Reviews

Playwright and novelist Jeff Baron has many plays to his credit, none more performed worldwide than Galleon’s latest production, Visiting Mr Green. Experienced director Vicky Horwood took on the task of breathing new life into this two-hander. A story told by co-protagonists, takes place in the Upper West Side Manhattan apartment of Mr Green – an elderly Jewish gentleman with a cantankerous nature, who is still mourning the loss of his wife, Yetta.

The Summer of the Seventeeth Doll is a truly great play. This production, the first since the recent death of Ray Lawler aged 93, never allows the audience to forget that fact. Dominating the stage, a large photograph of Lawler is suspended.

Robert Jarman has eschewed the standard box set. Whilst beautifully dressed, the stage blacks frame the action like the dusty swags of a studio portrait. There is a piano and a table and the clutter of seventeen years, but none of it is as real as Olive would like to think it is.

It’s a tough test if you want to win the $50,000 Archer Award. First you’ve got to be one of the four chosen active participants, then you’ve got to be declared the winner after a further 6 months working in adjoining rooms. But the prize is big enough to draw many in, and the four presented by writer Isabella McDermott are each determined to be champion. After briefly toying with the idea of sharing the prize, they decide to fight it out - and may the best man/woman win.

Fuccbois: replace the second ‘c’ with a ‘k’ (and the ‘i’ with a ‘y’), and you’re up to speed with this amazing all-female musical appearing in the New Works Festival at the Old Fitz Theatre in Sydney. The quality and quantity of the songs by Bridie Connell make this an exceptional piece of work and the 4-person Fuccbois group itself is nothing short of a miracle of sound and movement.