Year: 2013

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…

STORIES I WANT TO TELL YOU IN PERSON by Lally Katz in Joe’s Pub at the Public Theatre, New York. Crazy isn’t it? Life? Here I am in New York and I discover that Lally Katz is going to give a one night performance of her one person monologue (comic stand-up routine(?)) at Joe’s Pub, which is a cabaret space in the Public Theatre building way down town, at 9.30pm, on Sunday night. She follows, into the space, the monologist, Mike Daisey (he, of the notorious, THE AGONY AND ECSTASY OF STEVE JOBS monologue – Sydney Opera House Concert Hall),…

Photo by Sara Krulwich, The New York Times New York Theatre Workshop present ONCE, Book Enda Walsh. Music and Lyrics by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, Broadway, New York. ONCE, the musical, is an adaptation of a low budget, small Independent film from Ireland, directed by John Carney in 2007. Both, the film and the musical play, tell the story of a young Irish busker with a broken heart, called “Guy” who meets a young married Czech refugee called “Girl” (yes, really) and find that they can make music together. The twist is that…