Reviews

I am well aware of the various tertiary training courses available to music theatre students, but less familiar with the options available for younger enthusiasts. So I was interested to see this offering from the Young Australian Broadway Chorus. They hold classes for five to eighteen-year-olds and obviously the advanced students end up participating in their major production.

And major it certainly was with a cast of “thousands”. Well it certainly appeared like that on the small stage at the Union Theatre. And what a talented bunch they were.

The opening night performance of The Crucible was arguably the finest dramatic production seen in Townsville for some time.

The cast list read like a “Who’s Who” of strong local performers, from the professional company actors through to the aspiring young members of the Bridge Project.

Brendan O’Connor, in the role of John Proctor, delivered a superb performance. His character was powerful, right through to the climactic moment where he is torn between saving his life or his moral values. This was O’Connor at his very best.

Toby Francis has one of those voices. He can sing clean and crisp notes in the stratosphere one moment and warm, chesty tones down two octaves the next. Effortlessly.

Jim Steinman’s music is a good fit, then, to show off Francis’ incredible range and superb voice.

Love and Death and an American Guitar tells two stories simultaneously – that of Steinman’s constant struggle for royalties, respect and recognition, and the attempt to finish writing his incomplete musical, Neverland.

It’s Me… Mandela, ostensibly about Nelson Mandela’s life, actually has little to do with Mandela; it concerns mostly Mandela’s relationship with his brother.  Without giving too much away: the depicted relationship is entirely fictional.  The opening narrative mentions, from the perspective of an eight-year-old in a seventeen-year-old’s body, Mandela’s relevance to the end of apartheid; everything else in the play, though, might have related to an entirely fictional character.  In fact