Our latest Sydney theatre reviews

Just over a decade since it was last seen in Australia, Annie is back – bursting onto the Capitol Theatre stage filled with optimism, joy, and hope. Director Karen Mortimer revives this quintessential piece of musical theatre with a sentimental production that preserves the charm and flair found in Thomas Meehan’s book. For those living under a rock (mainly me), this Tony Award-winning musical follows the story of 11-year-old Annie, who is growing up in an orphanage in 1930s New York, under the cruel eye of Miss Hannigan. In the midst of the Great Depression, pessimism is all around, but chipper young Annie has the antidote: hope. Encouraging others to believe that “the sun will come out tomorrow”, Annie’s enduringly positive spirit seems to finally pay off, when billionaire Oliver Warbucks chooses to take her in for two weeks over Christmas. Four spirited young performers share the titular role in this production, alongside an alternating cast of child actors. On opening night, Dakota Chanel’s Annie is a ray of sunshine, fully embodying the doe-eyed optimism of the character, balancing warmth and comedy with the more tender and emotional segments. The whole ensemble of “orphans” share an incredible chemistry, which is strongly on display in their performance of ‘It’s The Hard Knock Life’. The stakes are high when it comes to such a well-known and well-loved song, but this ensemble more than meets the challenge with a passionate and committed performance.  Annie is the...

What does it take to choose your values and beliefs over those of others, and to fight for them? What does it take for a woman to be defiant – to go against what is expected of her, and perhaps even go against her own family? Fresh off an international tour of his critically-acclaimed three-hour epic Counting and Cracking (which included a special sold-out season at Sydney’s Carriageworks), S. Shakthidharan returns to the Belvoir stage with another powerful chapter of South Asian history. Detouring from the grand scale of Counting and Cracking and Shakthidharan’s follow-up show, The Jungle and the Sea, this restrained 90-minute fable is told through the perspectives of four defiant women, each of them shaped by differing values, ideologies, survival and sacrifice.  The Wrong Gods is a work of protest – it’s angry, sad, and deeply unsettled by the relentlessness of capitalism The Wrong Gods imagines the protests surrounding the controversial Narmada Valley dam project. Initiated in the late 1980s, the dam is one of the world’s largest hydropower infrastructure projects. It was intended to supply electricity and drinking water to three Indian states, but its legacy is fraught – thousands of indigenous people and villagers were displaced, ecosystems were irreversibly altered and damaged, and the project remains at the centre of sustained protests. Nirmala (Nadie Kammallaweera, who appeared in both Counting and Cracking and The Jungle and the Sea) a farmer and the head of the...

Two one-act Harold Pinter plays starring three actors across five roles for a total of two hours entertainment plus intermission – if we judged theatre by weight, that’d sound like a pretty good deal. And it is, because you tend to get more than you expect from Ensemble Theatre, and certainly from Pinter, if you’re not ready for him.  The relatively confined space of the Ensemble stage is a good fit for Pinter’s drawing room dreadfuls. The fact that we’re getting a double feature – a twofer! – speaks to the Music Hall traditions underpinning Pinter’s work, the way he was keyed to the rhythms of working class and middle class voices. It’s also the first hint that this is Pinter-as-comedy, although it’s still the comedy of menace. Pinter was the most mercurial of the angry young men who barreled through mid-20th-century British culture, and his work invites diverse interpretations. Here, director Mark Kilmurry has leaned into laughs, although often rueful. The Lover (1962) puts us in the ’60s-chic suburban home of housewife Sarah (Nicole da Silva – The Memory of Water, TV’s Wentworth) and businessman Richard (Gareth Davies – Benefactors, Belvoir’s The Master And Margarita) as they exchange pleasantries and also frank details of their extra-marital affairs. She has a lover, Max, who visits while Richard is at work. Richard admits to frequenting an anonymous whore (his words) for after-office dalliances. Then we meet Max – and Max, is Richard. The Lover is a brittle, nervy...

If the leading lady of a daytime telenovela was to read too many pop-psychology books while downing a double Espresso Martini, you might get something close to Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. This musical comedy based on Pedro Almodóvar’s 1988 cinema cult classic is given a neon-lit, red-curtained makeover at Sydney’s Hayes Theatre. With precision taking a backseat to passion, director Alexander Berlage (Cry-Baby, American Psycho) delivers a stylish descent into screwball mania. The action takes place in Madrid, Spain, where Amy Hack’s (Yentl) heartbroken actress, Pepa, is having a terrible, very bad day, which we see play out from depressive start to high-flung resolution. Her lover Iván breaks up with her over answering machine, and thus, her Odyssey-styled mission to find and confront him begins. Along the journey, Pepa butts heads with Iván’s scorned ex-wife Lucia (Tisha Keleman), his son and his own frustrated fiancée, as well as her wildly unravelling best friend, Candela (Grace Driscoll).  With a book by Jeffrey Lane (known for his musical adaption of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels) and music and lyrics by David Yazbek (Dead Outlaw), the original Broadway production of Women on the Verge had a relatively short lifespan – closing soon after it received poor reviews, and even poorer ticket sales. This is where Berlage’s adept hand at re-inventing cult flops takes charge – finding a space for his avant-garde style through sharp angles, frenetic choreography, and...

If you’re of a certain age, you have history (HIStory, perhaps?) with Michael Jackson. I remember getting ‘Thriller’ on cassette as a kid. ‘Dangerous’ was one of the first CDs I ever owned. I remember seeing the extended music video for ‘Thriller’ on VHS, which came packaged with a behind-the-scenes documentary. One woman, cornered for a quick vox pop at one of the filming locations, asserted that she loved Jackson because he was “down to earth”, which is darkly hilarious in hindsight.  Down to earth? The press called him “wacko Jacko” – we all did. He slept in a hyperbaric chamber. He owned the Elephant Man’s skeleton. His skin kept getting paler, his nose thinner. What a weird guy! Was any of it true? Hard to say. Even today, when a careless tweet is like a drop of blood in a shark tank to fans and journos alike, the media furor around Michael Jackson stands as one of the most frenetic in living memory, eclipsing the likes of Beatlemania. Jackson wasn’t bigger than God, he was God to a lot of people – the King of Pop, the first Black artist to smash through the MTV colour barrier, an artist, an icon, a living legend. Then came the allegations of child sexual abuse, which first began in August 1993, and continue to this day. For those who were still on the fence, the documentary Leaving Neverland, released in 2019, saw many more fans abandon Jackson, who died in 2009 at the age of 50. And so, it makes sense that MJ the Musical would set Jackson’s relationship with the...

Hold on to your alibis, dear readers. Hot on the heels of the recent national tour of The Mousetrap, another classic from Agatha Christie’s playbook of murder mystery mayhem lands on the stage at Sydney’s Theatre Royal.  *** Time Out Melbourne reviewed And Then There Were None when it played at the Comedy Theatre in February. Read on for that three-star review:   Somewhere off the coast of Devon is a dreary little island with high cliffs, higher tides and no way to escape. It’s Soldier Island: a lovely place to put your feet up, take a dip, meet nine strangers and watch as you all get slowly picked off one-by-one. This is the wickedly thrilling premise of Agatha Christie’s 1939 classic And Then There Were None. A favourite among Christie fans (and Christie herself), it arrives in a production that once again proves that the master of the whodunnit can still thrill us nearly 100 years on. Yet, this revival from director Robyn Nevin – her second of Christie’s following 2023’s The Mousetrap – rests on the laurels of its author too often, offering a passable but ultimately thin restaging that I think might signal the end of the recent resurgence of British classics in our theatres. It’s 1939. Ten people have been invited to Soldier Island under suspicious pretences. They have little in common apart from the skeletons in their closets. For much of the show’s bloated first act, we’re watching this motley crew of potential victims introduce themselves to each other. Christie is...