Category: Amy Hack

Alexander Berlage, the Director of The Mel Brooks Musical, YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN,has created a sterling record at the Hayes Theatre for revitalising, perhaps, even the resurrecting of Musicals that initially failed at the box office and critical response on Broadway. The musicals CRY-BABY (1990) and AMERICAN PSYCHO (2013) were given breaths of life by Mr Belage in Sydney. YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN, the musical appeared in 2007, based on Mr Brooks’ film also titled YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN from 1974. The musical received mixed reviews on opening on Broadway. Based on my experience of this present production at the Hayes the material that the actors have to…

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,…

CAROLINE, OR CHANGE, is a work, an autobiographical work from Tony Kushner. He is famous for ANGELS IN AMERICA (1993) – maybe, as well, for the screenplay of LINCOLN (2012). Born in Manhattan, his family moved to Lake Charles, Louisiana, when he was a young boy. He wanted to write about race relations, the civil rights movement,  African Americans and Southern Jews in the early 1960’s. This play comes from sorrow, from anger and grief, and also from hope learned from history, from recent history, which has shown us both the terrors and also the pleasures of change, which shows that…

THE INSPECTION, by Richie Black, at the Old 505 Theatre, Eliza St, Newtown, 25 January – 28 January. I saw this production without invitation and completely accidentally. I got my theatre’s mixed up and went to the wrong place. I couldn’t get to where I had promised, so, I stayed and watched this fledgling work instead. Maybe, this is my FIRST acknowledged symptom of an encroaching senility?!!!! Anyway, what was most pleasing about this accidental night in the theatre was the fact that THE INSPECTION, produced by Julian Ramundi, was a restricted showing of a new work. It had been…