Reviews

Those living in the major cities of Australia have access to a plethora of entertainment: musicals, plays, concerts, cabarets, indie productions - the list is endless.

But for those in regional cities, the pickings are generally far slimmer, and what theatre there is, usually comes for one night only. And if you have a prior engagement…tough.

Being the first musical to be developed by the Australian Musical Theatre Festival (2019), this profit-share pilot production has been created to showcase local musical theatre talent, most notably graduates from the Griffith Conservatorium Musical Theatre program in Brisbane. Creator Bradley McCaw began writing what was initially conceived as a song cycle in 2018, gradually expanding the work through the addition of new material and a series of try-outs across various venues, including a recording of selected original songs.

The ten-year-old girl sitting next to me with her mother was utterly entranced – switching focus between the action on stage, and the TV screen behind us of the conductor Tahu Matherson waving his baton for the cast.

The music with its German folk influences - like the birthday cake house set at the end of the opera – was scrumptious.

Kelly Lim Harris wants to find love, but it appears that all the men whom she dates have been struck with Yellow Fever, not the acute viral hemorrhagic disease found in parts of Africa and South America, but Asian fetishization and obsession with women of East and Southeast Asian descent.