Category: Imara Savage

Photo by Victor Frankowski Sydney Chamber Opera in association with The Song Company Australia, present LA PASSION DE SIMONE, an Oratorio. Music by Kaija Saariaho, Libretto and Lyrics, by Amin Maaloof, in Bay 17, Carriageworks, Redfern, as part of the Sydney Festival. 9th -11th January. LA PASSION DE SIMONE, is an Oratorio by Finnish Composer, Kaija Saariaho, to a Libretto, with Lyrics, in French, by Amin Maaloof. It featured an orchestra, choir and electronics. It premiered in 2006. A Chamber version was presented in 2013, with no electronics and the choir substituted with four vocalists. This is the version that…

Says Bernard Shaw in his Preface to the play of SAINT JOAN: Joan of Arc, a village girl from Vosges, was born about 1412; burnt for heresy, witchcraft, and sorcery in 1431; rehabilitated after a fashion in 1456; designated Venerable in 1904; declared Blessed in 1908; and finally canonised in 1920. She is the most notable Warrior Saint in the Christian calendar, and the queerest fish among the eccentric worthies of the Middle Ages. Though a professed and most pious Catholic, and projector of a Crusade against the Husites, she was in fact one of the first Protestant martyrs. She…

DINNER, is a British play, written in 2002, by Moira Buffini. In the original and published text, which is different to what we see in this production, produced by the Sydney Theatre Company (STC), Paige (Caroline Brazier), a famous gourmet hostess, invites a group of middle class intellectuals (not aristocrats, as suggested in the program) to a, supposedly, celebratory dinner, for the successful publication of her husband’s, Lars (Sean O’Shea), philosophic how-to-live a happy life tome BEYOND BELIEF. Wynne (Rebecca Massey), a not famous painter, arrives without her husband Bob, a politician, who has just run off with one of…

Sydney Theatre Company presents THE TESTAMENT OF MARY, by Colm Toibin, in the Wharf 1 Theatre, Walsh Bay, 13 January – 23 February. I trained as an actor and have spent a long time/career teaching actors, so, I am just saying, as someone who has a high regard for acting and actors: The last productions from the Sydney Theatre Company (STC) for their Sydney audience concluded five weeks ago (or so) with the closing of A FLEA IN HER EAR (9 actors), SPEED THE PLOUGH (3 actors) and THE WHARF REVUE (4 actors). In the mean time Christmas and New Year, and…

  Sydney Theatre Company presents Noel Coward’s HAY FEVER, in the Drama Theatre, at the Sydney Opera House, 11 April – 21 May, 2016. Noel Coward, at the age of 25, wrote and starred in THE VORTEX, opening in December in 1924, which settled into a long London run. Sheridan Morley tells us in his biography of Noel Coward, A TALENT TO AMUSE: On the principle that success breeds other successes, once THE VORTEX was an established hit both HAY FEVER and FALLEN ANGELS, which had previously been turned down by every management in London, went into rapid production; by…

    B Sharp presents FOOL FOR LOVE by Sam Shepard in the Belvoir St Downstairs Theatre. For me, Edward Albee, David Mamet and Sam Shepard are the three outstanding, living, American writers. There are others, but the recent contemporary past seems to place them in high regard nationally and internationally. Sam Shepard, oddly, though, seems to be relatively under represented in professional production here in Australia, and, again, relatively, exists as a ‘cult’ figure in the ‘underworld’ of Australian performance history rather than as an artist of the first rank. FOOL FOR LOVE has never been represented in the…