Reviews

Australia doesn’t really get pantomime. The Christmas tradition which the poms go berserk over, gets lost in the translation when summer is too hot and sticky to lure parents to make their children spend time indoors, when they could be by the pool.

The idea behind this production was a good one.  A  little country town,  which has a tomato sauce factory,   (in homage to the Belvoir Theatre’s own origins)  has to put on a panto to save itself from a big bad developer.

This Musica Viva programme should have been titled 'Proustian Paris: A Salon with Marcel' – as most of the chosen pieces are from the writer's revolutionary turn-of-the-century period that includes the Belle Epoch. And the represented composers are those whose works Proust would have been familiar with; some more intimately connected with his life, such as Reynaldo Hahn, the Venezuelan composer who lived in Paris and became Proust's lover. Appropriately the two artists met at a Parisian Salon.

Will we ever get over our fascination with Transylvania’s most famous citizen? Since Englishman Bram Stoker first penned it in 1897, his epistolary novel Dracula has had countless reincarnations for the stage, film and television. This ballet version re-imagines the character as a ‘romantic villain’, a reinterpretation that was first used in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 movie Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Callum Straford is an engaging, amiable young bloke, who does sketches, stand-up routines, and sings his own songs, accompanying himself on piano or ukulele.  His material may veer briefly into satire, but mostly it’s about the trials and awkward interactions of contemporary life, such as an inept attempt to hook up at a party, a very decisive, even cruel dumping of a girlfriend, insomnia, the indifference of God, or talkback radio.  He is intermittently interrupted and corrected, to his chagrin, by a mentor/producer/director via the PA.  It’s the old self-referen