Reviews

Why mess with perfection? Neil Simon wrote his smash hit, The Odd Couple in 1965. A story of flawed friendships, it became a huge hit on Broadway and later as a movie and television series. In 2002 Simon reworked his masterpiece to produce an updated version, Oscar and Felix.

Eddie Perfect would be considered a major talent anywhere in the solar system. When The Beast burst onto the scene in 2013 at MTC, it took everyone by surprise. Carefully handled by Director Iain Sinclair, it was perhaps the best offering from MTC that year. Personally I believed we were witnessing the birth of a major new playwright in the style of Edward Albee. The play was flawed, but the potential was breath-taking.

The musical Grease at The Regal Theatre is a lavish, high energy production, produced by the Australian Performing Arts Network. It features professional stars alongside local, emerging artists and a supporting cast of young performers.

Guest artists Lynne McGranger (Miss Lynch), Carmelo Pizzino (Vince Fontaine) and John O’Hara (Teen Angel) add a great deal of pizazz to the show, with McGranger’s comedic teacher and O’Hara’s fabulous “Beauty School Drop Out” highlights of the show.

The temptation – in the age of Trump – to update and make ‘accessible’ Brecht’s satiric parable about the rise of Hitler and the Nazis is well nigh irresistible – and this production gives in to it.  The play is not exactly Brecht’s best work, but it is continually revived: it has a black, cynical and chilling humour and its warning of incipient fascism is, sadly, ever topical.  Written in 1941 and intended for the American stage, Arturo Ui was not, in fact, performed until 1958 – and in Germany.  (Hence the famous warn