Anne-Marie spent many years working with amazing artists at arts festivals all over Australia. She's been a freelance arts writer for the last 10 years and teaches journalism at Monash University.
Anne-Marie has written 880 articles on AussieTheatre
Follow Anne-Marie: @SometimesMelb
Melbourne’s had the opportunity to see two adaptions of Frank Wedekind’s 1891 play Spring Awakening this month. StageArt’s production of the 2006 musical – which won eight Tonys, including Best Musical – is the better known and opened at Chapel off Chapel on the weekend that Daniel Lammin’s powerful Awakening closed its second season to… Read more.
“Words, words, words! I’m so sick of words I get words all day through.” This was always my favourite song from Lerner and Lowe’s My Fair Lady. Even with misguided-teen romance-goggles, I appreciated Eliza’s frustration with being told what to do, think and say. Show her! Show me! Show us! Which is hard to do… Read more.
David M Hawkins’s production of Cabaret may be as pretty as Sally Bowles’s green nail polish, but the only person who loved the green was Sally* and we know her manicure was cheap and chipped. After a mixed reaction to the Sydney season (now referred to as the preview season), Hawkins brought in director Gale… Read more.
Being in the depths of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, I was calling Richard 3, by Bell Shakespeare, Chick Dick 3 because Kate Mulvany plays Richard. But no more throw away jokes about having seen a lot of Dicks because this production’s found so much that’s new, relevant and fascinating. Yes it’s ANOTHER work about… Read more.
I was splashed by a wet condom and had a shite covered naked arse within touching distance. Choose life. Choose theatre. Choose Trainspotting Live. In 1993, Harry Gibson wrote the stage adaption of Irvine Welsh’s 1993 novel about heroine, addiction and AIDS in Edinburgh in the late 1980s. It’s said that this adaption inspired Danny Boyle’s… Read more.
Faith Healer, directed by Judy Davis, at Sydney’s Belvoir last year was so successful that the MTC put it into the Sumner Theatre. While twice as many can see it each night, most can’t experience the intimacy that made it so successful and the production struggles to find its strength in the large space. Irish… Read more.
The Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society present The Murder at Haversham Manor. It goes wrong. Very wrong. So wrong that it’s totally right. The Play That Goes Wrong by Mischief Theatre was first seen in 2012 in a 60-seat theatre. With a new second act, it went to the Edinburgh Fringe and has now been swimming through tears of… Read more.
In a hotel room in a third-world country, an unnamed person recounts a story of the fever he suffers from – and he’s not talking about the illness that has him sweaty and vomiting. Written by actor Wallace Shawn for himself to perform at private functions, The Fever debuted in 1990 and underwent a re-write… Read more.
American playwright Annie Baker won a 2014 Pulitzer Prize for The Flick (seen at Red Stitch) when she was 33. Her writing’s won Off-Broadway Obie awards and rightly declares a new Baker as a show to see. The MTC have the Australian premier of her 2015 play, John, and director Sarah Goodes guides a must-see production that revels… Read more.
Can’t afford your own time machine? A ticket to the National Ballet of China’s Red Detachment of Women is the next best thing. This ballet, first performed in 1964, is one of the ‘Eight Model Operas’ of the Chinese Cultural Revolution; a pet project of Madame Mao – Jiang Qing, Mao’s last wife and the leader… Read more.
