Reviews

With its potent tale of love and diversity, amidst New York’s impoverished yet still vibrant arts community living with the HIV/AIDS epidemic, 1990s rock musical RENT resonates powerfully today.

Baring the Drama Theatre stage to a black box - with a split-level podium as the central playing area, flanked by the almost obligatory moveable skeletal staircases and bridge - Dan Barber’s set design evokes urban decay. Unmatched chairs are strewn like kerbside detritus.

Melbourne Writers’ Theatre present a double bill of eleven short plays.  The first half is the six monologues of The Metropolis Monologues, directed and designed by Elizabeth Walley, and produced by Clare Mendes.  Staging is stripped to the bare minimum but that is no drawback here.  There is no clear theme uniting the six – except perhaps the aftermath of disaster in four of them, or a pressing problem in the present in the other two.  The monologues range from Michael Olsen’s alien (Marli van der Bijl) reporting defiantly to ‘Control&rs

Like Disney’s Newsies, this video of Kinky Boots is one of the best around because it captures the euphoria of a live performance. Recorded in London, the show, based on the movie, which in turn was based on a real story, has Charlie Price inheriting his father’s shoe factory and turning the business around by making shoes (or boots) for drag queens. The video springs from the London production of the show, a carbon-copy of Broadway, which opened at the Adelphi Theatre in 2016.

Shake & Stir’s acclaimed production of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is the perfect show to welcome audiences back into QPAC’s largest theater, the Lyric. Previously seen at the Playhouse, this grand little show has now been blown up to fit onto the Lyric stage. As it turns out, it has just been opened up a bit and  sits quite comfortably on it. That means that Craig Wilkinson’s brilliant state-of-the-art video projections now play an even bigger role in the production, as does Jason Glenright’s moody and appropriate lighting.