Reviews

GARGANTUA at the Perth Fringe Festival was challenging for both performers and audience. Battling noise pollution from a neighboring venue, the actors were working very hard to be heard. Sightlines were also tricky, with much of the action happening on the floor in a flat venue. It was also extremely hot.

Falling to the Top, in its second incarnation (it premiered at community theatre Playlovers in 2012), lives up to its subtitle 'the musical trashtacular', in a trashier, brasher version for Fringeworld.

Authors Robert Woods and Tyler Jones have tightened the show and pared it down for the smaller venue and tight stage space, but it remains an extremely funny send-up of reality TV, the quest for fame at all costs, pop success and the music business.

THIS delightful musical was a fitting finale for the graduating acting students at Hunter TAFE’s Regional Institute of Performing Arts, with their skills giving vivid life to a demanding work.

The Drowsy Chaperone is subtitled A Musical Within a Comedy, and it shows an elderly man talking about his love for musicals and especially that of the fictional 1928 title work as he listens to an old vinyl recording of its songs.

The Ballad of the Plague Doctor is an odd beast (I use that last word very deliberately). It’s a piece of spoken-word storytelling, delivered by an onstage narrator who is hideously made up with pallid skin, dark circled eyes and pockmarked face, garbed in a black smock.