Reviews

You would be hard pressed to find a more exciting outdoor location for an opera set on a barge on the River Seine, than the one selected by the Sydney Festival.

This production is staged on board the Carpentaria – an historic light ship built in 1917 – the same year Puccini finished work on the music, on the outdoor deck of the National Maritime Museum at Darling Harbour.

Victoria Falconer is no ordinary host! She has a vast history of performing and directing across Australia and internationally. But for this month she has left her role as co-artistic director of the Hayes Theatre to become the cheeky, sexy dynamo who fronts the cabaret Smashed – the Nightcap at Wharf 1. She sings, plays multiple instruments, leads the band and controls the show with a bold, defiant hand, deftly reeling the audience in to her contemporary take on the “salacious cabaret dens” of the 1920s and 30s.

Since its first appearance at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2017 The Choir of Man has become a global musical sensation. Its enormous success at the Adelaide Fringe Festival in 2018 also confirmed its suitability and popularity for Australian audiences. A group of hardy and blokey men, who populate a typical British pub called The Jungle, belt out a variety of pop and rock songs with incredible energy, enthusiasm and emotion. They perform renditions of hits by legendary artists such as Guns N' Roses, Adele, Avicii, Paul Simon, and Sia and.

‘For men, will always be men; you change the regime, the lust doesn't stop’ – sung with glee by The Engineer, these words reflect the world beyond Miss Saigon. Whether it’s the wars in Vietnam, those wars more contemporary, or even this new production of the Boubil-Schönberg musical. Based on Cameron Mackintosh’s 2014 West End revival and presented by GWB Entertainment and Opera Australia, the show is famous for its spectacle, infamous for its controversies.