Reviews

The University Of Adelaide Theatre Guild’s latest production brings a visceral intensity to a very familiar and oft-revived play, that has become such a frequent staple of high school English classes it’s likely to have lost some of its edge to many seasoned theatregoers.

When Avenue Q won Broadway’s Tony Awards triple crown in 2003, some people were surprised. This deceptively simple musical (more a series of vignettes) which features “full frontal puppet nudity and other vulgarities” wasn’t the usual stuff that hit musicals were made of, but Robert Lopez and Jeff Mars channelled their inner kids to give us an Adults Only Sesame Street, and turned expectations upside down. Thirteen years later this new production proves that a good show is a good show, regardless of style or fashion.

Following a complicated and at times painful genesis, Thornton Wilder’s comedy The Matchmaker has endured since the mid 1950’s and has also resulted in its well-known stage and screen offspring, the musical Hello Dolly!

The Matchmaker is an unlikely blend of comedy of manners and farce, which Adelaide’s Independent Theatre makes the most of with a very good current production directed by the company’s Artistic Director Rob Croser.

Broken is not the play you imagine it might be. The story concerns a woman who rolls her car on a highway in the Northern Territory, and the bond she forms with a mine worker who saves her life. But this sharply written and unusually staged production goes much deeper, capturing a profound sense of what it’s like to live in the remote outback and how three isolated characters struggle for a sense of connection and meaning.