Performing Arts Reviews:
2008–2022

This is a book by Vicki Baum. It is Grand Hotel. The Grand Hotel in Berlin. In Berlin in the early 1920’s. The culture, the city finding its way to continue survival post the Treaty of Versailles through the weighted demands made on the German nation in reparation for its provocation of World War I and before the Weimar Government was buried in the Hitler led National Socialist agenda – the rise of the Nazi party. The events that happen to people in a big hotel do not constitute entire human destinies, complete and rounded off. They are fragments merely, scraps,…

Cinema going is always a risk. At the moment with the re-opening of the cinemas there seems to be a dearth of product – new product. The BIG films are being held back from launching I guess to ensure a proper audience take-up to ensure a monetary return, as investment due for the risk taken. Fair enough. So, besides the reprise of many films that have had a proper screen time before the Coronavirus interruption we have been given, in new film, a lot of art film investigations. IT MUST BE HEAVEN, Directed by Elia Suleiman, in 2019, is one…

The cinema is back. I have an addiction for the cinema experience. So, a friend of mine booked the first morning session: 11am! I just love sitting in my seat as the lights go down, watching the previews and then the feature close to the front, to be enveloped by the width of the screen and surrounded by the sound. I have diagnosed the need to have the stimulation of the flicker of the large image otherwise I can become a little depressed, literally. No matter the quality of the film or its genre I feel so much better when…

I always try to keep my knowledge of the Performing Arts and the creators expanding to augment my vision and knowledge to teach my students with insights that only Knowledge can give me. So, here are some of my recent excursions and a brief response. BY WOMEN POSSESSED: A LIFE OF EUGENE O’NEILL By Arthur and Barbara Gelb (2016) The Gelb’s, husband and wife, spent a great deal of their creative energies researching and writing investigations into the genius and life of American playwright, Eugene O’Neill.They have written several books on O’Neill and some of the other people of the…

CORONAVIRUS reading time. Two books that are very different from each other but both easy and good reads. THE OFFING, by a young writer, Benjamin Myers, was published in 2019. It has had some ecstatic reviews. Set in England just after the end of World War II, Robert Appleyard decides to take a year off after finishing school, and explore the world outside of the Durham Colliery, in which his family have been miners from generation to generation. Is he destined to mine the mines? His family expect so. He is not so sure. This is the vague fuel to…

More light reads. ALL THE TEARS IN CHINA, by Sulari Gentill I found an Australian crime writer that has a series of books – 11 books – written about the character of Rowland Sinclair, a wealthy Sydney artist. Sulari Gentill is the writer. Each book is centred in a different background. The one I read: ALL THE TEARS IN CHINA, is set in Shanghai in 1935. Sinclair’s brother, Wilfred, runs the family business – a wool business and is unable to attend an important international negotiation meeting in Shanghai and seconds his younger brother, Rowland, to stand in for him…