Month: October 2013

Photo by Kurt Sneddon James Anthony productions and George Youakim in association with Youakim Investments presents DIRTY ROTTEN SCOUNDRELS, Book by Jeffrey Lane. Music and Lyrics by David Yazbeck at the Theatre Royal, King St. Sydney. DIRTY ROTTEN SCOUNDRELS is the best production of a musical that I have seen in Sydney for a very long time. DIRTY ROTTEN SCOUDRELS is a kind of ‘buddy-grifter-screwball’ comedy with music. The Book by Jeffery Lane, based on the 1988 film written by Dale Lauder and Stanley Shapiro and Paul Henning – starring Michael Caine and Steve Martin – is a preposterous confection…

Belvoir presents SMALL AND TIRED by Kit Brookman in the Downstairs Theatre at Belvoir St Theatre, Surry Hills. SMALL AND TIRED by Kit Brookman is a new Australian play about family. About family and the secrets of families. About the individuals that make up a family. About the secrets of each of the individuals that make up that family. The son (Luke Mullins) returns home after a long self-exile to arrange his father’s – an ex-army officer’s, – funeral. His estranged mother (Sandy Gore) has been reluctant, and his emotionally disturbed sister (Susan Prior) is unable. The internal politics of…

Sydney Theatre Company presents The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of ROMEO AND JULIET by William Shakespeare in the Drama Theatre at the Sydney Opera House. Kip Williams, the Director of this production of ROMEO AND JULIET, tells us in his program note: … When I came to reread ROMEO AND JULIET with a mind to direct it, I was struck less by the differences between the Montagues and Capulets, and more by the similarities: excessive wealth, unchecked ego, dominant patriarchs, packs of arrogant young men. The ancient grudge between the families felt like it could easily be the kind…

Photo by Jeff Busby John Frost by arrangement with Paul Nicholas, David Ian and Robert Stigwood present GREASE at the Lyric Theatre, Star City, Sydney. This show began. Those famous opening musical sounds. BOOM! A song in… then: “Grease Is The Word” and “Summer Nights”. Boom, boom! I have never seen this musical on the stage before. And, when, in the Lyric Theatre the other night, I heard those two songs I was transported to one of those long lost cinemas in George St, where Angela Punch, Mark Harrison and I jumped out of our seats and danced to the…

A TIME TO KILL. A New Courtroom Drama. Based on the classic bestseller by John Grishman, adapted for the stage by Rupert Holmes at the Golden Theatre, Broadway, New York. A TIME TO KILL is a new play adapted by Rupert Holmes from the first novel of John Grisham (1989). It has also been made into a film (1999) with Kevin Spacey, Matthew McConaughey, Sandra Bullock and Samuel L. Jackson. This is a classic Broadway commercial venture and the reason I went to see it. It is a courtroom drama and has all the sensational twists and turns of that…

Weatherboard Theatre Co and True West Theatre, present THE WESTLANDS by Dale Turner in the Rafferty’s Theatre at Riverside, Parramatta. THE WESTLANDS by Dale Turner opens with a community response to a bushfire alert in the Westlands. It was a sobering beginning to this performance in Parramatta, considering it was last Thursday, the 17th of October, and New South Wales, and the greater spread around the City of Sydney was dealing with one of the worst fire alarms in its history. We could see the smoke plume from the Mountain fires, trailing across the sky outside, through the windows. We…