Reviews

West Side Story is not an easy show to produce, requiring as it does triple-threat performers who can sing with an operatic range, dance as in the classical repertoire, and act. Professional companies have a hard time delivering on all these requirements, and for community theatre groups it’s even harder. It was a valiant try by SQUIDS but the youth and inexperience of the company defeated it.

Bad Girls the Musical is not bad at all, but great and thoroughly entertaining.

In the wake of Urinetown, Devonport Choral Society, and Director Sid Sidebottom, has delivered us another musical that many of us may not have heard of before. One should not let that hold them back.

Bad Girls is based on the U.K. hit cult-television drama series of the same name, set in a fictional women’s prison.

This is a coup for CTG ─ the world amateur première of Perve, which opened at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin in May 2011.

A highly charged piece, it is a cautionary tale for every young adult – or, in fact, for anyone with a computer. It captures our modern lifestyle, in particular our obsession with sex and more specifically the hysteria surrounding any whiff of paedophilia.

One of dramatic history’s most famous yet least produced plays, Eugene O’Neill’s 1928 Pulitzer Prize winning Strange Interlude, nearly gets a rare showing at the Belvoir. The bones of the modernistic milestone are there, but the original post-Great-War characters can only be perceived through a filter of laptops, smartphones and obscenity-laden Aussie language. For this is Simon Stone’s Strange Encounter, not O’Neill’s.