Month: November 2019

SCHOOL OF ROCK – The Musical, is an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical based on the highly successful Paramount film (2003) Directed by Richard Linklater, that starred a hyper-charged Jack Black, with Joan Cusack, in support. Bursting on to The Capitol Theatre stage is a phenomenal performer, Brent Hill, who with impressive energy and immaculate theatrical instincts and a highly refined comic and musical technique, drives this show with a manic, magical force. His performance, as Dewey Finn, is astonishing to behold. But this version of the original film has expanded its attention to the children in the 5th grade classroom…

H.M.S. PINAFORE is a comic operetta written in 1878, by a famous double act: W.S. Gilbert, responsible for the Book (Lyrics), with Sir Arthur Sullivan who wrote the music. Mistaken identity, class warfare, sisters, (cousins, aunts) and sailors and the trickiest of tongue twisters abound in this nautical caper. H.M.S. PINAFORE is a sharp satire of the English social hierarchical system of the Victorian Age. (…) It answers the burning question(s) of who among equals is the most equal and whether love can level all ranks. At the Hayes Theatre, Director Kate Gaul, brings this Victorian work onto its 2019…

Rita Kalnejais is an Australian actor/writer (BABYTEETH), who now lives in London. FIRST LOVE IS THE REVOLUTION was written 5 years ago and had its premiere at the Soho Theatre, London. It originated, Ms Kalnejais writes in the program notes, when she was in a state of ‘culture shock’, encountering an English language that was so different from her natural Australian English, and in an amorous state with the foxes roaming the streets and backyards of the suburbs of London. Basti (Bardiya McKinnon) is a young adolescent, surviving a family of violent father, Simon (Matthew Whittet), and mentally ill mother,…

Lewis (Sean Keenan) is a character creation of Louis Nowra that appears in three of his plays, SUMMER OF THE ALIENS (1992), COSI (1992) and THIS MUCH IS TRUE (2017). In COSI, Lewis takes on a job directing some patients of a local mental hospital in a ‘therapy’ production of Mozart’s COSI FAN TUTTI. This is not Lewis’ choice but one foisted on him by the thespian leader of the hospital patients, Roy (Robert Menzies), and his enthusiasm will not be brooked. The play charts the development of the rehearsals and first performance, hilarious in its ups-and-downs, as it negotiates the…

Carl Sternheim was a German Playwright and Short Story writer. This play, DIE HOSE, was written by this Sternheim in 1910, during the reign of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Wilhelm was an infamously unstable (neurotic? paranoid?) leader of a world power who became what some people regarded as “Prussianized’. He became immersed in the romance of the ‘look’ of the military uniform which leant him to the conception and instrumentation of a highly militarised country with a civil government of rules and regulation that made way for an ultra socially conservative way-of-living for his populace. It was he who built a…

BABY DOLL, began its life as a film in 1956, written by Tennessee Williams. It was Directed by Elia Kazan as ‘a black comedy’. It was shaped from two one act stage plays by Williams: 27 WAGONS FULL OF COTTON (1945) and THE LONG STAY CUT SHORT or THE UNSATISFACTORY SUPPER (1946). Tennessee Williams adapted the screenplay as a play, himself, under the title TIGER TALE in the 1970’s, but this work at the Ensemble Theatre has been made by Pierre Laville and Emily Mann – long time collaborators at the McCarter Theater Center in Princeton, New Jersey. The film…