Reviews

Much like our own Bangarra Dance Company, The Okareka Dance Company transcends the restrictive label of “Dance” to bring us something ethereal that is made up of history, spirituality, philosophy and physicality. Yes, it is dance, and dance of the highest order, but it is also a lesson in integrity, tradition, belief. Combine all those things and you have one of the most powerful pieces of dance theatre in the history of contemporary dance.

Actors love playing villains – and Assassins delivers a whole fruitcake tin of them. The Hayes Theatre has baked the loonies together, inside the most stunning set, combined with the tastiest of ensembles, to create a positively scrumptious result. 

The biggest surprise is to read the program afterwards, when you discover that Sondheim and Weidman didn’t have to make much up about the motley crew of ‘successful’ and ‘unsuccessful’ assassins of the Presidents of the United States over the years.  

Elizabeth is a first-person account of being a cocktail bar pianist, the musician – maybe a very talented musician – tinkling away in the corner in some venue or other where the main business is drinking, chatting and hooking up.  Live performance muzak.  Rarely listened to with any attention, often ignored completely, interrupted, regarded as interruption, the pianist asked to ‘tone it down’ or ‘play softer’, or harassed by sexist put-downs and well-worn pick-up lines, cut off any time by recorded ‘house music&r

In the tradition of contemporary Irish theatre, Conor McPherson mixes humour and the macabre in this gritty black comedy. His characters are as graphically realistic as the cluttered, shabby room in which they meet – and under the direction of Maeliosa Stafford, they meet with the rhythm and cadence that make them uncompromisingly Irish in a play that moves frighteningly quickly at times – and just a bit slowly at others.