As an image it’s slightly obscured, contemplative and beautiful. Suddenly, he faints, and a mob of dancers moves forward over the top of him, oblivious to his distress. This motif, of a body dropping in the middle of the crowd – from ecstasy, from exhaustion or execution – recurs throughout, a reminder that groups, that even great movements, are not without their casualties. But oh, such movement. Almost immediately, Shechter’s choreography seduces and bewitches us, no

It’s been 35 years since French Canadian street performers Guy Laliberté and Gilles Ste-Croix joined forces to create a circus company that would go on to become the largest theatrical producer in the world. Cirque du Soleil is now a global brand so successful it’s recognised just about everywhere, and it’s a name that comes with certain expectations. Australian audiences have known what to expect since 1999, when the company first visited our shores with the brightly colourful Saltimbanco. That show was a genuine revelation at the time. There were certainly local companies making artistically adventurous circus, but nobody was making circus of the same scale and design sophistication. Since then, Cirque has been a near constant presence in Australia with regular tours.  The shows follow a similar formula (and why wouldn’t they, if they’re drawing in the crowds that Cirque attracts) and despite their beauty and spectacle, not all have felt as vibrant or as immediate as live circus should. Each one has roughly the same proportion of high-flying acrobatics to smaller-scale wonders, a clown crossing language barriers through audience interaction, a cast of strange, superhuman characters, a live band performing world music-inspired pop, bright and bold costumes and make-up, and a very loose narrative that’s usually about somebody discovering something. But it can be hard to recapture the same thrill of discovery that came with those earlier Cirque shows when audience expectati

There’s a whole lot of joyful noise at Belvoir right now. Fangirls, a new Australian musical by Yve Blake, is an ode to the agony and ecstasy of teen longing – the feeling of loving so much you might actually, literally, die. And what better lens to view this feeling than through the love for a boy band heartthrob?  Edna (played by Blake) is obsessed with Harry from True Connection (Aydan, who made waves on The Voice). He takes lead vocals on all the group’s best songs and has the best hair (though they all have great hair). Edna's friendships – both IRL and online – are constructed in large part by their big, swoony, celebrity crushes. Edna is having a bit of a tough time as the scholarship kid in a school full of rich kids and a mum that just doesn’t understand, and she feels a kinship with the unreachable Harry, who surely also feels trapped in his life. She’s sure that, if you pause concert videos at the right timestamp, you can see a real sadness in his eyes. If only they could run away together – an impossible notion, perhaps, but not in fanfiction, which Edna writes and shares online. But when True Connection announces an Australian tour, everything changes. What if Edna can make her fic come true?  Fangirls is operating on two main narrative threads: the first is this story of Edna, her mother (Sharon Millerchip), and her complicated friendships with Brianna (Kimberly Hodgson) and Jules (Chika Ikogwe) – plus her world of fan community (best represented by James Ma

When Lee Hall wrote Billy Elliot, the surprise hit film about a young boy in a Northern UK mining village dreaming of a career as a dancer, he was largely writing his own story. Hall grew up working class, the son of a house painter, and his family didn’t really understand why he’d want to go to university and pursue a career as a writer. That tension between a young person’s burgeoning creative spirit and the realities of their family and community’s social situation is at the heart of the film, and it is just as central to the deeply moving 2005 musical version, with a book and lyrics by Hall, and music by Elton John, another son of the working class who was lifted by his own prodigious creative talent. Making a musical that runs on class tension is not the easiest thing to do (although My Fair Lady got it right), but Hall and John, along with director Stephen Daldry, have concocted a smart, surprising and exhilarating piece of theatre. The characters from the film – Billy, his tough-as-nails ballet teacher, Mrs Wilkinson, and his miner father and brother – are all blown up to theatrical proportions in a way that feels tactful and caring. This new tour, opening 12 years after the show first popped up in Sydney and won a swag of Helpmann Awards, proves the story’s endurability and ability to capture an audience’s heart. One key element of the set, designed by Ian MacNeil, has been adjusted slightly to make the show more tourable, but it's lost very little of its visual app

This is a review of the March 2019 season of The Choir of Man. The show is returning to the Opera House for an encore season in November. We all know that Sydney has lost plenty of bars, clubs and late-night venues in recent years, but we’re not totally alone in that struggle. If you look to the UK, the neighbourhood pub is under threat; across England, Scotland and Wales, pubs are folding at a rate of one every 12 hours. The number of small pubs – the ones with fewer than ten employees, and the kind that tends to prop up a community – has almost halved between 2001 and 2018. The Choir of Man, a breakthrough hit of the 2017 Edinburgh Fringe that falls somewhere between pub gig, cabaret, choral performance and scrappy musical, is an ode to pub culture and the communities that exist within them. There’s not much going on in terms of narrative, but there are nine men from England and Ireland onstage leading the audience through a night at their local. George Bray is the narrator; Sean Keany is the angel-voiced tenor known as the “Casanova”; Christopher Norton is the deceptively gentle “beast”; Richard Lock is the “pub bore”, who dresses like a character from an Agatha Christie novel. Each has their moment to shine and all are superb singers – Lock delivers an impressive rendition of ‘The Impossible Dream’ while attempting to make a house out of coasters, Keany belts the bejesus out of Adele’s ‘Hello’, and Bray performs a touching version of Luther Vandross’s ‘Dance with My Fa

This is a review of the 2018 Melbourne premiere of School of Rock. Casting is yet to be confirmed for the Sydney premiere season. 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 Ho

If you know your Shakespeare – or your Baz Luhrmann – you know that the moment Romeo met Juliet changed everything. It was all ‘did my heart love till now?’ and making eyes through a fishtank while Des’ree sang ‘Kissing You’ in the background. It was a shock of love, a jolt of emotion. It’s iconic.  But wasn’t Romeo supposed to be all hung up on Rosaline? With that first meeting, Juliet is only the only girl in Romeo’s life. The one before her, the one that had him moping and mooning, is all but forgotten. Enter Australian playwright (and head of education at Bell Shakespeare) Joanna Erskine and her play, simply and directly titled Rosaline. What happened to the girl left behind, it asks? What was she doing while those star cross’d lovers married and fought and died?  Turns out, things weren’t going so well. Rosaline (Aanisa Vylet) might have been cautious about going to the next level with Romeo (Alex Beauman), but she loved the boy – much to the dismay of her loyal friend Peter (Jeremy Campese), who’s carrying the biggest metaphorical torch in the world for Rosie.  But Rosaline has bigger problems. Sequestered in her room (everyone enters by window – she’s either Rapunzel or Clarissa Darling), Rosaline films herself and her guests near-constantly, because she’s been having trouble with her memory. That trouble, much like her isolation, has likely been orchestrated by her brother, Tybalt, or the good friar (David Lynch) that we know best for helping out lovestruck Romeo

Ask anybody who has anything to do with western theatre and they’ll tell you this much about Tom Stoppard: he’s properly smart. The British playwright is known best for his highly intellectual but entertaining plays that stretch the theatrical form to enter the philosophical realm. But The Real Thing is, in a lot of ways, a step away from the kind of Stoppard both loved and loathed by audiences. The 1984 play is essentially a semi-autobiographical romantic comedy about a successful playwright called Henry (Johnny Carr) and the actor he falls for and starts an affair with, Annie (Geraldine Hakewill). Although it has touches of metatheatricality (there are instances when the audience is unknowingly watching a play within a play), Stoppard plays things pretty straight. What’s truly impressive is the way he uses a fairly simple set-up to explore ideas of love and authenticity in all its forms, while keeping the cogs of a rom-com turning.  Director Simon Phillips is the perfect captain to sensitively navigate the often unsteady waters Stoppard’s writing ploughs through, and he has created something gently dazzling with this company of actors. Hakewill is particularly memorable as Annie, a woman struggling to make sense of the relationship she’s landed in, while Carr captures both Henry’s swagger (in professional territory) and heartache (in personal territory). Rachel Gordon is brilliantly assured as Charlotte, the woman whom Henry leaves to take up with Annie, and Charlie Garbe

If an exclusive fine dining restaurant is booked out for the night, they might use the term “fully committed” to describe the situation to deep-pocketed callers clamouring for a reservation.  Now imagine you answer those calls. It’s not your dream, obviously (that’s acting), but this pays the bills. It’s a terrible job – rich idiots and creepy men yelling at you constantly – but you’re handling it. Until one day that’s already a bad day: your girlfriend just left you, you’re anxious to hear about an acting gig, you’re missing your dad. And then your co-workers haven’t shown up, and you have to manage the switchboard alone. And when the restaurant’s tables fill up three months in advance, those callers are probably not going to be happy with you. That scenario is the premise for Becky Mode’s Fully Committed, a whirlwind of a one-hander full of chirping phones and entitled customers. Everyone is terrible: the “bad boy of the kitchen” chef, the sexist maître d', the receptionist gatekeeper at her agent’s office, the movers and shakers who simply have to have a table for that evening. And Sam has to handle it all on her own. She misses the staff meal, she can’t go to the bathroom and upstairs keep asking her to clean up a terrible mess, even though that’s clearly out of her remit, because Heston Blumenthal is in the building and they’re all in a tizz. The actor who plays Sam and the 31 other characters in the show (every voice at the end of a line) is usually a man. Here, thou