Things to do in Sydney this week

Las Vegas Entertainment dishes out a rip-roarin' mix of comedy and live music every weekend in the centre of the CBD. Every Friday night you'll find the $10 Comedy Club, which showcases rising stars of the local scene alongside long-term residents. Saturday night is all about Bonkerz, which sees a full evening of experienced comics hitting the stage from 8pm.  On the last Saturday of every month you can catch Magic Motown and the Whitney Houston Tribute Show featuring the Soulsville band. You can also make a night of it and add on dinner packages.  Time Out readers can also get a special discount this month – simply mention Time Out Sydney at the door and you'll enjoy two-for-one seats at either the $10 Dollar Comedy Club or Bonkerz. 

The boutique opera company Opera Bites has several strong, well trained voices and is taking the classics in period costume into pubs, historic houses, restaurants and even sheds. It’s not always a full opera, or even an abridged one: we caught their Celebrated Highlights at Annandale’s ornately decorated Empire Hotel, enjoying two sets of ten arias close up and personal, plus fine finger food delivered continuously to the comfortable chairs and benches. It’s a really enjoyable experience, even if you’re not already a big lover of Verdi or Rossini. And even experienced opera goers will be impressed by the power of a good singer only a metre or two away. Singer Murray Dahm doubles as an MC/narrator, giving the context of each aria in the story of its opera, explaining why the character is feeling the particular emotion of the song. He also makes some gentle fun of the conventions and cliches of opera: “The tenor is always in love with the soprano,” he sighs, himself a bass. Everyone goes home humming their favourite number, and feeling they have been converted into experts.

“You’re seeing yourself reflected in it because it’s opaque,” says a character in Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan’s slippery and intriguing adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984. “It’s a mirror. Every age sees itself reflected.” As the timelines layer and repeat within the production, and characters dissolve into each other, it becomes increasingly hard as an audience member to discern  who said these lines or what it is, exactly, they’re speaking about. Is it someone in a book club, studying Orwell’s novel? Is it someone under the rule of the ideological Ingsoc, speaking about the rebellious book The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism? Or is it someone, hinted at in Orwell’s appendix to the novel, who has survived Ingsoc and rejected Newspeak, and is studying the remnants of Winston Smith’s diary from that fabled year? We spend most of the play with Winston (Tom Conroy) as he uncomfortably navigates the regimented world of Oceania in 1984, but continually succumbs to its rules. When barked at by the voice from the telescreen, he obeys and bends over in an attempt to touch his toes. He goes to work and erases the records of people’s lives, shaping the past in the party’s favour. His rebellions are small, hidden, and largely inconsequential: in thoughtcrime, in a diary, in a secretive tryst. Weaving the appendix through the text, Icke and Macmillan make explicit a crucial part of Orwell’s intent: the knowledge that this society can fall. But even so, Winston and

Five editions in, Bondi Feast is looking a lot like Sydney’s “unofficial Fringe”: a curated festival of new independent work, unusual work, boundary-breaking work and experiments – all for the kind of price point where you the viewer can also afford to take risks. Having started as a project of Tamarama Rock Surfers (the now-defunct independent theatre company) in 2012, and after taking a year off in 2016, Bondi Feast is returning this year under the auspices of Waverley Council – and co-curated by founder, theatre-maker and Story Club regular Phil Spencer, with theatre maker Rachel Chant. Looking back across six years, Spencer sees an evolution from a theatre-focused festival into a more diverse program that includes cabaret and comedy. This year, around 30 shows were selected from more than 70 submissions – more than Spencer expected, and the highest calibre for Bondi Feast so far: “Obviously there’s a gap in the Sydney scene,” he says. In addition, Chant and Spencer invited a number of artists and shows they’d seen and loved (from the Adelaide, Perth and Melbourne Fringes, and elsewhere), including Melbourne comedian Tessa Waters, who will do a retrospective of her three shows; Demi Lardner, who will reprise her award-winning Melbourne Comedy Festival show Look What You’ve Made Me Do; Sami Shah reprising his show The Islamic Republic of Australia; and the hit Adelaide and Melbourne Fringe double bill Wank Bank and Pussy Play – a surprising mix of sex positivity, inter

Patricia Cornelius’s new play is an outright provocation as the title suggests. It dares to put three female characters on the stage who are rarely if ever given a theatrical voice. Rough, rude and irrevocably damaged, they are the kind of people most theatre-goers would cross the street to avoid – but under the rich talents of the playwright and the extraordinary direction of Susie Dee, they make a compelling and heartbreaking subject.  Billy (Nicci Wilks) opens the play with an expletive-fuelled rant that is hilarious and also politically charged. She barrages the audience with more fucks than prepositions – something even her friends Bobby (Sarah Ward) and Sam (Peta Brady) find over the top. Cornelius’s particular talent for turning flat realistic speech into a kind of heightened street verse is on immediate display. And as the women’s stories become clearer, as the abuse and marginalisation eat away at any hope we may have for them, the play’s real power comes to the fore. Despite the characters’ energy and vigour, the sense of despair and inevitable narrowing of options begins to choke them. They turn on each other, they mock each other’s attempts to imagine a better life, and eventually they egg each other into senseless and self-defeating violence.  Cornelius’s play is in many ways a companion to her award-winning work Savages. That play was about four men aboard a cruise ship who channel their dissatisfaction and self-doubt into an act of random violence against an

Aphra Behn was cooler than you. Not only was she a spy for King Charles II against the Dutch, she was also the first woman to make a living as a playwright. The Rover debuted in 1677, just a few generations after Shakespeare made his apparently indelible mark on the theatrical canon, and only a few years after the English Puritan regime lifted their 18-year ban on plays. And Behn wasn’t interested in writing a particularly polite or ladylike play now she had her stage. No, The Rover is a lusty, swashbuckling story of sex, desire, and love in Naples during the freewheeling Carnival. Sisters Hellena (Taylor Ferguson) and Florinda (Elizabeth Nabbben) want to escape their penned-in noble lives for the festival fray. Hellena craves at least one last night of freedom before she takes her religious vows, and Florinda plans to marry the man of her dreams before she’s stuck with the dud match her brother (Andre de Vanny) has selected for her. The sisters become entangled with a group of exiled English gentlemen: one is Florinda’s beloved Colonel Belville (Leon Ford); the others – his friends Frederick (Nathan Lovejoy) and Blunt (Gareth Davies) – are just along for the sex and canary wine. Also in Naples for a good time is Willmore (Black Sails star Toby Schmitz), the eponymous Rover.  He’s hot and he knows it, leaving a trail of broken hearts in his wake. The latest target? Well it’s either not-so-chaste Hellena or Angellica Bianca (Nikki Shiels), a famous courtesan. Missed connect