Reviews

Keith Huff became my hero when I knew he wrote Mad Men and the brilliant House of Cards.  His expertise at storytelling and snappy dialogue is also on show at Sydney’s Old Fitz with A Steady Rain, a two hander about a couple of longtime partners patrolling the hardened streets of Chicago.

Toni’s grant application (for something undoubtedly very artistic) is refused.  Toni is so stunned that she is, well, speechless.  But undeterred, she contacts Sara (whom she has never met) far away in Rome and invites her to join the project.  It’s a project, Toni asserts, that ‘is going to make millions’.  Sara likes the sound of ‘millions’, but otherwise exhibits not a shred of comprehension of Toni’s project – and we’re not too sure what it is either.  Possibly Toni herself hasn’t quite got it

Belvoir’s new artistic director Eamon Flack both scripted and directed this remarkable reworking of Chekhov's first full-length play.  With a strong comic cast who capture both the pathos and full ridiculousness of Chekhov's lost characters, Flack’s rollicking but sensitive production reaches beyond pre-revolutionary Russia to our Australia today.  The actors somehow inhabit both worlds, and so point to what we have in common, as our social progress also falters into inertia and the only bottom line is economic growth.

Lyric Opera continues to explore obscurity with the first staged version of G. W. L. Marshall-Hall’s opera, Stella, in over 100 years. The Englishman Marshall-Hall was brought out to Australia as founding Ormond Professor of Music at the University of Melbourne and had a profound impact on the musical life of the city. This is believed to be the first opera written in Australia.

Written at the time of Puccini and Massenet, Stella is very melodic and pure verismo. The title character had a couple of beautiful arias and there were some lovely ensembles.