Reviews

Avenue Q

Music and Lyrics by Robert Lopez & Jeff Mark. Book by Jeff Whitty Based on an original concept by Robert Lopez and Jeff Mark. Directed by John Boyce. Brisbane Arts Theatre Playing Nov 10 – Dec 22, 2018

Avenue Q is a poor, run down area of New York where a cross-section of people have gathered to survive while looking to advance their lives.  A young graduate from Princetown, hence his name, arrives while he searches for his purpose in life and, in the process, meets people, falls in and out of love. This play displays the full range of human emotions in explicit deeds and language, as is the modern norm. Where this play is very different is that all but three of the characters are puppets.

As You Like It

By William Shakespeare. Directed by Megan Dansie. University of Adelaide Theatre Guild. Pfitzner Court (Gate 14, off Kintore Avenue). 17-25 Nov, 2018.

As far as Shakespeare goes, As You Like It  may be relatively lacking in serious themes, but this makes it ideal for anyone just up for a cheerful time in a pleasant location. What makes UATG’s production special – and what should prove especially pleasing to buffs of the Bard - is the evident expertise and care that director Megan Dansie and her terrific cast have brought to it.

Nobody’s Talking To Me

By Tony Marren. Irish Theatre Players. Directed by Siobhán O’Gara. Irish Club of WA, Subiaco, WA. 15-24 November, 2018

The Irish Theatre Players have a reputation for being one of the warmest theatre groups in WA, with wonderful hospitality and the friendliest front of house around. It is perhaps ironic that their latest show features many characters who are quite the opposite - very unfriendly people who refuse to talk to each other.

Broken

By Mary Anne Butler. Lab Kelpie. fortyfivedownstairs. 15 -25 November 2018.

Broken plays with time, coincidence and consequence.  Events play out of chronological sequence enabling juxtapositions of their emotions.  The audience must hold the pieces in mind – until they come together in a moving and satisfying whole. 

An horrific car accident isn’t a plot point: it’s dramatised in all its physicality, terror and pain.  An abortion isn’t a plot point; it too is dramatised, heightened by the graphic language that describes it, in its agony and regret. 

Giselle

Ballet by Jules-Henry Vernoy de Saint-Georges from Theophile Gautier. Teatro Alla Scala Ballet Company. Choreography: Jean Coralli and Jules Perrot. Choreograhic restageing: Yvette Chauvire. Music: Adolphe Adam. Queensland Symphony Orchestra conducted by David Coleman. Director: Frederic Olivieri. Lyric Theatre, QPAC, Brisbane. November 14 -18, 2018

With endless curtain calls and multiple bravos, Teatro Alla Scala Ballet Company closed QPAC’s International Series with a ravishing Giselle. Claimed as one of the world’s prestigious ballet companies, Giselle proved beyond doubt they deserve that accolade.

Six Degrees in Melbourne

Melbourne Writers’ Theatre. Directed and Designed by Mazz Ryan and Adele Shelly. Carlton Courthouse. 13 – 25 November 2018

Melbourne Writers’ Theatre always presents a stimulating and rewarding program.  One doesn’t necessarily attend their shows to watch slick theatre but more pertinently for the satisfaction of exploring, and dwelling, on interesting stories.  Most recently their programs have been comprised of monologues. However this year Six Degrees in Melbourne is made up of six ‘two handers.’  They are set in and around Flinders Lane and each one of them is intriguing.

Eurydice

By Sarah Ruhl. Red Line Productions and Mad March Hare Theatre Co. Old Fitz Theatre. November 15 – December 15, 2018

American playwright Sarah Ruhl re-tells the famous tale of Orpheus descending to the underworld to retrieve his dead bride by keeping our focus firmly on Eurydice.

Her play has a gentle poetic humour as the romantic musician pines on earth for his love  while below Eurydice, reconciled in death with her father, seems happy without her boy, now searching her past and dead future.

Yellow Yellow Sometimes Blue

By Noëlle Janaczewska. Q Theatre. Allan Mullins Studio, Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre. Nov 15 – 24, 2018

Noëlle Janaczewska is an Australian playwright, poet and essayist who specialises in writing about people and events that “have been overlooked or marginalised in official records”. In this play she has taken as her inspiration the history of Penrith Regional Gallery & The Lewers Bequest and through it “traces the roots of Sydney’s early Modernist thinking and offers a fresh take on Emu Plains in the 1950s”.

The Wild Party

Book by Michael John LaChiusa and George C. Wolfe and music and lyrics by LaChiusa. Based on the narrative poem by Joseph Moncure March. Little Triangle. Reginald Theatre, Seymour Centre. Nov 15 – 24, 2018

Infamous jazz age showbiz parties, descending into booze and drug fueled orgies, drive this musical and the 1928 narrative poem which inspired it.

Moral Panic

By Rachel Perks. Dramaturg Emma Valente. Directed by Bridget Balodis. Darebin Arts Speakeasy. Northcote Town Hall Arts Centre. 14 – 24 November 2018.

Waiting at the tram stop after a performance of Moral Panic, I overheard a young woman say excitedly to a friend, ‘Did you see that?  It just got to me on so many levels!’  I agree.  Moral Panic may not make ‘sense’ in terms of the logic the playwright and director Bridget Balodis wish to eschew, but the play does ‘get to you on so many levels’.  There are passages where I struggled to get the literal meaning of what was happening on stage, but something – a line, an image, a suggested emotion – keeps gett

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