Year: 2010

SIX QUICK CHICKS @ RAVAL, The Macquarie Hotel, Level 1, 42 Wentworth Ave, Surry Hills. SIX QUICK CHICKS is a cabaret/burlesque company of rotating artists. In this new, very well appointed venue RAVAL at the Macquarie Hotel six chicks present a show that is full of brave quirky talents. A ‘hostess’ introduces a series of guests during her ‘cooking’ show. The guests, this night, were single ‘stand-up’ comic acts of various and contrasting exaggerated eccentricities. This form of entertainment is one of absolute risk and skill. RISK. ABSOLUTE. I can tell you, I’d never do it – for whatever the…

Australian Chamber Orchestra, ACO, present’s Tour One: Tognetti’s Mozart at the Angel Place Concert Hall. The Australian Chamber Orchestra augmented by “period” instruments, oboe, bassoon and horn gave a refreshing concert of four composers. All the works bar the Mozart being “firsts” for the orchestra. Schubert: Quartet Movement (Quartettsatz) in C minor,D703 ( 1820). Later Haydn: Symphony No. 46 in B major (1772). The Schubert is the surviving sections, introduction and coda, of the unfinished Twelfth String Quartet. The work has ‘a clear autobiographical program’ of a love affair that was unable to be fulfilled because of economics and the…

  Company B Belvoir presents THAT FACE by Polly Stenham at Belvoir St Theatre. One of the major centres for contemporary writing, “ a new writing powerhouse”, in the UK is the Royal Court. In all of its manifestations, it has been, for a very long time. My memory of my History of Theatre lectures, as a student, take me back to G.B. Shaw and Harley Granville Barker dreams of a National Theatre and this building. Certainly the John Osborne LOOK BACK IN ANGER ‘bomb’ resonated from there (1957) and changed what was, then, newly acceptable on our stages. From…

  DOUBLE EXPOSURE is part of a triple bill of Comedy and cabaret offerings that play on alternate nights in the Downstairs Theatre until the 14th February. The brochure for this show says “Two strange men, two strange minds, one big night of stand up comedy.” The first half of the program features Marty Murphy in HAPPY AND CLEAN, directed by Tommy Murphy. Marty Murphy, dressed in a period pin striped suit and shiny black shoes, with a white handkerchief tucked, necessarily in the suit pocket, and very neat hair, “takes us on a surreal journey as he reveals how…

  Sydney Festival, 2010 presents OEDIPUS REX & SYMPHONY OF PSALMS by Igor Stravinsky with the Sydney Symphony and Sydney Philharmonic Choirs in the Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House. I need to declare that I do not have any expertise in this field other than as an enthralled attendee at selected music concerts. I do not go to the concert hall as a matter of course but as a dilettante who either knows the work well or wishes to explore the composer or artists and their contribution. I do hold Stravinsky high on my curiosity chart and am not greatly…

    The following excerpt is pulled from the HAPPY AS LARRY blog: These programs are not the only inadequate programs. And at least they are free. Unless you can afford the $10 for the STC shows, [$12 for the more “elaborate” programs of the Festival – dramaturgically, generally, poor in comparison to the London experience] and many people can’t and won’t pay it, the artists remain virtually unknown, unless you gather around the poster on the wall in the foyer. You and a couple of hundred as you exit!!!!! Surely a handout on each seat or for the interested…