Reviews

The program sounds exhausting - four actors playing 139 roles in an Alfred Hitchcock suspense thriller with a twist.

What is exhausted in this devilishly clever two hour production is every ounce of imaginative stagecraft, every accent known and exaggerated, and every seat in QPAC’s Cremorne Theatre.

Queensland Theatre’s The 39 Steps is sold out, which is frustrating because the moment it finishes, there’s a great urge to get another ticket and see it again.

It is a farce, a murder mystery, a comedy, a romance and riotously good fun.

In Blue: The Songs of Joni Mitchell, Queenie van de Zandt offers a new take on songs from Joni Mitchell’s oeuvre and the role of life events in shaping Mitchell’s lyrics, presenting the latter partly through narration and partly through recordings of — or apparently of — others narrating events in Mitchell’s life, including Mitchell, her mother, and her daughter.

Toowoomba Repertory Theatre teed off their 2018 season with The Ladies Foursome, a comedy staged around a friendly game of golf. Three long-term friends (Tate, Margot and Connie), one player short due to the untimely death of their usual fourth (Cathy) are joined by a newcomer (Dory). Each hole on the course is a chance for the group to grapple with the game and parallel revelations about their friendships – especially why Cathy never mentioned Dory over many years of weekly golf meet-ups.

According to the Oxford dictionary, burlesque is “A variety show, typically including striptease.” However, as I discovered watching Hot Sauce Burlesque, it is so much more!

Yes, the girls do take their clothes off and show us what they can do with their tassels, but it is obvious that there is a real sisterhood between them. When not performing they are sitting at the side of the audience in robes encouraging each other.