Reviews

Sammy Butcher is the sole surviving Indigenous musician from the Warumpi Band, which  began in his community of Papunya in NE Arnhem Land and toured enthusiastic communities and then cities here and overseas through the 1980s.  The first to sing in language, the Warumpi Band created anthems which radicalised Australians, black and white, into action on Aboriginal concerns and landrights. The charismatic lead singer, the late George Burarrwanga, was a performer to be reckoned with.  

The show opened to the very enthusiastic audience with the question, “Are you ready to be entertained tonight?” Frenetic athletic energy and a blistering pace held the loosely themed collection of items together and generally delivered an entertaining night of dance and song backed up with interesting staging.

The Master of Ceremonies, vocalist Bek Chapman added live performance and a good dose of audience involvement to the recorded music. Mandy Savickas added solo dance elements.

We all know that Chicago is Bob Fosse’s signature piece, embodying everything he had tried to do on stage for almost twenty years. It opened in 1975, and has played somewhere around the world ever since (49 years!!!) but is it too soon for yet another revival (this time of the 1996 Broadway production, already 18 years old) when it is only four years since we saw the last national production?

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.