Year: 2010

    Company B Belvoir presents THE POWER OF YES – A dramatist seeks to understand the financial crisis by David Hare in the Upstairs Theatre, Surry Hills. On September 15th 2008 capitalism failed. The National Theatre of Great Britain commissioned David Hare to discover, uncover, what had happened. To try to answer the Queen’s question “Why did nobody notice?” A year later in September 2009 a ‘verbatim’ text had been ‘massaged’ by Mr Hare from an intense year of interview and research and opened in the Lyttelton Theatre. A character called The Author begins the performance: “This isn’t a…

Presented at the MARQUIS THEATRE by James M. Nederlander and James L. Nederlander, COME FLY AWAY – A New Musical. Concept, Direction and Choreography by Twyla Tharp, Vocals by Frank Sinatra (By special arrangement with the Frank Sinatra Family and the Frank Sinatra Enterprises). New York. The set (James Youmans) on the very capacious stage of the Marquis Theatre , is that of a nightclub, with a bandstand sweeping around upstage supporting a large live orchestra led by Russ Kassoff featuring the live vocalisations by Hilary Gardiner and the eternal sound of Mr Sinatra himself, sound tracked from recordings with…

THE GLASS MENAGERIE opened in Chicago on December 26,1944. The following year it opened on Broadway and played there for nearly two years. “It would be performed all over America and abroad, and Hollywood would film it. Next to OUR TOWN it would become the best-known American play. When the New York Drama Critics gathered in the Algonquin Hotel on April 10,1945, they took just fifteen minutes to award nine of their fourteen votes to THE GLASS MENAGERIE and acclaim it the best play of the 1944-45 season.”1 It is regarded, today, as the first of Tennessee Williams’ great contributions…

    SYNERGY PERCUSSION present STEVE REICH AT City Recital Hall Angel Place, Sydney. (Associated Event of the ISCM World New Music days). Steve Reich is internationally, along with Philip Glass, one of the outstanding contemporary composers of today. “Our greatest living composer’’- The New York Times”…the most original musical thinker of our time” – The New Yorker. “There’s just a handful of living composers who can legitimately claim to have altered the direction of musical history and Steve Reich is one of them” – The Guardian. My consciousness of him is fairly recent – the last decade, perhaps. But,…

    Dominie Drama in Association with Come Again Jnr. Presents THE THINGS GOOD MEN DO, written by Dan Muirden at the TAP GALLERY, DARLINGHURST. THE THINGS GOOD MEN DO was written in 2007. The play concerns Nick (Chad Richards) who along with his best friend Joe (Chris Leaney) are leading the good life in, relatively high flying incomes and a life style that is fundamentally morally indulgent and fancy free –alpha males as full-bore sexual game players and/or predators. We may have been there ourselves a few years ago, or certainly know of others who have been. But Nick…

Among others, Tom Hulce & Ira Pittleman, Berkeley Repertory Theatre in Association with Awaken Entertainment, John Pinckard and John Domo Present: AMERICAN IDIOT, Music by Green Day; Lyrics by Billie Joe Armstrong; Book by Billie Joe Armstrong and Michael Mayer at the St.James Theatre, Broadway. I have ten more shows from my USA trip to blog. So here goes. I arrived in New York Tuesday afternoon and went to see AMERICAN IDIOT at the St James Theater that night. This work was still in preview, but I chose to see it because I thought it would have the dynamic of…