Reviews

Quartet has become a popular title on the amateur circuit. Its gold-class pedigree includes a West End season in 1999, and a film which starred Maggie Smith, Pauline Collins, Tom Courtney and Bill Connelly. It’s another in a series of plays and movies for an older audience like Ladies In Lavender, and it fits the bill nicely.

Billed as ‘an uplifting concert experience celebrating the women whose music changed the world’, Hear Me Roar - Unplugged was certainly a satisfying balm for our post-Covid cultural appetites during the 2021 Adelaide Cabaret Festival, full of great songs and, for the most part, setting up a joyous dance party vibe.  I am still trying to work out just what the ‘unplugged’ refers to though, given the very much electrified technical set up.  The first iteration of this show, conceived and directed by Trevor Ashley, was shown at the Sydney Opera House

The masked audience roared as Brian Nankervis took to the stage to begin the proceedings, first with a quick-fire round of questions to six selected audience members, four of whom would become the panel for the remainder of the evening. They weren’t random: they knew their stuff, answering their questions rapidly, correctly – and often in full song or (River)dance. And so, with the remainder of the audience applauding loudly, Lynne, Con, Simone and Max were seated behind their RocKwiz desks.

Ayesha Harris-Westman (Abbie) and Lucy Rossen (PB) are best friends in their final year of high school facing some of the usual challenges presented to teenagers on the brink of adulthood. This story is much less conventional than expected and deals with much more than the usual plots that often characterise coming of age narratives.