Reviews

Not Quite Committed Productions is the labour of love of Tessani Wells and Ella Ragless. Having just finished high school, these two young people have devoted the last six months to creating and staging a musical from the ground up. Full disclosure, Ella is a good friend of my daughter Rouane.

Tessani and Ella have basedLove’s Labour’s Lust loosely around the story of Romeo and Juliet, transferring the setting to the modern era. Romeo becomes a lovelorn fool, Juliet is the epitome of a dumb spoilt brat, and the humour is eyerolling teen sarcasm.

An alarm wakes a man, Guy (Justin Hosking).  ‘Is it now?’ he says.  ‘I thought I had more time.’  This is a play about dying and resisting dying and clinging to what constitutes – good or bad – being alive.  The title, Wakey Wakey, might be an admonishment to us: ‘Wake up – you may think you have ‘more time’, but…

Cinderella is the Queensland premiere of a relatively new one-act play by actor and writer Matthew Whittet. It is a sharp debut by Myths Made Here, a fresh Queensland-based group that includes director, Daniel Evans, Cinderella’s two stars, Amy Ingram and Thomas Larkin, along with producer and educator, Annette Box, and producer, Tara Hobbs. I’m sure we will hear more from this creative collective in the future.

Justin Fleming takes Molière’s satire/farce and makes it even more farcical; he up-dates its language to a distinctly Australian idiom with contemporary references and clunky-but-irresistible gags, even while retaining the convoluted plot of the original – and the occasional rhyming couplet.  Director Peter Evans and a great cast - who all turn out to be very able comedians – invest all their skill in Mr Fleming’s take and run with it all the way.  The result is a hugely entertaining romp.