Reviews

Three weeks after Cinderella, Victorian Opera introduced another opera for children with Richard Mills’ version of The Pied Piper. Set in the Australian town of Hamelin, this was a variation on the well-known fairy tale, with a different ending.

Apart from the principals, the production involved a number of children who performed as either rats or school-children. Also assisting was an ensemble of community choristers. What a great experience for them!

So where do you start with a convoluted, inexplicable plot like this one?

Perhaps with the singing, which is sublime - even if the often wooden acting offers little help in sorting out the story. Verdi himself had two goes at this medieval tale set in the politically fractious court of a Doge of Genoa.  

For this Opera Australia production in 2000, director Moffatt Oxenbould set it at the time of Verdi’s second attempt, in 1881, to underline the composer’s intention to remind his Italian audience of the worth of their newly reunified nation. 

This iconic work by Edward Albee is a play of its time. When it opened in 1962, it was acclaimed as the play that would lead a revolution in American playwriting. But because it dared to portray a picture of American life that was less than ‘wholesome’, it was also criticised by those who found it “obscene, morbid and decadent”. Yet the play took its place as the harbinger of a new wave of theatre that did what theatre is meant to do … reflect society and question prevailing values and behaviour.

Set in three time frames – early 19th century Australia, the suburban present and some kind of dog-eat-dog, dystopian future – Zoe Dawson tracks a young woman who somehow survives ‘impossible odds’ and creates… nothing.  It begins promisingly enough with some clever staging from director Declan Greene, ingenious set design from Romanie Harper hand-in-glove with Amelia Lever-Davidson’s lighting.  Caroline Lee and Ruby Hughes are Mother and Daughter, felons passing themselves off as airs-and-graces free settlers in this land of opportu