Reviews

The conductor Andrew Litton was so animated during the overture that he looked like he was trying to wind up a giant machine. The music, after all, was meant to simulate furious sex between 17 year old Count Octavian Rofrano and his much older married lover Feldmarschallin, Princess Marie Therese. An ecstatic fortissimo explosion of four horns is the climax, so when the curtain opens we see the lovers languishing post coutil on the royal bedspread. Much slapstick follows when the Princess fears her husband has arrived home.

In a similar style to Jesus Christ Superstar, Rent is a rock opera, with little dialogue. Coming from an operatic background, I found remarkable similarities between the genres. The story was dramatic, based on Puccini’s opera La Boheme; the music was powerful and highlighted the drama of the piece; and it might as well have been sung in Italian as I could hear less than half of the words.

A total knockout is the only way to describe the first Brisbane community theatre production of Schonberg and Boublil’s classic Miss Saigon by Ignatians. I have rarely been as moved by a community theatre production as I was by this stunning interpretation of the sung-through work based on Madam Butterfly. The piece has some of the most emotional music in the modern music-theatre canon, which was fully realized by a top-flight cast.

The Minister for Science is worried about the falling enrolment of university science courses. To stem the flow, he recruits handsome young researcher Andrew Dean, developer of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation—a process known to cause bad artists to draw ever so slightly better cats. Can Andrew maintain his intellectual integrity, or will he have to resort to making science sexy? And what does the mysterious TMS machine really do?