Reviews

It's a brave choice to pull together a fully-realised musical, exclusively for a mere two-night stint at any festival – let alone one staged in Launceston, but with Tyran Parke's contacts, resources and passion, this kind of outrageousness has become de rigueur for the Australian Musical Theatre Festival, now in its 6th year.

University student performances of any of the arts' repertoire is often a worthwhile visit, providing the opportunity to view our future talent and even possible stars of the future. With a variety of vocal talent on display in this modern interpretation of an historic opera, indeed one of the first of its kind having been composed in 1640, the pedagogic talent of the university's staff were in full flood tackling a score out of the boundaries of the forthcoming Classical period and the famous composers who eventually brought opera to the forefront.

‘Esteemed members of the academy,’ opens the solo performer in Colin Teevan’s Kafka’s Monkey (adapted from Franz Kafka’s short story A Report to an Academy), ‘You’ve done me the great honour of inviting me to give an account of my former life … as an ape.’ So begins the peculiar story of ‘Red Peter’, an ape captured violently in Africa and brought by sea to England, where he sees ‘no way out’ but to abandon his true nature and adopt the habits of humans – a species he abhors – in ord

Louisa May Alcott was both a woman of her time and a woman before her time! A writer, teacher, nurse, abolitionist, feminist, believer in women’s suffrage, as well as a caring, supportive daughter, sister and aunt. Reading a summary of her life is like combining the female characters from Dickens and the Brontes and transporting them across the sea to a little town in nineteenth century America.