Year: 2020

SONGS FOR NOBODIES is a work written by Joanna Murray-Smith. This performance is a revival production, it having been seen first some 10 years ago. Five nobodies tell us of their individual brush with fame, interactions with five extraordinary divas: Judy Garland, Patsy Cline, Billie Holiday, Edith Piaf and Maria Callas. All ten figures appearing in this 90-minute show are inhabited by Bernadette Robinson, she dressed in a simple black skirt and tailored black jacket of an indeterminate period fashion with a coiffured hairstyle that, similarly, is of an undefined time, that together radiate a visual cohesion to the setting,…

FAMILY VALUES, David Williamson tells us it is his second-last play. CRUNCH TIME, soon to premiere at the Ensemble Theatre will be his last. After 50 years of writing for the theatre, its time to put up the pen, type writer, computer keyboard, or what ever. The Stables Theatre was where we saw THE REMOVALISTS way back in 1971, so it is fitting that the Stables Theatre, then the Nimrod Theatre, hosts this play. On the eve of Roger’s 70th Birthday, dutiful wife, Sue, has organised a family get together with balloons and funny hats to mark the occasion and…

Redline Productions in association with the Sydney Festival 2020, present, BETTY BLOKK-BUSTER REIMAGINED, text by Reg Livermore, Mary Rachel Brown and Louis Nowra in the Spiegeltent, Hyde Park, Sydney. January 7-26th January. With the announcement that there was to be a re-imagining of the BETTY BLOCK-BUSTER show/phenomenon that had made its debut in 1975 at the Bijou Theatre in Balmain, confirming Reg Livermore a star – for he had made his mark of ascendancy to the ‘stars’ in our theatrical heaven as part of the ‘Tribe” in the 1969 production of the American musical HAIR, and spectacularly in the first…

ANTHEM, a work commissioned as part of the Melbourne Festival in 2019, represents the reunion of the writers of the 1998 play WHO’S AFRAID OF THE WORKING CLASS? to examine and tell us through story invention of the present state of the nation: Andrew Bovell, Patricia Cornelius, Melissa Reeves and Christos Tsiolkas are the word smiths, whilst Irine Vela provides the musical scoring. Getting together, they write in the program note: We sat around the table and thrashed out our ideas. We argued and yelled and laughed and when we got sick of the sound of our own voices we…

LADY TABOULI, is the latest work from James Elassi. Mr Elassi is a member of a Lebanese Maronite (Christian) family and its culture. All his works, that we have seen in Sydney (OMAR AND DAWN), concern themselves with the struggle of the young male (usually) struggling in the pull, on one hand , between the traditions of his culture and their demanding expectations and, on the other hand, the secret of the forbidden heritage of being a member of the abhorrent LGBTIQI community, as well. Danny (Antony Makhlouf) has been given the responsibility by his sister, Josephine (Nisine Amina) to…

2019 was a challenging year for myself with a health issue intruding on my ability to see as much theatre as I usually do. Of what I did see here is my summary of the year. Griffin Theatre at the SBW Stables in the first part of the year produced some work that was of great import for our cultural discussion and maturing.Two Sydney Festival offerings: A re-presentation of a political ‘feminist’ hit called LOVE AND ANGER, written and starring Betty Grumble. SINCE ALI DIED, performance piece created and performed by Omar Musa – a re-presentation dealing with minorities trying…