Reviews

Georgia Latchford (Charlotte) and Lachlan Hamill (Tom) make the most of Joanna Murray-Smith’s intellectual, witty, sexy and intense script. While it starts as a usual boy meets girl seduction tale, its setting in Berlin provides a backdrop as layers and layers of thought and meaning are peeled away until a very uncomfortable truth is uncovered. Both characters have deep personal wounds which are echoed in the national German wound of the Holocaust.

Stirling Players’ Absurd Person Singular, despite its title, is about the changing fortunes of three couples, told over three successive Christmases. Good ensemble work featured in this often quite black comedy, first performed in 1972.

First a provocative French play written fifty years ago, then the hit film, and then the multi-award-winning Broadway musical in 1983, this gay love story between a night club owner and his resident drag star was, last century at least, a real forerunner.  

This modestly staged revival on the State Theatre’s slender stage runs for only a week. It’s like a pop-up musical, even a concert version – a sign of the times perhaps, and the need for cheaper budgets and ticket prices.  

After short stays in Melbourne and Brisbane, this cheapo production of a very interesting ‘lost musical’ comes to Sydney’s Lyric Theatre for one week only. Its creator-writer, Jonathan Larson, famously died the day before his big-deal show Rent opened Off-Broadway in 1996. This is his only previous work to receive a production.