Reviews

Babirra Music Theatre continued on their practice of producing top class shows at the Whitehorse Centre on Saturday night. Everything about it had class.

Dominating the production was the Daddy Warbucks of Zac Brown. I’ve often heard Warbuck’s songs badly sung as they are almost unsingable, but he coped with ease. He also showed pathos and timing that drew the audience in. I’ve never seen the role played better.

How would you feel if you ordered something from the mainland and what was delivered to your island home was something quite different? That’s the predicament established from the outset here: the ageing Cuthberts ordered a boy from the orphanage to help on their farm but Anne was sent to them. 

Translated and adapted from the Marguerite Duras novel by Colin Duckworth, The Lover is a monologue for Kate Kendall who masterfully draws us in to the world of 1930’s Saigon, where a poor 14-year-old French girl falls in love with a wealthy 27-year-old Chinese man, and we witness the intimacies and the repercussions of their doomed affair.

The Bolshoi Ballet’s return to Australia last night with the monumentally spectacular Le Corsaire was a giddy, glorious delight. Based on a poem by Lord Byron, and set in Turkey, this romantic swashbuckling story of pirates and slave girls had all the fun of a Pirates of the Caribbean movie with exotic characters, settings and costumes. It was old-school traditional ballet, expertly executed by a company with its tongue firmly planted in its cheek.