Reviews

A brilliant production!

10 years ago Les Mis was given a re-tread, with the theatrical equivalent of botox, facelift, and tummy tuck. Twenty minutes were cut from the original run time, pictures added to the backdrop, more sets, more props, fancier effects, less barricade, more moving around on stage by everybody. This souped-up version was designed to appeal to a generation brought up on Marvel movies and the Fast & Furious franchise. This was the version that played in the Australian pro-revival from 2015 – 2017.

A man, known only in the text as the ‘Client’ (Rob Meldrum) goes for a walk…  No, he asserts he is walking with a purpose, to a destination, from one place to another, without interest in what lies between.  Or, his protestations to the contrary, does his walk have perhaps an entirely different but unadmitted purpose?  Somewhere in a city’s dusk, in a lonely place, he encounters the ‘Dealer ‘(Tom Dent), who offers to supply whatever it is the Client wants…  The Client claims the Dealer has nothing that he could want or need.&nb

‘Sydney continues to lose theatre spaces at an alarming rate’ states the Fledgling Theatre Company and so opens its new performance space on the 4th floor of an old building behind Central Station in Sydney. Good for them. A very narrow doorway at street level leads to a very slow lift: Studio Blueprint has taken a large space on the top floor which includes a large thrust stage surrounded on three sides by rickety, uncomfortable chairs.

There is a lot to be said about fashion and eighties pop songs, but who wants to sit around and chew on about a retro decade when you can saturate your senses at NEON, a great cabaret and Circus OZ rock show directed by Malia Walsh, currently in the Melba Spiegeltent, as part of the Melbourne Comedy festival.