Things to do in Sydney today

Brisbane-based all-male burlesque sensation Briefs has long been smarter than your average. Yes, audiences go to one of their shows to witness feats of superhuman ability, laugh their troubles away and gawk lustily at the Briefs boys – but there’s something a bit deeper and more subversive lurking under pretty much everything they do. Not that it will always be apparent to you; scantily-clad bodies have a tendency to distract an audience from dramaturgical nuance. And that’s fine. Club Briefs is the scrappier, younger, and, um, fleshier sibling of their more themed, structured shows – last year’s Sydney Festival hit imagined a queer future – but it’s every bit as fun. It’s also appropriate that this is the show they’ve brought to Sydney for their first appearance at Mardi Gras; it’s more daring and relies more heavily on a community vibe, kicking off with a runway which every audience member is invited to walk. The looseness of the format – with hostess Shivannah (Fez Fa'anana’s drag alter ego) leading an audience through the Briefs boys’ acts – makes the “club” of the title feel totally apt. She’s able to keep an audience screaming for 90 minutes and make the Seymour Centre’s York Theatre feel like an intimate club (not exactly an easy feat given how much it feels like a lecture theatre with its fold-out tables on every seat). Plus, she’s absolutely hilarious; an extended bit about being a “busy mum” and a criminally ugly dress she decided to wear is side-splittingly funn

You could almost reach out and touch them. Angels in America is a theatrical epic that has become a cultural touchstone. Tony Kushner’s dizzying, achingly poetic work is huge: comprised of two parts over seven hours and subtitled as a ‘gay fantasia on national themes’. It is included on virtually every list of the last century’s greatest plays, has been adapted for HBO and revived frequently on major stages. Its legacy has begun to feel untouchable – too grand, too important – to feel like a small revolution. But here, at the Old Fitz, it belongs to us again: those of us alive right now in these times of conservative power and despair. That is the quiet, self-assured secret behind director Dino Dimitriadis’ approach, which plays in a 60-seat theatre inside a pub basement. This production isn’t above us, but of us – we are close enough to the work again to see our own reflection in it. It could crack you open. It’s 1985 and Prior (Ben Gerrard) has been diagnosed with AIDS; his lover Louis (Timothy Wardell) leaves him, anguished. Joe (Gus Murray), a Mormon Republican lawyer, is a mentee of the criminal, ruthless, Trump-mentoring Roy Cohn (Ashley Lyons). Joe is struggling with his sexuality, and his marriage to Harper (Catherine Davies) is in trouble. Harper is deeply unhappy and self-medicating with Valium. And then Cohn is diagnosed with AIDS, and Prior is visited by an angel, and Louis and Joe crash into each other, and the play soars into something dazzling: an angry, f

The first act of Australian theatre, television and media polymath Nakkiah Lui’s new play is an extraordinarily funny and incisive political satire. Three Canberra insiders – Vic (played by Lui herself), Zaza (Michelle Lim Davidson) and Chris (Anthony Taufa) – are frustrated that despite their immense skills and education none has the political clout they need to change the country for the better. The reason for their struggle is simple: Vic is Aboriginal, Zaza is Korean and Chris is Tongan. They have to stand by watching mediocre white man after mediocre white man rise to positions of power. And now the Sovereign Territory Bill – a dangerous political tool designed to placate the far right and entrench white supremacy through talk of Australian “values” – is before parliament. One night at a Canberra nightclub, fuelled by an effective amount of cocaine, they hatch a plan to beat those mediocre white men at their own game. They find their own mediocre white man, turn him into a political puppet, and direct him all the way the senate. The laughs come thick and fast for all of the first act, particularly when the trio are transforming their puppet (played to absolute comedic perfection in jelly sandals by Hamish Michael) into the perfect white man. Seeing this group of young people of colour construct an image of whiteness from their own perspective is very funny, and a subversive act in and of itself. There’s even a musical number (thanks to Paul Mac and Steve Francis) t

This is a review of the 2019 Melbourne season of Cake Daddy at Midsumma Festival. There’s been a lot of discussion about identity in the general community, and it’s a theme that has come to dominate this year’s Midsumma Festival. We’re talking about gender identity, sexual identity, racial identity. Disability is finally fully on the agenda. But fat? Well fat, according to mainstream social norms, just ain’t right. More than this, it’s wrong, even has a whiff of immorality about it. It isn’t only the people who fall outside the ideal of physical beauty who are trapped by this mentality; all of us have become dangerously obsessed with our bodies, and the fuel that drives them, and we’re looking around for someone to blame. Ross Anderson-Doherty is a Belfast theatre-maker who has descended on Melbourne’s Midsumma like a giant pink inflatable swimming aid, and he’s here to tell us all about, wait for it… Cakewatchers! It’s a new, totally fabulous, completely indefatigable weight loss scheme, unlike all the other, failure-inducing weight loss schemes that have come before. This one has three central tenets: “Watch the cake!”, “Know your cryminals!” [sic] and “Practise your manoeuvres!”. Ross is going to take us through and out of this new routine, with a touch of autobiography on the way down. Cake Daddy is best described as a three-way collaboration between Anderson-Doherty, playwright Lachlan Philpott and director Alyson Campbell; an attempt to wrangle the separate aesthet

This is a review of the 2018-19 Melbourne season of Peter Pan Goes Wrong. In 2017, Melbourne audiences chortled and guffawed – no doubt at times even choked on their own windpipes – through the hilarity that was The Play That Goes Wrong. It wasn’t the first farce of that year but it was by far the best, leaving local efforts like The Homosexuals and Noises Off for dead. The question is, can the producers step into the same river twice? Peter Pan Goes Wrong promises to up the laughs and the chaos, to be more wrong than the previous play that went wrong. Does it succeed at being a bigger failure? Perhaps not, but it’s certainly fun watching it try. It starts very much like its predecessor, with “stage hands” mugging and ad-libbing their way around the auditorium. Of course, this seeming looseness is actually extremely calculating, lubing us up, getting us in the mood for the riot and mayhem to follow. It’s only when the director Chris Bean (Connor Crawford) comes out, with his assistant/co director Robert (Luke Joslin), that we begin to sense the tensions underpinning this theatrical endeavour. We launch quickly into the production of Peter Pan itself, and within minutes we realise it’s a production that is doomed. Doomed for the actors, directors and producers; comedy gold for us. Anyone who saw The Play That Goes Wrong will recognise the beats, the set-ups and even the specific gags that made that show so funny. What’s remarkable is how amusing it is the second time around