Month: August 2008

CIVIL was first created in 1996 as a five person piece but evolved into a solo work for the director Robert Pacitti which he then performed until 2003 when it the was re-committed to Richard Eton (Dicky). Richard Pacitti is a guest artist at the LIVEWORKS Festival for Performance Space over the next two weeks. He is creating with Australian Artists a project: FINALE which will be premiered next Friday the 5th of September for three performances. Richard Pacitti is the Artistic Director of Pacitti Company and creator of the SPILL Festival Of Performance-London’s premier biennale of experimental theatre and…

In the program notes there is the Bumming With Jane poem by Charles Bukowski and a quote from Doris Day. This play has all the inclinations of the middle class romantic fantastic fawning over the glamorous grunge of Bukowski but with a 9o% feel of the world of Doris Day in its bourgeois sentimentalities (Drunk is romantic. The life of the self disenfranchised is a positive experience especially if you have love to get you through. etc) (Crazy, because even though darling Doris is quoted as saying “The important thing in life is just loving and living.” she always had…

  This is not my skill area. However it is part of my Theatre going life and I just thought for those of you out there who do not go to concerts I should pass on my experience. Concert going for me was boring. I work in the Performing Arts and always felt that I needed visual distraction to keep me focused. I don’t know when, but several years ago, out of a cultural guilt I guess, I thought I should attempt to experience this Art Form. Something happened at one of these attempts and I became hooked. I am…

“Write what you know.” In almost every biography one has read about the great literary figures this “write what you know” is a constant mantra of advice. This is what Mr Murphy has gone on to do so well. Beginning with TROY’S HOUSE a “story of a group of teenagers at the end of their schooling”. STRANGERS IN BETWEEN about a young boy fleeing his home and attempting to discover who he might be in the alien world of a big city: Sydney’s King Cross, and confronting his relationship with his family through the demands of his brother. HOLDING THE…

ORLANDO was first performed on 27th January 1733. This is a new production for Opera Australia. It is sung in Italian with surtitles. Several years ago this company presented one of my favourite nights in the theatre when I attended their production of Handel’s GIULIO CESARE. I remember the original season having a vividly sung, conducted and played performance enhanced with consummately witty and dramatic acting with a set and costume design that was functional, witty and beautiful. It was a sublime night in the theatre. It scored high on my Ecstasy chart for performance. I had been wetted in…

The Arabian Nights that I know from my childhood memories and also from my occasional foray into the ONE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS (Five volumes long) that I have at home, begins with a betrayed husband, a cuckold, the King Shahrayar who in vengeful grief has his first wife beheaded, and then declares that from now on he would marry for one night only and the next morning would order the Vizier to have the Headsman cut off his new wife’s head. For a thousand nights he married and the next day each of the thousand wives would perish. Until…