Reviews

Jazz sensation Emma Pask was five when Tom Burlinson rode into the heart of the nation in the 1982 movie The Man From Snowy River.

The launch of their singing careers was more closely aligned, with Burlinson debuting in 1990, and Pask being discovered by Jazz legend James Morrison in 1994.

At the QPAC Concert Hall on Friday night, the pair collaborated for only the second time on stage in Swing That Music, after recording an album and premiering it at Sydney’s State Theatre last year.

On the way to the tram stop after the opening night of Ron and Isobel, we were stopped at traffic lights and joined by a couple of fellow audience members.  They were still smiling, and the woman said to us, ‘Wasn’t it good?’  They were La Mama first timers; they’d picked this show as a bit of an experiment, they’d had a great time and they’d be going back to La Mama for more.  And why not?  Although we did say – tentatively - that Ron and Isobel is not exactly your usual La Mama show… 

Any play that boasts a maudlin alcoholic sister-in-law, a frisky vicar, a brow-beaten woman seeking liberation, an over bearing son with a seemingly mute chef girlfriend, and a suffocatingly controlling and overbearing ghost is bound to catch your attention. The Tea Tree Players’ current production of Life and Beth does that for all of the right reasons.

Disarming in its unpretentious frankness, Barbara and The Camp Dogs will make you laugh and have you cry.  It is bold, brassy, engagingly moving theatre with great songs.  It is just tremendous.

Having sold out in Sydney it is surely set to sell out in Melbourne.