Month: August 2010

Advice for every writer: Write what you know. In the program notes from Tommy Murphy: “Memory is like writing a play. After about a year of writing, something clicked in the story and I was surprised to discover that much of the play is in fact underpinned by disputed memories. Perhaps this is a likely conflict in a family, among people who may have opposing interpretations of their shared history and shared identity. The voices in this play stem from people I know and love but as soon as they found their way to the page they were characters bending…

  Australian Brandenburg Orchestra present HANDEL CORONATION at the City Recital Hall Angel Place, Sydney. The Australian Brandenburg Orchestra is celebrating its 21st Birthday. It also paid tribute to Ken Tribe “our dear friend and patron of the Orchestra, who passed away last week at the grand age of 96”. Music by Henry Purcell and George Frideric Handel were represented by music for choir. The first work was Suite from Abdelazar, or the Moor’s Revenge, Z 570 by Purcell. Music arranged from the incidental music for Aphra Behn’s play, written in 1695 (Behn was one of the first professional female…

    Gaiety Theatre and Power Arts present KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN – The Musical. Music by John Kander. Lyrics by Fred Ebb. Book by Terrence McNally. Based on the novel by Manuel Puig. At the Darlinghurst Theatre, Sydney. On entering the relatively, small space of the Darlinghurst Theatre, the small company of performers, 11 in total, including 4 musicians, are on stage. Tuning, revising their instrumentation, pacing, glancing at the audience as we trickled in, nervously interacting with themselves, exiting and entering an upstage door, but mostly ‘imprisoned’ in the space and, finally, as the lights lowered in…

    Sydney Theatre Company in association with Artists Repertory Theatre, Portland present LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT by Eugene O’Neill at the Sydney Theatre. LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT by Eugene O’Neill is claimed, by some, to be the great American play, and certainly from my engagement with this play many times in the theatre and in the cinematic form with Katherine Hepburn and Ralph Richardson (reduced as it is), the affect has always inclined me to think so. This long naturalistic work winding through one day into the night with this Irish-American family, the Tyrone’s, in late summer,…