Reviews

Truth, beauty, freedom and love are the mantras of the characters in the original film and each of these elements is echoed in the stage version. The show is incredibly truthful in its adaptation of the spirit of film by replicating and enhancing its colour and vibrancy. The transition to the stage is truly remarkable and demonstrates an enormous commitment to the beauty that runs through the story and its setting. The staging is nothing short of breathtaking.

Lockdown was hard and the future was grim for new theatre company 7th Floor Theatre, founded in 2019, yet they continued their work with play reads via Zoom, and along the way they bumped into the dystopian futuristic award-winning play Sprout, written by Jessica Bellamy in 2011.

Australia doesn’t really get pantomime. The Christmas tradition which the poms go berserk over, gets lost in the translation when summer is too hot and sticky to lure parents to make their children spend time indoors, when they could be by the pool.

The idea behind this production was a good one.  A  little country town,  which has a tomato sauce factory,   (in homage to the Belvoir Theatre’s own origins)  has to put on a panto to save itself from a big bad developer.

This Musica Viva programme should have been titled 'Proustian Paris: A Salon with Marcel' – as most of the chosen pieces are from the writer's revolutionary turn-of-the-century period that includes the Belle Epoch. And the represented composers are those whose works Proust would have been familiar with; some more intimately connected with his life, such as Reynaldo Hahn, the Venezuelan composer who lived in Paris and became Proust's lover. Appropriately the two artists met at a Parisian Salon.