Reviews

Set in the multipurpose Space Theatre, Glorious Misfits is visually stunning, in your face, funny and entertaining all at once!

Artistic Director Ali McGregor has gathered seven of her favourite performers from the circus, burlesque and cabaret and formed a vaudeville show that has something for everyone.

The show is all around you, among the audience and on the stage, all set under a glittering mirror ball and multi coloured lighting.

In 1975 The Merry Widow was the first full-length original ballet created for the Australian Ballet and has been much loved ever since. Devised by Sir Robert Helpmann, the ballet has a long and esteemed pedigree for the company and this production does not disappoint.  There is a whimsical nature to Widow (in spite of some thankfully outdated ideas about love and marriage) that leaves the audience feeling delighted and charmed as they leave the theatre.

A beautiful young woman in a shimmering silver dress, strappy heels and Jackie Onassis shades sashays across the stage in waltz time. Obsessed with this vision, Propishchin waltzes close behind her, his eyes half-closed in delirium, nostrils flaring as though to smell her. But then, the image evaporates. Right there, Propishchin’s mind breaks. It’s a moment of agonising poignancy, and one that doesn’t exist in the original story as Gogol wrote it. The scene captures the tone of The Street’s production of Diary of a Madman.

Somewhere in the Bronx, in a scrappy, empty bar, a woman sits alone, her coiled, angry misery overlaying her striking looks.  A younger man slouches in with a jug of beer and sits at another table.  His knuckles are bloody, his face is cut and bruised, his hoodie dirty, his boots held together with gaffer tape.  They are two damaged isolates.  It will emerge that he fears he killed a man the night before.  His workmates call him ‘The Beast’ – and he is afraid of himself.  We realise she is contemplating suicide.