Reviews

It is interesting that while Disney movies and animated features don’t really feature any explicitly queer characters, their subject matter tends to play to queer sensibilities.

A row has broken out on social media after reports that Jack Whitehall will play the first major openly gay character in a Disney film.  “He is playing a gay man – one who is hugely effete, very camp and very funny” (The Sun, UK).

Set in the nightclub Buenos Tiempos, we witness the lead-up to the show and the first part of the performance for the evening. When star of the show Scarlet Serenade dies in mysterious circumstances, the audience split into teams to search for clues, interrogate suspects and solve the mystery.

The poor victim, Scarlet Serenade, is nicely played by Jocelyn Campbell, and although we don’t spend a great deal of time with Scarlett, we do get to see her perform.

Queensland Theatre’s first production for 2020 celebrates 50 years of seasons for the company, and also 50 years of plays by Australia’s greatest living playwright David Williamson.

Emerald City is one of Williamson’s most successful plays. Premiering in 1987, it was a rip-roaring satire on the Melbourne and Sydney arts rivalry and the film and television industries.

The arrest in 1988 of 100 gay rights protesters at Hobart’s Salamanca markets was

a touchstone not unlike the Mardi Gras arrests in Sydney a decade earlier.

Campaign Decent’s largely verbatim, thoroughly researched play charts the surprisingly complex strategy of activism and brave confrontation which lead to Tasmania’s gay law reform a full nine years later.  Until 1997, gay sex could get you imprisoned for 21 years.