Reviews

Pop Showcase

Created, Arranged, and Performed by the Third Year Bachelor of Popular Music Students from Queensland Conservatorium of Music. Conservatorium Theatre. 10 October, 2025

At the Queensland Conservatorium’s Pop Showcase, the air shimmered with nerves, pride, and pure possibility. These weren’t just songs, they were milestones, each one marking the culmination of years of study, collaboration, and artistic self-discovery. The third-year Popular Music students stepped into the spotlight to present an evening of original compositions, including works that were heartfelt, inventive, and unfiltered in their youthful ambition.

THE BLOK!

Devisors: Kamarra Bell-Wykes, Alexis West and Chatbot GTP. Company: A Daylight Connection. Melbourne Fringe. Director and Co-Director: Kamarra Bell-Wykes and Carly Sheppard. Sound Design and Musician: Andrew James. Lighting Design: John Collopy. Stage Manager: Holland Brooks. Northcote Town Hall Arts Centre, 189 High Street, Northcote VIC 3070. 8 - 18 October 2025

The Master (Carly Sheppard) has been chosen to save the Universe including Earth from destruction through the production of an artwork. At first, The Master revels in the task, but the reality of the pressure leads to an artist’s block and attempts to produce the needed work consumes the rest of the play. Carly Sheppard takes this surreal proposition and wrestles it into an engaging, humorous, and challenging event.

Fate

Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. Adelaide Town Hall, King William St, Adelaide. Oct 10-11, 2025

The Adelaide Symphony Orchestra have once again excelled with a perfect program selection for their latest presentation, Fate, conducted by Martyn Brabbins.

Before the main program we are treated to an Acknowledgement of Country by Jack Buckskin arr./orch Ferguson – Pudnanthi Padninthi. With no conductor in sight, the piece is led by the rhythmic clapping of boomerangs from the percussion section. An orchestral reminder of the country we are all sharing.

The Glass Menagerie

By Tennessee Williams. Ruby Productions. The Ruby Theatre, Level 1, 15 Evan Street, Penrith. October 10 – 18, 2025

Under the direction of Anthony Brown and Ann Attwood, this production eloquently captures the fragile beauty and melancholy of memory, breathing life into the tale that first touched Attwood during her high school years in the 1970s.

Set against the backdrop of 1940s St. Louis, the play unfolds within the modest apartment of the Wingfield family.

The Laramie Project

By Moisés Kaufman and Members of the Tectonic Theater Project. New Theatre, Newtown. October 7 – November 1, 2025

A diminutive gay student named Matthew Shepard was tied to a prairie fence in Wyoming and bashed to death in 1998. He never knew it but Matthew left a remarkable legacy.

I’m Gay But I Know Jesus

By Melody Rachel. Melbourne Fringe. Theory Bar. Oct 10 – 12, 2025

Melody Rachel has a story to tell, she is same-sex attracted and that is inconsistent with her fundamental evangelical Christian upbringing.

So she left New Zealand, left the church and started dating women. But in time, that left a God-shaped hole in her life.

In that hole however she continues to talk to God and comes to a number of important realisations including that God talks back, that being lesbian is not a sin, that using people is a sin, that sorrow is not the same as despair and that it wouldn’t be called faith if we were all certain. 

Chip On Her Shoulder

By Jen McCauliffe. Melbourne Fringe Festival. Theatre Works. Explosives Factory. 8 – 11 October 2025

Kate (Vanessa Buckley) is addicted to potato chips, always has been. Her mother chipped her about her weight for it when she was a child.  Now she’s grown up, living alone in New York, a hospital nurse, but really an aspiring actor who does a lot of auditions but never gets cast.  A pushover with men.  Well, unlucky in love (if ‘love is what you call it) usually...

How to Art

Presented by Rat Bags Theatre and Claudia Harris. Melbourne Fringe. The Meeting Room, Trades Hall. Oct 8th - 19th, 2025

How to Art is a much-needed mockery of high art performed by three virtuosic physical theatre performers. The show is a playful satire inspired by the inconceivable BS surrounding Maurizio Cattelan’s artwork ‘Comedian’, in which he duct taped a banana to a wall and called it art. It sold to a cryptocurrency tech jock for $US6.2 million in 2024. Personally, I get so damn delighted to see fringe artists responding to real life events like this. This Maurizio Cattelan debacle was so grotesque, I am stoked that these New Zealand performers chose to push against it.

Brothers Bare

By Jessica Fallico & Iley Jones. Melbourne Fringe Festival. Ranting Mime Productions & Theatre Works. Explosives Factory, Inkerman Street. 7 – 11 October 2025

If Sondheim’s fairytale mash-up Into the Woods is a wry, ironic, comic and a gently moral tale, Brothers Bare is subversive, confrontational (but funny) and very black.  Playwrights Fallico and Jones depict the hidden subtext, not just of one, two or three fairy tales but the dark insidious ideology of the fairy tale world – the stories told and retold, shaping the minds of children – especially girls - and on into their futures.  Models of passivity – until rescued by a Prince or a Fairy Godmother.

Chicken in a Biscuit

By Mary Rachel Brown and Jamie Oxenbould. Fixed Foot Productions. Director Mary Rachel Brown. Old Fitz Theatre. 3 – 18 Oct, 2025

Do you ever wonder what your dog is trying to tell you? Or why your cat scratches at the sofa rather the scratching pole that cost a fortune? Or why some pet owners appear obsessive?

Mary Rachel Brown and Jamie Oxenbould have gone beyond wondering! In Chicken in a Biscuit they’ve imagined life through the eyes of an aging labrador, a haughty Burmese cat, a yappy protective terrier – and three quite fanatical animal lovers.

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