Year: 2017

Photo by Clare Hawley MELBA, A New Musical, Book and Lyrics by Nicholas Christo. Music by Johannes Luebbers, Adapted from the book “Marvelous Melba” by Ann Blainey. At the Hayes Theatre, Greenknowe Ave, Darlinghurst. 15 August – 9 September. MELBA, is a new Australian Musical. It has been nurtured through the New Musical Australia, Hayes Theatre Co’s musical theatre development program. In 2014 TRUTH, BEAUTY AND A PICTURE OF YOU, by Tim Freedman and Alex Broun was presented by the company. THE DETECTIVES HANDBOOK, by Ian Ferrington and Olga Solar was presented in 2016 and now MELBA, by Nicholas Christo…

Photo by by Marnya Rothe Sport For Jove and the Seymour Centre present, ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST, by Dale Wasserman, adapted from the novel by Ken Kesey, in the Reginald Theatre, Seymour Centre, Chippendale. August 3 – 19, 2017. ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST is best known as the Academy Award laden Milos Forman film, made in 1975, starring Jack Nicholson as Randle P. McMurphy and Louise Fletcher as Nurse Ratched. The essential core of the work is the battle between the Dionysian spirit with the formally controlled world that permits it to function for the supposed ‘greater…

Darlinghurst Theatre Company present, KINDERTRANSPORT, by Diane Samuels, at the Eternity Playhouse, Burton St., Darlinghurst, 28 July – 20 August. KINDERTRANSPORT, is an English play written in 1993, by Diane Samuels. Diane Samuels has written: In early November 1938 an intensive series of ‘pogrom’ attacks on Jewish property and arrests of people were launched in Nazi Germany. This became known as ‘Kristallnacht’, The Night of Broken Glass, and has subsequently been called “pogromnacht’ or Novemberpogrome’. In the wake of this calculated violence the British government was lobbied by Jewish humanitarian and Quaker organisations to provide refuge. Ten thousand permits were…

Photo by Marnya Rothe Outhouse Theatre Company and Mad March Theatre Company in association with bAKEHOUSE Theatre Company present, DRY LAND, by Ruby Rae Spiegel, at the Kings Cross Theatre (KXT), in the Kings Cross Hotel. July 28 – August 19. DRY LAND is an American play by a young writer, Ruby Rae Spiegel, played in a 90 minute no interval one act mode. It is a particularly interesting entry, for an audience, into a story concerning the issues of young women (American high school age), never really dealt with on stage (perhaps, Wedekind’s SPRING AWAKENING is an exception, Premiered in 1906).…

Photo by Brett Boardman Griffin Theatre Company and Queensland Theatre present, RICE, by Michele Lee, in the SBW Stables Theatre, Kings Cross. 26th July – 26th August. RICE is a new Australian play, by Asian-Australian writer, Michele Lee. It received the Queensland Premier’s Drama Award 2016-2017, and this production was first presented by Queensland Theatre in the Billie Brown Studio, in June, Directed by Lee Lewis. Michele Lee has been working around the edges of the mainstream theatres for many years, and this is the first major mounting of one of her works. Nisha (Kristy Best), the Australian-born grand-daughter of…

In the year 2017, in what I feel is a year of a cultural murmur of social progress, with the arrival of WONDER WOMAN, at out local cinemas, where many of my ‘girlfriends’ have been seen, or have reported, that they wept, because of some deep stirring in their human/female psyche, Evelyn Doreen Warburton O.B.E. (Doreen Gabriel), on the 17th July, passed away. I believe Doreen Warburton was a real life Wonder Woman of her time. In my living through theatre history I have benefited from contact with Five Wonder Women, without whom, I have often wondered how my life…