Reviews

When your home is the Sydney Opera House, going elsewhere during renovations will always test the loyalty of your guests. Opera Australia is using the Capitol Theatre for its only mainstage production since the Joan Sutherland Theatre closed in May for a makeover. The choice is a tried-and-tested production of one of the most loved operas.

Once We Lived Here is an Australian Musical by Mathew Frank and Dean Bryant. This warm, touching musical has some very dark themes, but is ultimately a feel-good experience in the capable hands of director Andrew Baker and the new company Western Sky Theatre.

The Blue Room’s stage is transformed into a quintessentially Australian, rural property, with Rhiannon Walker’s set design featuring sunburnt colours, wood and tin. Katrina Johnston’s lighting design is beautifully emotive.

Headstones and eerie, blank-faced, white clad figures line the way as the audience is ushered along Cemetery Lane to Dural Musical Society’s production of The Addams Family. Their small stage is converted to the lonely home of the macabre characters that entertained television audience over 64 episodes between September 1964 and April 1966.

‘Move over Wentworth,’ says the publicity blurb for this production of Hilary Beaton’s play (published 1984) about seven women locked up in a gaol.  In fact, television series Wentworth is a ‘re-imagining’ of the Australian television series Prisoner, which debuted in 1979 and ran for 692 episodes till 1986.  Ms Beaton’s characters are not a copy of the television show, but given similar themes – shifting power relations, strategic alliances, injustice, dominance and dependence, frustration and boredom, the need for sex,