Performing Arts Reviews:
2008–2022

PHOTOGRAPH 51, is an American play by Anna Ziegler (2008). It is a one act work of about 90 minutes length and it focuses on a remarkable scientist Dr Rosalind Franklin (Amber McMahon), leading a team of male comrades in the investigation into the “secret of life” using x-ray crystallography to reveal the atomic structure of DNA – the famed Double Helix. This discovery happened in 1951 in the King’s College laboratory in the city of London which was still recovering from the collateral destruction of that city via the second World War. This discovery won the Nobel Prize of…

SIX The Musical is back. I first saw it in February, 2019, a few years ago (review here), in the Studio at the Sydney Opera House. It has, despite the Covid-19 pandemic, survived the battering and postponements of cancellations of performances to bounce back here in Sydney and to some of the rest of Australia. It has swept back into the West End in London and all round the UK and onto New York, Broadway, where it won two Tony Awards for Best Original Score (Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss) and Best Costume Design (Gabriella Slade). 4 Drama Desk Awards…

A month and a few more weeks ago at the RSL Club in Paddington, Endangered Productions under the Direction of Christine Logan, 80, or so, performers took a curtain call which was enthusiastically given by an audience who had just witnessed an Australian first: a presentation of a performance (edited) of the play PEER GYNT (1867), by Hendrick Ibsen, Translated by May-Brit Akerholt, with the incidental music by Edvard Greig (1876) under the Direction of Peter Alexander. Meanwhile, the Sydney Theatre Company (STC), Sydney’s Leading company and, arguably, Australia’s leading theatre company, were showing their adaptation of Anne Bronte’s only…

GODS AND LITTLE FISHES, is a beautiful gem of a play that the writers control with unerring sensitivity. It is a play about Grief. Its narrative wrapping/content is the recall of a terrible set of circumstances of 1960 that disturbed the provincial blanket of protection that Sydney wore – perhaps, Australia, as well – when an ordinary, suburban Bondi family won the Sydney 0pera House Lottery of $100,000 – a fantasy dreamt by all of us a big cheer – only to have a stranger call on the telephone a month later with a demand of extortion in exchange for…

The MGM Musical film of 1951, AN AMERICAN IN PARIS, Directed by Vincent Minnelli, made famous by the dancing of Gene Kelly with a famous film debut performance from Leslie Caron and a Musical Score with Lyrics by George and Ira Gershwin, is the inspiration for this stage Musical. This stage work has been adapted with a new Book by American playwright, Craig Lucas, under the direction of  British Choreographer, Christopher Wheeldon. The first significant change is the Setting of the time it sits in, originally in the film a more comfortable early, gradually resurgent late 1940’s, early 1950’s Paris,…

  Alfred Hitchcock had decided he needed a change of style and, particularly, after the twisted Freudian themes and motifs of his then disparaged VERTIGO – released in 1958 (it, belatedly has become  regarded as a Hitchcockian Masterpiece) – he began a treatment of THE WRECK OF THE MARY DEARE, based on a novel by Hammond Innes with screenwriter Ernest Lehman. It didn’t work out. They quit on it. Being under contract they had to produce something for M.G.M. , so the Cold War suspense thriller, romantic-comedy, NORTH BY NORTHWEST, gradually crystallised. It seems that Hitchcock had collected in his…