Reviews

Emil and The Detectives

A play based on the 1929 novella by Erich Kästner. Slingsby Theatre Company. Director: Andy Packer. Playwright: Nicki Bloom. Lighting Design: Geoff Cobham & Chris Petridis. Composer & Sound Design: Quincy Grant. Designer: Wendy Todd & Ailsa Paterson. Gasworks Theatre, Melbourne. April 20 & 21, 2022.

After seeing this production I can see why it was winner of the 2018 Helpmann Award for Best Presentation for Children. Even before the lights went down, the audience, confronted with a sign saying 'Do Not Press' was instantly drawn into what wonder and mischief is about to conspire. For the next 70 minutes you could hear a pin drop!

Fame The Musical

By David De Silva, Jose Fernandez, Jacques Levy and Steve Margoshes. HAMA Productions. Directed by Adam Mitchell. Crown Theatre, Perth, WA. April 16 - 24, 2022

Fame The Musical is playing to enthusiastic Covid Capacity crowds at Crown Theatre. Locally produced by HAMA Productions, this is a bright and bounteous professional production that continues our Covid Legacy of top-notch locally produced musicals. Well directed by Adam Mitchell, it features a predominantly local cast that really pack a punch.

Hamlet

By William Shakespeare. Bell Shakespeare. Directed by Peter Evans. The Playhouse, Canberra Theatre, 4 – 16 April, 2022 and Arts Centre Victoria 28 Apr – 14 May.

A drop-dead brilliant performance by Harriet Gordon-Anderson is the shining beacon at the centre of Bell Shakespeare’s latest Hamlet. Back in February 2020, this production premiered at the Opera House as the first play of Bell Shakespeare’s 30th anniversary year. A fortnight later it was forced into hiatus by Australia’s first lockdown. It’s taken this long for the production to get the run it deserves.

To Schapelle And Back

Melbourne International Comedy Festival. The Butterfly Club. April 2022.

A true-blue Aussie is our Schapelle Corby, sentenced to twenty years for smuggling 4.2kg of marijuana in her boogie board bag. The new comedy show by Alex Hines To Schapelle And Back, in all its crazy mayhem, is a fuzzy expose about the tacky Australian Media and their piranha-like tactics for a news story, while raising issues around trauma.

Ross Noble: On the Go

Melbourne International Comedy Festival. Athenaeum Theatre, 188 Collins St. 30 March – 24 April 2022.

This show sees Ross Noble continually on the go in terms of his train of thought and his physical movement. Both indicate hyperactivity and there is a frequent suggestion of mania that is disarmingly captivating. Noble takes a very risky approach to stand-up comedy and has a very loose structure to the show, if any at all. This is part of the skill and charm that he displays which produces a complex web of impressions, observations and inner workings of an extremely busy mind.

The Boys

By Gordon Graham. Alchemy Artistic. Directed by Amy Kowalczuk. Produced in affiliation with Shadowhouse PITS and Sophie Benassi. ACT Hub at The Causeway Hall, Kingston. 13 – 16 April 2022

With terrifying realism, punctuated with moments of stylized beauty both sublime and dreadful, Alchemy Artistic’s debut production The Boys is a meticulously crafted exploration of masculinity at its most toxic. Loosely based on Anita Cobby’s murder, the horror here is not in graphic violence but in the hyperreal presentation of male brutality, an emotional landscape increasingly bulging with anger which devastates all when it erupts.

Bleep Bloop – a pop comedy album

Written & Performed by Lou Wall. Music Co-Writer James Gales. Melbourne International Comedy Festival. Trades Hall, Carlton. 11 – 24 April 2022

Photo by Emma Holland.

Empathy Training

Written and directed by Brendan Black and Martin Chellew. La Mama Courthouse, Carlton. April 12 - April 17, 2022

This play pokes gentle fun at the attempt to lead four high-profile, self-absorbed people to understand the impact of their actions and choices on others. They have been forced to do empathy training and the process used to try to develop some understanding in them forms the content of the play.

Roald Dahl’s The Twits

Adapted for the stage by shake & stir. Cremorne Theatre, Queensland Performing Arts Centre (QPAC), Brisbane. April 1 – 23, 2022

Fans of Roald Dahl’s cheeky children’s classic The Twits will know that it is one of Dahl’s typically non-PC tales of terrible, smelly, ugly characters who run a circus, play practical jokes and fight with one another – a lot! This gives the award-winning team at shake & stir – one of our premier touring companies – a wonderful setting to bring the tale to life for theatre goers, young and old.

Wayside Bride

By Alana Valentine. Belvoir Street Theatre. April 2 – May 29, 2022

Alana Valentine gives voice to stirring stories of outsiders who, rejected by mainstream religion, chose instead to be married by Ted Noffs at his famous Wayside Chapel in Kings Cross.  Noff’s Methodist superiors took a dim view of him prioritising social need over doctrine, and his defence against charges of heresy is Valentine’s main story.