Reviews

The musical Grease at The Regal Theatre is a lavish, high energy production, produced by the Australian Performing Arts Network. It features professional stars alongside local, emerging artists and a supporting cast of young performers.

Guest artists Lynne McGranger (Miss Lynch), Carmelo Pizzino (Vince Fontaine) and John O’Hara (Teen Angel) add a great deal of pizazz to the show, with McGranger’s comedic teacher and O’Hara’s fabulous “Beauty School Drop Out” highlights of the show.

The temptation – in the age of Trump – to update and make ‘accessible’ Brecht’s satiric parable about the rise of Hitler and the Nazis is well nigh irresistible – and this production gives in to it.  The play is not exactly Brecht’s best work, but it is continually revived: it has a black, cynical and chilling humour and its warning of incipient fascism is, sadly, ever topical.  Written in 1941 and intended for the American stage, Arturo Ui was not, in fact, performed until 1958 – and in Germany.  (Hence the famous warn

Although it’s thirty-years old, Christopher Hampton’s much-praised adaptation of Choderlos de Laclox’s epistolary novel about salacious sex games in the salons of Parisian aristocracy in 1782 still has the power to connect with a modern audience. Revenge and seduction are the key themes of the piece in a plot that has the Marquise de Mertueil challenging her former lover, the Vicomte de Valmont to seduce the convent-reared, 15-year-old Cecile. He accepts, but his real conquest in the amour stakes is to bed the religiously devout Madame de Tourvel.

With limited opportunity to attract widely recognised talent, it's possibly predictable that a startup dance company's public debut would set out to distinguish itself in choreography, dance style, music, or production.  Strings Attached, Australian Dance Party’s inaugural offering, is a medley of pieces that set about distinguishing itself on all four counts.  Other than by using the one set (beautifully decorated with string nets) and more-or-less the same cast, what chiefly connects the pieces in Strings Attached is an impression that danc