Amazing Companies that support Aussie Theatre:
A break-up can often result in a few common scenarios: crying into one’s pillow, living off Rocky Road ice cream, downing that bottle of Bourbon or all of the above. Yet actor-writer Kurt Phelan chose a different route: he wrote a play. Currently playing as part of Melbourne’s Midsumma Festival, Kurt’s debut…
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One of the biggest problems facing theatre practitioners today is having enough venues (and the money to pay for them!). What if we took away that problem? The 2012 Anywhere Theatre Festival in Brisbane has done just that, but time is running out for all you struggling thespians and cabaret…
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Matthew Backer catches up with Hugo Chiarella about his new musical, Dreamsong, currently workshopping at Arts Centre Melbourne. If there is indeed a God, and He happens to enjoy musical theatre, actor-writer Hugo Chiarella might want to send a few prayers of thanks His way. One could almost deduce from talking…
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The success of the musical Jesus Christ Superstar in the early 1970s was partly attributed to its initial release as a concept album on vinyl. Before the show hit the stage, audiences knew the lyrics and the music was already in the public consciousness. Clever move. 2012’s answer to the vinyl…
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Presented by new indie outfit Workhorse Theatre Company, That Pretty Pretty: Or, the Rape Play is a powerful, darkly funny play that subverts stage conventions as we follow a pair of radical feminist ex-strippers through what else but a murderous rampage? They’re hunting down right-wing pro-lifers, blogging about their explots…
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Forty women spent six days in Falls Creek with Gertrude Stein. The result is Midsumma’s in Girls Do Gertrude! at the Northcote Town Hall. I haven’t read any Gertrude Stein, but I saw Midnight in Paris at the flicks and read Alice B Toklas’s recipe for dope brownies (that she didn’t…
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The paradox of living in a big city is that you can feel suffocated by crowds of people and yet completely alone, usually at the same time. Adam Gwon’s Ordinary Days is an understated show about the most extraordinary of ordinary experiences: human connection, seemingly at random and left to…
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A History of Everything, seemingly inexplicably, manages to do exactly as advertised: it tells a history of more or less everything that’s happened:
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Being a white boy from Brighton is so damn hard that it’s left Ash Flanders in a foul mood for 30-odd years. Like me, Ash generally hates things and people and is only happy when he’s sharing the pain with a rant and an obscure show tune. Negative Energy Inc…
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If you expect anything different from the title, remember it’s a homage to Joan Didion’s painful and serious The Year of Magical Thinking. Unlike Didion, Watkins didn’t lose a partner and child, but his year of self-reflection confronts the shame that left him craving intimacy but terrified to find it because it hurt…
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Sometime in the 70s, the ABC filmed the MTC production of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll; my grandmother made me watch it with her. I didn’t really get it, but I liked it, especially as 1950s Melbourne and 1970s Adelaide weren’t that far apart. Years later in high school, The Doll…
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