Reviews

The Grinning Man is a hugely entertaining music theatre show – a hybrid mix of melodrama, pathos, pantomime, and very black comedy – performed by a hugely talented cast who sing, play musical instruments, dance, cavort, mug – and bring people to tears.  The music is kaleidoscopic inventive pastiche, mixing pop with classical, and referencing many modern music theatre hits.  Music Director David Youings gets energy and clarity out of his ensemble of three.

Susan Hill’s ghost story from the late 19th Century is at the core of this play, cleverly adapted by Stephen Mallatratt. It’s been in the West End for more than three decades and yes it has played Australia before, a production that also saw the charismatic John Waters as Arthur Kipps, a role he is repeating, along with six or eight other characters.

I Love You, You’re Perfect Now Change, is a vignette musical about the trials and tribulations of dating, love, marriage and coupledom. Fun and relatable, it is a show that sits well in Murray Music and Drama’s cabaret set-up at Pinjarra Civic Centre.

Playwright Sir Alan Ayckbourn has penned over eighty full-length plays in his long career. He wrote a trilogy of plays, called The Norman Conquests in 1973. Although designed to be watched together, the three plays stand alone, each taking place over the same weekend, in the same location, but from a different viewpoint. Living Together, the second play in the trilogy, takes place in an English living-room in the mid 1970s.