Reviews

Koorliny Arts Centre’s musical drama, End of the Rainbow, centres on Judy Garland’s comeback concerts in late 1968. A beautifully presented piece of drama, with a great singing performance, it is perhaps unsurprising that it is playing to sellout crowds.

Presented cabaret style in Koorliny’s smaller theatre, designer Jon Lambert transforms the compact stage into a London hotel suite, which in turn becomes a concert venue, revealing a hidden band. Director Brad Tudor’s costume design is an elegant and effective reflection of the era.

“I prefer to call it marriage equality. We don’t get ‘gay married’, we just want to get married like everyone else,” to paraphrase Craig Morrow, the young out gay man at the centre of David Atfield’s Exclusion. In many ways that is an essential truth about this play: it’s not gay theatre, it’s theatre which happens to have a few gay characters. Of course, being same-sex attracted has affected the lives of some of these characters profoundly, and in different ways depending on when they came of age.

‘There are times when the simple dignity of movement can fulfil the function of a volume of words’ – Doris Humphrey. The same can be said of Andropolaroid 1:1.

Andropolaroid premiered in 2010 and was based on the personal experiences that Yui Kawaguchi experienced during her emigration from Japan to Germany.

Malvern Theatre’s Tarantara! Tarantara! was a most enjoyable experience. I caught one of the shows towards the end of the run, and it was a slick, well-oiled production.

The small stage was well used, with three trucks being rolled out swiftly to change the scene and keep the action moving. As one piece of dialogue or song finished, other cast members were in place to move the show forward.