Reviews

10 years in a coma, trapped in a mine for two weeks, propelled to the edge of the stratosphere, falling 33,000 feet from an aircraft, beating a world record by 50 times over, winning $70 million or walking on a wire cable across to the North Tower of the World Trade Centre - Not In A Million Years showcases seven phenomenal true stories, some of which audiences will be familiar with and others they will learn of through this performance.

Melbourne City Opera continue to bring the lesser known Italian operas to the Melbourne community. La Rondine was Puccini’s attempt at an operetta and was not particularly successful. The opera is only known for one aria, actually a duet, but I found the rest of the opera very approachable with the usual Puccini sweep in the music.

As one of the characters in the play Almost, Maine says, “we got together to start a town but did not get any further so it’s almost a town.”

Almost, Maineis a story of people in Almost, a town in the state of Maine, U.S.A.

This series of vignettes, dealing with couples and their feelings for each other, is set in a U.S. winter. The sacrifices the artists made for their art are to be commended, considering that opening night was between 25 and 30 centigrade, and the audience were in light clothes and short sleeves.

Characters trapped in their terminally dull lives skull vodka shots with abandon in theatre that is anything but dull, as a cast of Australia’s finest actors rampage deliciously through Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya.

Uncle Vanya is my favourite play, stretching, as it does, seamlessly across the boundary between drama and comedy, and the fine membrane between surface wit and depressive pain.